Research in Urbanism Series
Not a member yet
94 research outputs found
Sort by
Detecting spatial features from data-maps: The visual intersection of data as support to decision-making
Full text linkThe assessment of spatial systems can be supported by the analysis of data coming from different sources and describing different aspects such as economic, social, environmental, energy, housing or mobility issues. Nevertheless, the analysis of such a large amount of data is difficult. In order to improve the readability of data also with non-technicians, new methods of communication are needed, which could facilitate the sharing of information among people with different skills and backgrounds. In this context, the paper shows the developments in geo-visualisation to support and improve the processes of planning and decision-making. First, the use of a map-based visualisation is suitable for intuitively understanding the location and distribution of specific elements. Second, the graphic interface can be used to drive users in the investigation of data. It can provide a linear method that is more comprehensive to the human mind in dealing with the complexity of spatial systems. In addition, the possibility to select and filter data by single attributes allows databases to be explored interactively and read by differently skilled users. The intersection and overlapping of information enables users to discover the relationships between data, the inefficiencies and critical areas, thus providing suggestions for further reasoning in planning and decision-making. Furthermore, collaborative and participatory sessions require quick answers and simple readability. Thus, the real time response to simple queries widens the opportunities for improving the discussion. A case study describes the methodology used for sharing the data collected during an Interreg IVB NWE Project named “CoDe24” (INTERREG IVB NWE, 2005; ERDF European Territorial Cooperation 2007-2013, 2010). By the use of a web-GIS visualisation tool, namely GISualisation, the project partnership was allowed to explore the data concerning the railways and train typologies along the Genoa-Rotterdam corridor. Despite the high factor of usability of the tool, it was not employed much by participants to the project so that further reasoning is needed to evaluate how digital tools are perceived by professionals
Creating a Geodesign syllabus for landscape architecture in Denmark
Full text linkGeodesign provides a conceptual framework through which to understand relationships between geoscience and design. This paper takes its point of departure from the merger of the Departments of Geography and Geology and Forest, Landscape and Planning at the University of Copenhagen, and the subsequent approach taken to Geodesign as a means to realise potentials within the new academic structure. The aim is to address specifically how an on-going process of transforming the Landscape Architecture program has begun to integrate GIScience in a new way that fosters integration within and between disciplines. The approach to Geodesign will therefore be discussed in terms of cross-disciplinary dialogue and curriculum development. Emphasis will be placed on the results of the Geodesign Conference held at UCPH in November 2014 at which practitioners and academics came together to present extensive experiences and understandings of Geodesign. The conference was also the forum for discussion of the challenges and opportunities offered by Geodesign in the context of teaching
Using satellite imagery analysis to classify and redesign provincial parks for a better cooling effect on cities: The case study of South Holland
Full text linkThe purpose of this research is to analyse the thermal behaviour of South Holland provincial parks during heat waves, in order to provide design adaptation guidelines to increase their cooling capacity over the hotspots present in their urban surroundings. This research analyses the thermal behaviour of different land use patches (forests, cropland, grassland, water surfaces, built areas and greenhouse areas) present in the six South Holland provincial parks during heat waves. It studies their average night land surface temperature (LST) (with Modis 11A1), day LST (with Landsat 5TM), NDVI, imperviousness, patch size and patch shape index, and analyses through a multiple regression analysis the impact of each of these last four parameters in the night and day LST for each land use. Within each land use category, NDVI, imperviousness and patch shape index influence differently the thermal behaviour of the patches. NDVI is inversely correlated to day LST for all categories, imperviousness is correlated to day LST for all areas which do not comprise a significant presence of greenhouses (grassland and built patches) and inversely correlated to LST for areas with a high presence of greenhouses (cropland and warehouses). Finally the shape index varies depending on the nature of the surrounding patches, especially for small patches (built areas, forests and greenhouse areas). Most of the hotspots surrounding the Midden-Delfland park are adjacent to grassland patches. The measure to increase the cooling capacity of those patches would consist in a change of land use and or an increase of the NDVI of the existing grassland patches. These suggestions to increase the cooling potential of the parks remain deliberately open in order to allow combining these measures with other spatial planning priorities
Bringing Geodesign to the world in a massive, open, online engagement: ‘Geodesign: change your world’
Full text linkA MOOC titled “Geodesign: Change your world” demonstrated a unique approach to scaling up awareness about geodesign to a global audience. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are gaining visibility as a wide-reaching educational trend to provide exposure on topics, theories and techniques in any field. The first MOOC on the subject of geodesign was offered in Autumn 2014. Over 17,000 people registered from 167 countries. The results yielded a unique worldwide conversation about geodesign. This paper discusses how this MOOC engaged a global audience of thousands, including the challenges and opportunities experienced with the development and delivery of the MOOC. The outcomes illustrate how participants gained appreciation for the role geodesign can play in land planning and design issues in their location. The Geodesign MOOC course’s dynamic structure breaks from the typical format of MOOCs. Examined here are the innovative course design and delivery mechanisms deployed in this MOOC. Drawing on recent research about online learning, pedagogical and technological issues important to consider in MOOC development are reviewed
Spatial tools for diagnosing the degree of safety and liveability, and to regenerate urban areas in the Netherlands
Full text linkThis contribution describes the tool Social Safe Urban Design (SSUD), seen together with socio-spatial and linguistic challenges when applying space syntax in the regenerating of problem urban areas. The Space Syntax jargon is technical and needs to be translated into a language understandable and acceptable to stakeholders who are responsible for the implementation of improvement strategies acceptable for the users of a neighbourhood. Moreover, the degree of public-private interface between buildings and streets needs to be incorporated in the Space Syntax analyses. As it turns out from spatial analyses and crime registrations, there is a correlation between crime and anti-social behaviour and the spatial layout of built environments in the investigated eight pilot cases. Simultaneously, there is also a challenge to come up with locally and globally functioning spatial solutions for reducing opportunities for crime and anti-social behaviour for the neighbourhoods. Proposed solutions for three of these neighbourhoods are presented in this contribution
Design challenges of multifunctional flood defences: A comparative approach to assess spatial and structural integration
Full text linkDue to the changing climate and increasing urbanisation delta cities are faced with an increasing flood risk. In The Netherlands many of the flood defence infrastructures, such as dikes and flood walls, need to be adapted or improved in the near future, to comply to current or improved safety standards. These improvements directly affect landscape and urban development. In its 2008 report, the 2nd Delta Committee presented the idea of multifunctional flood defences, which are flood defence structures that deliberately provide opportunities for other functions. Since then, spatial designers and hydraulic engineers together delivered a wide palette of designs and concepts, resulting in a rather fluid and indefinable concept of multifunctional flood defences. This paper presents a method to describe the level of multifunctionality, based on two existing spatial and structural assessment methods from the fields of civil engineering and urban planning. The combined method distinguishes four ascending levels of integration, ranging from spatial optimisation to structural and functional integration. The combined classification method is tested on a selection of cases of multifunctional flood defences in the Netherlands. Based on this test, it is concluded that the classification method is a useful and generic method to describe the level of multifunctionality. Some of the selected examples look very innovative and multifunctional at first glance, while the level of spatial and structural integration is limited. Other examples might not be very spectacular from a spatial designers point of view, but show that true functional integration of flood protection with multiple other functions is already feasible, depending on the local context. The method helps to bridge the gap between the practices of civil engineering and urban and landscape design. Also, it makes clear that flood risk management is part of an overall process of integrated area development, anticipating on what could be described as a multifunctional flood defence zone
The diabolic highway: On the tradition of the beautiful road in the Dutch landscape and the appetite for the magnificent highway in the big city
Full text linkThe highways of the Netherlands are used intensively, yet most of us are unable to summon up as much appreciation for them as we can for an attractive square, park or landscape. Highways may well be component parts of our public space, but they are not part of our aesthetic culture. From the history of the landscape we know that the impressionability of the poet and the depiction of the painting were needed to train the gaze. Appreciation follows representation. Is there a schematic organisation of visual perception that could assume the role of yesteryear’s landscape painting in the present day? Here and there voices tenaciously proclaim that no aesthetic principles are applied in the laying of highways in the Netherlands, and that the road is purely the product of the art of engineering and the immanent logic of its technology. In the essay this myth is unmasked and brings an almost forgotten dimension into the limelight: the aesthetic design. Immediately after the Second World War, the engineer K.E. Huizinga explicitly gave shape to an aesthetic theory for the highway. So the design of highways in the Netherlands does indeed boast an aesthetic tradition of no small measure. Therein Huizinga’s ‘spatially expressive approach’, the Dutch heir of the parkway and the Autobahn, has proven to be the leitmotif that courses from the beginnings right through to the present day. The parkway has found its counterpart in terms of landscape in the autonomous motorway. Aesthetic as well as sublime ideals of beauty are, however, carried to the grave by the urban counterpart, the highway in the big city: the Diabolical Highway. Take, for example, the Boulevard Périphérique in Paris, which is a Diabolical Highway without compare. We cast our minds back to Siegfried Giedion. The parkway, his parkway, as the backbone of a new city planning, gives the motorist the uplifting feeling of rust calm and freedom. The Diabolical Highway is, however, anything but that. There is no calm rust and everything is coincidental. They are roads in overly tight spaces, hectic experiences, but also metropolitan experiences. The essay makes a distinction between three types of highway, each of which is elucidated by an example: the parkway, the autonomous motorway and the diabolical highway. Thus in the design of the urban highway lies the greatest challenge, and as yet few principles have been devised for it
Representing nature: Late twentieth century green infrastructures in Paris
Full text linkThe appreciation of green infrastructures as ‘nature’ by urban communities presents a critical challenge for the green infrastructure concept. While many green infrastructures focus on functional considerations, their refinement as places where concepts of nature are represented and where nature can be experienced and understood, has received little attention in research and praxis. Contemporary urban societies entertain varied and distinctive ideas on nature and their relationship to it, themes explored in contemporary urban park and garden design. These projects can provide insights into the representation, comprehension and experience of nature in green infrastructures. This article expands on contemporary conceptions of nature in urban parks and urban gardens such as those realised in Paris between 1980 and 2000. The projects all display articulated expressions of conceptions of nature, reflecting both a return to the classical garden tradition, as well as elaborations of nature via the sensorial, ‘abundant nature’ and nature as process. These conceptions can be positioned within the theoretical framework of three forms of nature – first nature (wilderness), second nature (cultural landscape) and third nature (garden). In Paris, contemporary parks and gardens not only express new forms of nature, they also form part of a green infrastructure network in their own right. As a series of precise moments connected by rivers and canals, this network differs markedly from prevailing green infrastructure models. The network of parks and gardens in Paris represents a green infrastructural network made up of a layering of historical and contemporary elements connected in compound ways. The completeness of representations and elaborations of nature – gathered in the three natures – can be dissected and spread out over different constructed landscapes in the city, and it is up to the green infrastructure to unite them
Waking Leviathan: Frank Lloyd Wright’s rural urban ideal from Art and Craft Of The Machine (1901) to The Living City (1958)
Full text linkThere still exists in the collective global imagination a ghostly ‘image of progress’ framed by a nature-dominating narrative that distorts reality. As living standards rise worldwide, the demand for natural resources is accelerating in a familiar pattern: cities eat the rural, and the rural eats the wilderness. Ecology, society and economy are not the either/or variables they are often portrayed as being: there is no society without ecology, and no economy without society, each is embedded in context. As globalised societies become increasingly urban, the notion that cities ought to become self-sufficient has been widely popularised in both the architectural profession and in academia, legitimated through the use of the term autopoiesis (Greek αυ’τo ‘self’ and ποίησις ‘creation’), borrowed from the field of chronobiology. The opposite of autopoiesis, a closed process in which context might be an afterthought, is allopoiesis, the process whereby an organisationally open system produces something other than itself. Reality is many-layered and emphatically simultaneous, and while designers are busy fine-tuning daydreams of ‘self-sufficient cities’, regions and ecological systems now supporting real cities are being fragmented and erased in vast swaths, often taking once thriving cities along with them, further accelerating centralised urbanisation. Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Living City is a conceptual rural urban model for decentralised development that attempts, through its evolution in several iterations (from 1901 till 1958) to provide a humane alternative to centralised commercial urbanism. Wright’s life (1867-1959) and work spanned from the Victorian age to the space age, and The Living City is arguably his most ambitious attempt to ‘bridge the gap’. In arguing for contextual, open-ended planning methods it provides a suitable polar counterpoint to contemporary notions of cities as self-sufficient. As a precedent stimulating awareness of the fundamental need for the ‘humane proportion’ of industry and agronomy, it is of urgent relevance today
City pig farm: A design-based-research on urban livestock farming
Full text linkOver the last centuries, the global food system has managed to provide a growing global population with more and better food. Yet, the system is criticised for its negative effects, like increasing food miles, monocultures, a lack of transparency and poor animal welfare. The recent trend to farm more food in an around cities (urban and peri-urban farming) seems to provide an alternative to the existing system. Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) comes with many potential benefits, from reducing food miles and improving local urban climate to supporting social coherence in local neighbourhoods and improving personal health. At the same time, the field of UPA is very diverse and not each project addresses each of the potential benefits. This paper addresses urban livestock farming as a specific form of UPA. “Livestock farming” is hereby defined as raising domesticated animals, such as cattle, pork, poultry or fish for the production of food. Each of these types of farming has different needs and implications when included in the city. This study specifically looks into pig farming in an urban setting. It states that design-based-research is a useful research strategy to explore the possibilities and probabilities of this type of UPA. It draws on the design-based study ‘City Pig’, conducted at The Why Factory (2009), Delft University of Technology. The results of this study can be evaluated in order to get a grip on the possible benefits of this specific type of urban livestock farming. An important limitation is that it concerns virtual, un-built design proposals. As built, productive examples of UPA are still scarce in the Netherlands and beyond this design-based-research method could fill a gap and help gathering knowledge for future project. Therefore, this paper not only evaluates of a specific type of UPA, but also tests on whether research-by-design studies, can form a useful tool to further develop UPA in general. The aim of this paper is therefore two-fold: What are the potential benefits of urban pig farming and how can un-built design projects help to answer that question for future ‘real’ projects