1,720,978 research outputs found
Spatial attractiveness towards industrial placement: a parametric index based on spatial-economic territorial exposure metrics
No full textThe asymmetrical process of industrial development tends to increase regional disparities and result in different patterns of territorial exposure: the amount of support given to activities placed within industrial agglomerates. Spatial Attractiveness towards industrial placement tends to follow such patterns, as places with lower exposure tend to be more attractive, providing more support to productive activities. Spatial models based in economic methods have issues in precising the nature of Spatial Attractiveness disparities, as their interpretation of space as an abstracted parameter, provides insufficient locational precision to demonstrate these patterns and how those are dependent on relations between production, territorial endowments, and industrial agglomerates’ internal organization. Novel spatial-economic models ought to consider and incorporate spatial units reflecting the microfoundations of space while providing an accurate spatialization, crucial aspects to create knowledge useful for decision-making. Hence, the paper showcases spatial models tailored to address the differences in Spatial Attractiveness, based in spatial and economic territorial exposure indexes, to unveil the territorial-imbalances’ spatial logics. Organized in a GIS-based environment and using Tuscany as a proof-of-concept, the index-models identified factors of sensitivity or support to firms placed within industrial agglomerates providing an overview of spatial attractiveness within the territory, useful for supporting decision-making practices
Configurational properties and the internal geography of local-regional urban spaces: findings of a multiscale-based analysis of the Tuscany’s road-circulation networks
No full textIn the past decade, Space Syntax has made considerable strides towards understanding the spatial relations among local and regional continua, as numerous studies proved to address configurational properties within regional networks. Those became possible after the introduction and development of Angular Analysis, that, alongside the adoption of Road-Centre Line graphs, allowed researchers to stitch together different scales and model them into cohesive territorial representations. Despite that, configurational analysis of large networks still poses important challenges regarding models’ morphological accurateness, which hinders observation of certain network properties like fractalities, which are obscured due to the insufficient detail on regional models’ representation. With those points in consideration, we discuss the procedures to create a high-detail multiscale configurational analysis while maintaining morphological accurateness across scales and address the findings of this experiment. The objective is to compare the configurational properties of regional, provincial and municipality scales for the Tuscany region, describing the internal geography of urban contexts within the regional road-infrastructure to emphasize how disparities in connectivity and network density may concentrate movement or lead to spatial segregation. Beyond this, we discuss how the construction of several comparable configurational models can enable the investigation of certain network properties – fractality and homothetic behaviour. Then, we impart on how those recursive regularities in-between the urban- regional spatial structure, evidenced by Space Syntax’ centrality measures of NAIN and NACH can be used and extrapolated to indicators suitable for exploratory studies in urban analysis
Urban demolition: Application of blight elimination programs and flood buyout programs to the italian case
Full text linkIn recent years, there has been a growing awareness that not all decommissioned and obsolete real-estate assets can be recovered and reused. After the paradigm of urban growth, and following the paradigm of regeneration, a new paradigm seems to be looming on the horizon: the paradigm of shrinkage. Due to this change in perspective, discussions on the potential of demolition policies as an alternative to regeneration and reuse are gaining support in the debate about urban growth. In the United States, there are two on-going programs using demolition as their main tool for urban planning: the blight elimination programs and the flood buyout programs. The former foresees the demolition of abandoned and decayed real-estate assets, while the latter envisions the demolition and relocation of buildings within areas under flooding risks. Given their successful employment in the U.S., this paper evaluates the applicability of these programs to an Italian case, which is characterized by a different building heritage and different territorial conditions. Simulations of the programs’ application are made using two case studies: Lecce nei Marsi (Abruzzo) and Moncalieri (Piemonte). The results demonstrate the substantial feasibility of the blight elimination programs’ usage in Italy, while the flood buyout programs instead demonstrates major obstacles that may hinder its successful application
Towards a Spatial Approach to Territorialize Economic Data in Urban Areas’ Industrial Agglomerations
No full textThe space matters: beyond a mere background for economic activi- ties placement, it constitutes a crucial element for their overall dynamism. This rationale, however, contravenes more traditional urban and regional economics approaches that interpret space as intangible within their spatial models. In that vein, notable constraints can be found in economic-based methods and spatial units oriented to spatialize the territorial endowments and interpret their role within the urban structure. While economics’ methods are limited in their spatial representa- tion, urban and regional planning has otherwise focused in providing instruments that address spatial characteristics of areas where urbanization is predominant. Methods that highlight the configurational properties and the organization of the cityscape structure, could aid economics in its methodological issues. Still, a divide persists between these two fields of research, as neither consistently incorporates the methods and variables considered by the other. In this paper we showcase a method used to create a spatial unit oriented to territorialize economic-based datasets represented at a regional scale within the confines of urban areas’ indus- trial agglomerations. In this proof of concept, variables related to labour – average number of firms, employees, and firm-size; and to installed capital – average real estate prices – are spatialized to outline their patterns distribution across Tus- cany’s cities. Organized in a GIS-based environment, the representation of such variables within a computerized space and with a proper spatial unit provides a basis that can be associated to the configurational aspects of the territory, being a complementary analysis for urban and regional planning
Twin-cities over the Messina Strait : a discussion on Reggio Calabria and Messina road-networks linkage
No full textThe idea of permanent connection and territorial integration between mainland Italy and Sicily across the Messina Strait
dates to the 19th century. However, it was not until 1970’s that the area received the first planning regulations. Since
then, proposed linkage projects remained limited to economic-based cost analysis and engineering-design feasibility
evaluation. Due to the ever-unstable Italian political scenario, public interest on matter decreased in 1990’s and, by then,
associated to incipient configurational models and data processing tools, it hindered any further analyses regarding
urban agglomerates’ morphological changes deriving from this connection. Strait debates resurfaced in 2020-2021, as
territorial integration is on the agenda of Italian economic recovery plans, an ideal scenario to revisit and study existent
proposals, drawing from exploratory evaluations on urban morphology and twin-cities dynamics. This paper contributes
to this discussion, through the analysis of different proposals for the Messina Strait linkage, using Space Syntax’
Integration measures to assess configurational changes connections between the urban agglomerates of Messina and
Reggio-Calabria; depicting tendencies for their urban dynamics transformation. Results and discussion contribute
towards planning policies, while appointing the potentials to enhance a shared functional centrality for twin-cities
Decoding small-worlds networks in a regional context: unveiling local-local and local-global centrality logics with Space Syntax
No full textIn network theory, the “small-worlds” concept draws attention to the logics of local centralities, providing a basis to interpret how the network elements’ connectivity, clustering, and hierarchy inform interactions within systems. In urban analysis, as in Space Syntax, investigating local spatial relationships can provide insight into the emergence and structuring of sub-centralities in urban-regional areas, their local-regional dynamics, patterns of movement and accessibility, plus on the role of configuration in cities’ socio-spatial life. This paper explores how the Space Syntax framework currently informs centralities, demonstrating that different configurational measures – at different radii – can visualize certain centralities’ strata. Moreover, it discusses how those strata may pinpoint the underlying network hierarchies, and if those can give clues about “small- worlds” emergence. Using Rome Metropolitan City (Italy) as a proof-of-concept, this approach objectives are divided into two stages. Primarily, it is addressing the issues in statistical data patterns and their fit to data visualization methods currently used on DepthMapX, that that elude the identification of different sub-centralities’ strata. With technical issues addressed, the patterns of lower-and-higher rank centralities appearance throughout the metropolitan area are analysed; furthermore, the Normalized Angular Degree Centrality measure is introduced as an experiment to decode where “small-worlds” are likely to emerge in urban systems. While discussions are, for now, methodological, speculating how network measures can be incorporated into the Space Syntax framework may unveil the “small-worlds” role in the spaces’ use and spatial appropriation logics, contributing to Space Syntax’ outreach as an instrument for urban decision support systems and decision-making
Territorial disparities in Tuscan industrial assets: a model to assess agglomeration and exposure patterns
No full textIndustrial agglomerates are considered drivers of urban development. This reiterative process of industrial growth, nevertheless, tends to increase regional territorial disparities, an asymmetrical development pattern that can lead to productive spaces’ underuse or abandonment. Although numerous economics studies about industrial distribution and territorial disparities were so far conceived, those are based on dated spatial methodologies. These consider space as an abstract background, hence, leaving unexplored several spatial relations between production, infrastructural networks and industrial agglomerates organization. Novel models ought to consider real attributes of space, being crucial to economic recovery in times of territorial constrains; with this in consideration, the paper objective is to construct and discuss a spatial-economic model tailored to assess territorial disparities in industrial agglomerates distribution and the condition here defined as territorial exposure. Exposure, represented by a composite spatial index, denotes disparities in territorial endowments, identified as factors of sensitivity or support to firms placed within industrial agglomerates, spatial conditions that can affect their capabilities to react to periods of economic recession and their post-crisis recovery. The model analyses Tuscany Region’s industrial structure and depicts territorial disparities in a GIS-based environment. The spatial knowledge produced can aid regional initiatives for economic recovery directed to Tuscan industries
Urban-regional dynamics of street network resilience. The spatial outcomes of Genoa’s and Bologna’s bridge crashes
No full textThe configurational approach enables understanding the behaviour of road-network systems in the face of sudden physical disruptions. Previous studies show that Space Syntax analysis can assist in evaluating how urban systems respond to punctual network interruptions, both in the short and medium-term, and help managing associated risks. The events which followed the crash of the Polcevera bridge in Genoa and that of Bologna Borgo Panigale bridge in 2018 demonstrated in practice that localised urban network interruptions can propagate, affecting movement dynamics, well beyond the boundary of a city and compromise the functioning of the regional motorway network. However, representing the associated effects across the urban to the regional network levels remains a challenge due to computational limitations which constrain Space Syntax studies to use simplified networks in their analyses. This in turn causes discrepancies in cross-scale comparisons, as urban and regional road-morphologies are represented at different levels of detail. The paper studies the effects of the two dramatic events from a multi-scale configurational standpoint by comparatively analysing the through-movement patterns of the urban road-, the regional primary- and the regional motorway- circulation systems. The goal of this research is to discuss, using a real-world example as a benchmark for assessment, the viability of adopting the configurational approach to study failure propagation and gauge levels of street network resilience across spatial scales. The results of this study clarify the importance of weak ties for the resilience of road infrastructure systems and further demonstrate the homothetic behaviour of Normalised Betweenness Centrality measures
Markov-Chain based centralities and Space Syntax’ Angular Analysis: an initial overview and application
No full textCentrality measures of Integration and Choice have performed a crucial role for Space Syntax in depicting complex relations among form, function, and movement within cities. However, while still relevant, those measures are unable to address certain innate network properties regarding the relative importance of certain road elements, essential for urban analyses focused on road-network resilience. The overreliance on Integration and Choice metrics to explain urban phenomena left several configurational patterns derived from connectivity rather unaddressed by Space Syntax and currently constitutes the methodology’s main limitation. With those points in consideration, this paper proposes an initial overview regarding the adaptation of Markov-based centrality measures to the Space Syntax framework and graph representation. These measures, often computable only in primal graphs, are adapted to the Road-Centre Line representation, in a first approach that aims to further integrate them into the Angular Analysis’ framework. We use the measures of Normalized PageRank Centrality and Normalized Kemeny-based centrality that estimate the connective relative importance of individual road-elements within the system. These measures are based on the notions of strong-ties and weak-ties, both well-known concepts in social networks; Weak-ties are important to establish bridges among interconnected communities of strong-tied individuals. In the urban configuration, weak-ties give information about crucial bridges among spaces characterized by strong-ties, areas that possess a high number of interconnected road elements – common pattern found in urban settlements. Results indicate that adapting Markov-based centralities to Space Syntax is feasible and maintains a configurational and spatial sense, hence it introduces new dimensions to be evaluated in urban-regional analysis
Urban Design, Space Syntax and Crime. An evidence-based approach to evaluate urban crime geographical displacement and surveillance efficiency
No full textSpatial configuration analysis plays an important role in understanding the materials and intangible factors within built environments. Space Syntax is an important instrument in that aspect, as the decomposition of space in Isovists, Road-Centre Lines, or Visibility Graphs emulate tendencies of human natural movement in urban contexts. From the early ‘90s, Space Syntax methods have been applied to crime science, to unveil connections between urban design, citizen behaviour, and where crime occurrences happen; in fact, the urban space features are assumed in the literature as key factors to crime prevention. Several studies investigated relations between crime distribution and street-networks' spatial configuration identifying important correlations between movement, natural surveillance, and crime occurrences. Hence, the possibility to investigate the relationship between the crime distribution and the visual fields (VGA) in the urban scenario from the perspective of natural control emerges and represents an intriguing aspect, yet to be explored and integrated with other analyses. With this in consideration, this paper contributes to these discussions, as it evaluates the geographic distribution of crime occurrences regarding drug dealing and car break-ins offences in the historic centre of Pisa (Italy) and their possible correlation with street networks’ configurational properties. Starting from the Isovist concept, the spatial features of visual control and controllability measures (VGA) are investigated, as they represent useful tools to interpret the rational offender logic in deciding the suitable locations and opportunities to commit a crime and, as a consequence, to indicate a direction to lead crime prevention interventions. Further in-depth studies are finally proposed
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