(note about the design: give me a break, this was 2011/2012 😆 Bootstrap was cool)

This game tests the extent to which you are able to recognise parts of London. The more stations or boroughs you guess correctly, the more points. You can also share your score on Facebook or Twitter.

It's fun! Also, you will make a difference. The game is designed for purposes beyond pure entertainment — your answers will contribute to promote urban interventions where needed. This site extracts Londoners' mental images of the city. By testing which places are remarkable and unmistakable and which places represent faceless sprawl, we are able to draw the recognisability map of London.

Every Londoner has had long associations with some parts of the city, which bring to mind a flood of associations. Over the years, London has been built and maintained in a way that it is imaginable: in a way that mental maps of the city are clear and economical of mental effort. Starting from Kevin Lynch's seminal book "The image of the city", studies have posited that good imaginability allows city dwellers to feel at home and increase their community well-being. The good news is that the concept of imaginability is quantifiable, and it is so partly based on recognisability maps. We hope that these maps will inform the positive design of public facilities (e.g., civic buildings) and promote urban interventions (e.g., place landmark in key areas, refurbish memorable horrible buildings).

1. Set up the database (see db folder). You have to populate it with the tube stations, boroughs and points you want to use.
2. Replace usernames, passwords and api keys with your own. Namely: database on db.php and ipinfodb on common.php)
3. Alea iacta est :)

If you don't want to have all the work of redoing the experiment, the aggregate datasets are also available.