Cognitive Landscapes of Cities: A Co-Evolutionary Framework for Urban Resilience

What if the way we navigate a city today was shaped by choices made thousands of years ago? 

This project explores how human perception, culture, and the built environment continuously shape one another, from the shaded avenues of Angkor to the modern grid of Manhattan. Cities are not just collections of buildings; they are cognitive landscapes that guide how people move, interact, and understand space. By viewing ancient urban centers as long-running “experiments” in wayfinding, social life, and environmental adaptation, the project uncovers how spatial design has supported resilience and wellbeing across millennia. Blending insights from archaeology, perception, and digital simulations, the research examines how people learn and adapt to different urban environments, and how shared patterns of movement or comfort can gradually transform the spaces we inhabit. 

Instead of treating cities as fixed physical structures, the project views them as evolving systems shaped by human experience, cultural transmission, and multisensory perception. The goal is to build a new framework for cognitively–resilient urbanism, one that brings perception, learning, and sensory experience into long-term models of land use and urban evolution. By connecting behavioral patterns with archaeological evidence and large-scale simulations, the project reveals how urban spaces become legible, comfortable, and adaptive, and how future cities might be designed to support collective resilience. Ultimately, it asks a playful but essential question: What would our cities look like if we designed them with human perception, comfort, and collective behavior at the center?