Research in Urbanism Series
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Landscape policy and visual landscape assessment: The Province of Noord-Holland as a case study
Full text linkSpatial quality is a key element in landscape policy of the province of Noord-Holland in the Netherlands. Visual attributes such as spaciousness, openness, and landscape enclosure are considered as constituent elements of spatial quality and play a crucial role in comprehending and defining landscape identity. This article introduces a landscape planning and design oriented approach towards landscape physiognomic issues in order to describe, protect and develop the visual landscape. Expert knowledge and advanced spatial research methods and techniques are combined in a landscape physiognomic framework for landscape policy, planning and design. This framework is recently employed by the provincial authority and is adopted in the Structural Concept of Noord-Holland 2040.
In the presented approach the application of the visual attributes through GIS resulted in an integral landscape physiognomic framework for spatial planning and design. This framework addresses three different scales of physiognomic research: scale of the province, scale of the landscape unit, and scale of the observer. Grid-based and viewshed-based methods are employed in order to comprehend and connect these conceptual and perceptual spaces. This planning and design oriented approach offered the provincial authority a framework for managing and monitoring the visual landscape and is recently adopted in the structural concept of Noord-Holland. The article addresses the theoretical, methodological and technical foundations, as well as its implication for landscape policy of the provincial authority
Preserving panoramic views along motorways through policy
Full text linkMotorways were initially built outside cities, and intended to connect them. Nowadays they are an integrated part of the urban landscape. In the Dutch context of high-density land use with a scarcity of open spaces, the challenge of motorway design is shifting from attempts to fit the infrastructure into the landscape towards moulding spatial developments to fit the motorway. This is presenting policymakers with a challenge, as new motorways are rarely being constructed, while urbanisation is an ongoing process. As early as 1928, Professor J.H. Valckenier (Delft University of Technology) wrote about infrastructure’s magnetic effect on urbanisation; the fact that traffic attracts buildings seems to be a law of nature. The question is how to preserve the once so carefully designed and highly valued panoramic views from the motorway. The article sketches the background of this Dutch policy dilemma. Urbanisations along motorways have led to a cluttered landscape. Policymakers, therefore, are attempting to get a grip on urban developments along motorways, to protect the open landscape.
The article provides for a definition of panorama, to provide policymakers with a basis to handle the concept of a motorway panorama. Subsequently this definition is elaborated, and a practical method is presented for identifying motorway panoramas, using GIS techniques. The article discusses the results of the identification of motorways panoramas in the Netherlands. It describes how motorway panoramas are incorporated in Dutch spatial planning. This is followed by concluding remarks. Despite the fact that this article focuses on the Netherlands, the presented method can also be applied in an international context. And although the Dutch policy agenda of wanting to prevent spatial clutter across the landscape carries a strong national connotation, the preservation of open landscapes deserves wider attention
Hi Rise, I can see you! Planning and visibility assessment of high building development in Rotterdam
Full text linkWest European cities like London, Paris, Rotterdam and Frankfurt am Main have seen impressive high-rise developments over the past two decades. The cities with a longstanding tradition of urban management, building regulations and zoning plans seem to feel the need for additional instruments to control the development of what is described by McNeill (2005) as "an extremely complex spatial phenomenon". It was only after the emergence of a new type of high building development in the inner cities and suburban centres in the early 1990s that the image of high buildings started to change for the better, not just in the Netherlands but also throughout much of Europe. Even now, high buildings evoke emotions and provoke controversies. This has led them to develop policies for regulating the planning and construction of tall buildings, high-rise buildings and skyscrapers within their territory.
This article presents a systematic approach for analysing the visual impact of high building development on a city and its surrounding region, using Rotterdam as a case study. This work is based on a previous analysis that included aspects such as architectural height, year of completion, location and functional use of high buildings in the city. It allowed us to compare the actual high building development with the urban policies in place. The showcase city of Rotterdam demonstrates that a considerable distance exists between policy and reality. The city struggles to deliver a consistent and integrated policy for high-rise urban areas, although the high building developments themselves seem to be ruled by a remarkable internal logic that is not fully recognised in policymaking. By studying the height and completion year, identifying the tall building cluster as it is perceived visually, and by conducting a GISc-based visibility analysis, it provides a context to tall building designs, making the assessment of individual projects more transparant and balanced, and removing some of the emotional elements that often enter into the discussions
The phenomenological experience of the visual landscape
Full text linkAny environment, natural, rural or urban, cannot be only reduced to a physical object that is measured, analysed, monitored, or captured through mapping, human beings also relate to their environment through their beliefs, emotions and senses. This existential relation brings together the objective and the subjective, the physical qualities of the space and its perceptual and sensorial experience, the tangible (quantitative) geographic values and the intangible (qualitative) emotional connotations.
This article addresses how we can map and monitor, the quantitative and the qualitative, the tangible and the intangible aspects of landscape. It argues that we should include phenomenological information that is constantly expanding and actualising in the Internet. This information is outside the subject, and inside a digital environment that can be always consulted, as an external memory. If we consider a new social participative methodology, we should see the potentials of a digital society that did not lose the physical and phenomenological contact with the environment, on the contrary, this sensorial and corporeal contact has been intensified.
The Information Age does not create isolated individuals in front of a computer, but collectives and groups eager for communication in infinite social networks. Landscape is not only appreciated by the ‘look’ but also by the rest of the body senses. Landscape becomes a somatic space where individuals are not outside, taking distance, and ‘looking at’ the view, but inside of it, creating it by the same corporeal action and body awareness. In the mapping of the qualitative and intangible values of the landscape, a new social participative methodology should take into consideration, together with the way society perceives and appreciates the landscape by the look, also the degrees of social interaction with it, and the layers of exchange of information and communication that the landscape contains
Visual research in landscape architecture
Full text linkA core activity of landscape architecture is designing and construction of outdoor space. In addition to that landscape architecture can be considered a matter of epistemology, a way of looking, with the architectonic composition as core of landscape architectonic research and design. An architectural composition can be comprehended by addressing four layers of interest: basic form, corporeal form, visible form and purposive intention. This article argues that GISc offers researchers new possibilities for representing, analysing and modelling landscape architectonic compositions to study its visible form. The visible form derives from the act of perceiving, which is linked with the sequential unfolding of information as our bodies pass through space. We can understand the visible form from the vertical perspective, its conceptual order, and from the horizontal perspective, its perceptual order.
GISc in relation to the conceptual order deals with geometric properties such as shape, symmetry, rhythm, alignment, congruence, and repetition. GISc in relation to the perceptual order considers landscape architectonic compositions as it is encountered by an individual within it, moving through it, making use of GIS-based isovists and viewsheds. This article focuses on the analysis of the relationship between the conceptual and perceptual order of a landscape architectonic composition by measuring visible space, using GIS-based methods and techniques and link the outcomes to the geometric properties of the design. Piazza San Marco (Venice, IT) and Stourhead landscape garden (Wiltshire, UK) are used as examples to showcase some applications
Mapping landscape attractiveness: A GIS-based landscape appreciation model for the Dutch countryside
Full text linkOffering people scenic beauty is one of the most frequently mentioned landscape services. In the Netherlands it also has become an explicit policy goal: “we want a beautiful country to live and work in”. However, instruments to help policy makers and spatial planners to implement this relatively new goal are largely lacking. Where do people like the landscape in their living environment and where do they not? And which physical characteristics influence this appreciation and to what extent? To provide such information in a cost-efficient way, a model was developed to map, monitor, and simulate precisely this: the GIS-based Landscape Appreciation Model (GLAM).
The model predicts the attractiveness of the landscape based solely on nationally available GIS-data on its physical aspects for each 250 x 250 metre cell. The model was calibrated using attractiveness ratings from a national survey among residents. The final model was evaluated using data from another Dutch survey of landscape appreciation among residents living in the vicinity of 52 areas that landscape experts considered being of high quality. In this article, we describe the theoretical background to GLAM, the attributes in the current version of the model, the final steps in calibrating the model, as well as its validation. We conclude with a discussion on the usefulness of GLAM for spatial policy
Geomatics in physiognomic landscape research: A Dutch view
Full text linkGeomatics is a technology and service sector focussing on the acquisition, storage, analysis and management of geographically referenced information for improved decision-making. Landscape physiognomic and research –and its GI science application. The geomatics developments since 40 years confront us with many new algorithms and a variety of geo data. Due to these the interest in physiognomic research has been increased. This article links the variety of geodata and its processing functions to the landscape physiognomic research framework. This link is based on an overview of the geo data, the intended applications in landscape physiognomic research and the functions to perform.
The article provides an overview of geographical data using/driving methods and applications that may support physiognomic landscape research that longs from methods that rely on geo-data that ranges from a administratively defined (INSPIRE), professional experiment acquired up to collected by volunteers. These methods may act manifold: describe, proof and project of space as could be perceived, imagined and created from both perspectives affectively and cognitively. Besides to communicate results the methods include persistently also analysis by visualization. Other findings are the interest in changing objects of the landscape and perception via moving subjects
The one- and two-dimensional isovists analyses in Space Syntax
Full text linkThis article aims to show the spatial properties for indicating degrees of street life, safety and economical attractiveness in urban areas through analysing the one- and two-dimensional visibility analyses of the space syntax method. The space syntax method is able to calculate the spatial configuration of built environments and can be applied on a wide scale level in research on built environments - from the organisation of furniture in a room up to the metropolis, making possible, in the first instance comparison of built environments with one another from a spatial point of view. Similarly, the method is a useful tool for comparison of the spatial changes in a before and after situation of structural urban changes in an area.
However, while the method is a tool for explaining the physical spatial set up of buildings and cities, the interpretation of the results from the spatial analyses must be done in correlation with understanding of the societal processes and human behaviour. The most known method is to calculate how spatially integrated a street is in relation to all others in terms of direction change and degree of angular deviation. It is able to identify the streets’ spatial features for vital shopping areas, crime distribution, various social classes’ spatial preferences when choosing a dwelling area, and the spatial features of the location of various institutional buildings. The space syntax method’s elements are based on visual sight lines. Examples from Delft and Alkmaar will be used for showing the correlations between the spatial analyses and socio-economic data
Exploring visual landscapes: Introduction
No full textVisual landscape research is an interdisciplinary approach important for landscape and urban planning. This field of research integrates: (1) landscape planning, design and management concepts, (2) landscape perception approaches, and (3) GISc-based methods and techniques in order to map the visual landscape. It offers possible ways of getting a grip on themes like: landscape openness, cluttering of the rural landscape, high-rise buildings in relation to cityscape, historic landscapes and motorway panoramas. This article is an introduction to the field of visual landscape research and provides an overview of the different perspectives on the subject. It provides, from a specific Dutch academic context, important clues for theory, methodology and application in research and development of landscapes all over the world. It offers clues for visual landscape assessment of spaces in cities, parks and rural areas. This article provides a wide range of insights into the psychological background of landscape perception, the technical considerations of geomatics and methodology in landscape architecture, urban planning and design
Psychology of the visual landscape
Full text linkWhile environmental psychology is a leading discipline in the study of human responses to the visual landscape, various other disciplines contribute to our understanding of the psychological reception of landscape as well, such as human geography, leisure sciences and sociology. Despite the disciplinary differences, all approaches share two core assumptions: (1) the way people experience landscape is influenced but not determined by physical landscape attributes, a complex mental process of information reception and processing mediates between the physical landscape and the mental landscape, and (2) various factors can exercise influence on this mental process, to be divided into biological, cultural and individual factors.
This article presents an overview of the various disciplinary approaches to psychological responses to landscape, with a focus on the predominant psychological phenomena under study, the theoretical perspectives, and the factors that are stressed to explain psychological dispositions related to landscape. Within this overview, also the Dutch contributions to the study of landscape perception and experience will be emphasized. The article concludes with a discussion that stresses how knowledge produced within these approaches may be useful within various stages of planning and design processes in general, and which approaches are most promising to inform GIS that support landscape policy and planning in particular