Mapping meaning in the city image: Towards managing the imageability of urban cultural landscapes

This study provides a theoretical framework for historic preservation research and practice in general and valuable insights into the preservation program of the World Heritage City of Kandy in Sri Lanka in particular. It argues that (a) a city preservation program can be defined as the process of managing the city's capacity to evoke strong 'images' of it in people's minds (b) this capacity or 'imageability' of the city depends on the perceptual and meaning attributes of the city features (c) the highly imageable city features or 'core city features' should be preserved to maintain the city image, and the relatively less-imageable city features or 'peripheral city features' could be modified without much harm to the city image and (d) a comprehensive understanding of the city image and imageability can guide the preservation/development policies towards success.Within an ethnographic case study design, this study interviewed 49 residents in Kandy. Data collection methods included free listing survey, card sorting, multiple-choice questionnaire, expert evaluation, and document analysis. The findings revealed that Kandy evokes a very strong image, which is quite uniform across its resident population. Most city features have become known to the residents primarily due to the meanings associated with them. Together, these core features evoked a city image that, in essence, is a juxtaposition of several symbolic dimensions, i.e., senses of sacrality, historicity, scenic serenity, and well-being, all complementary to each other. The city image is primarily constituted of three spatio-symbolic clusters of varying degrees of imageability. The sacred meanings of Kandy play a vital role in determining the nature and the strength of the city image. Even if its residents do not have full understanding of its historic sacred meanings and cannot coherently articulate whatever fragmented knowledge of these meanings they have, for all of them the quintessential Kandy is still a sacred landscape. The study concludes that environmental meanings immensely contribute to the imageability of the city and are thus worthy of promoting under the city preservation program. The study then discusses the application of the findings for managing the imageability of the City of Kandy.