1,720,991 research outputs found
EPB880902 Supplemental Material - Supplemental material for Towards analytical typologies of plot systems: Quantitative profile of five European cities
No full textSupplemental material, EPB880902 Supplemental Material for Towards analytical typologies of plot systems: Quantitative profile of five European cities by Evgeniya Bobkova, Meta Berghauser Pont and Lars Marcus: for the ALICE (All-Literature Investigation of Cardiovascular Evidence) Group in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science</p
The New BreBeMi Highway. Character, Identity, Scenarios of a New Regional Conurbation
No full textThe BreBeMi highway project began in 1990: a highway connection to link the metropolitan system of Milan to the zones of productive activity of Bergamo and Brescia. The highway - construction began in 2009 - connects 3 of the largest cities of northern Italy, crossing 43 municipalities. Apart from the technical and constructive difficulties the main problem faced by the new infrastructure is its impact on the territory, on conurbation and on the habits of social life.
The territorial context crossed by the highway is impacted by processes of transformation of the landscape and the environment, accompanied by consolidation of the settlement patterns that beyond the borders of the historical cities and their immediate suburbs have accelerated the process of widespread anthropization of the territory, especially in the vicinity of the branching infrastructural grids.
The goal of this study is to identify and describe the character of each place (cities and landscapes) impacted by the highway, and to bring out the general identity of this territory seen as a whole. The connecting thread is a new street. By means of suitable categories of interpretation, the paper attempts to describe guidelines that can be of use for the comprehension of the landscape, crossed by the highway, while at the same time shedding light on opportunities on which to base future projects, trying to imagine a possible transformation of the infrastructure itself during the time, according to the growth of cities.
The hypothesis of including such a vast territory in a single study is based on the premise that it is possible to consider the landscape - natural and constructed - through the same parameters, in order to orient individual new projects in a coherent way with respect to a more general idea of place.
The project presented here calls for the subdivision of the space in variable intervals and measures, marked by the presence of repeating elements, thus producing the rhythm of the urban narrative. On this “platform” that subdivides the territory between Milan and Brescia a metric pace is thus generated. The highway becomes not an element that splits the territory, but a new opportunity. The work is organized on two different levels of analysis: a macro level, that focuses on all the territory crossed by the infrastructure and its areas of influence; a micro level that puts local identities into relation with the overall design of the territory
Supplemental material for Development of urban types based on network centrality, built density and their impact on pedestrian movement
No full textSupplemental material for Development of urban types based on network centrality, built density and their impact on pedestrian movement by Meta Berghauser Pont, Gianna Stavroulaki and Lars Marcus, in EPB: Urban Analytics and City Science</p
Territorial Configuration of the Dead Cities in Northern Syria
No full textAn urban organism or a settlement network is ‘sustainable’ if its configuration is linked to its territorial structure. It is therefore difficult to propose possible new urban configurations – including those linked to rural or urban agricultural areas – without taking into account an analysis of their relationship with the territorial structure. It is hard to define a territorial or urban layout as an abstract paradigm to be applied wherever needed, without taking into account ‘self-sufficient’ models related to spatial structures having their own ‘vocation’ and ‘individual characteristic’. It is hard to believe that such new urban or settlement configurations could be ‘sustainable’ if they needs an enormous amount of infrastructure, energy and maintenance costs.
A ‘sustainable system' (expecially in non-core areas) should be instead related to a ‘homogeneous region’, whose features are compatible with urban or settlement network we want to plan, as well as to the ‘vocation’ of their own environment. To avoid the ‘Dubai model’ we need paradigms for settlement development, which are closely linked to the potential of the area in which it is located. To this end, we need to analyse ‘virtuous’ and ‘sustainable’ examples in various historical-regional contexts.
This research leads us to regain not only ‘metropolitan’ but also ‘regional’ models: systems of medium/small settlements as parts of larger networks, located close to regional and international hubs where the agrarian structure plays a significant role in defining the landscape morphology, and which demonstrate the integration of work-places and dwellings. We can find such networks of small rural settlements in different geographical contexts. Among these, a case study is particularly interesting: the so-called ‘Dead Cities’ in the Limestone Massif of Northern Syria. Here the territorial model is a valley-bottom agricultural system in which the medium-large sized trade centres (such as Ma'arrat an Nu'man, Idlib, and Aleppo) are the ‘nodes’ (hubs) of the Syrian land-use system, and the ‘poles’ (peripheral hubs) for the Limestone Massif settlements. This system represents a 'paradigm' of possible sustainable 'new urban configurations' for non core agricultural and handicrafts areas, places for ‘sustainable supply chains’ based on traditional ‘material culture’, and hub for new industrial bio-based productions. If new regional models will be designed according to this close relationship between urban fabric, ‘productive gardens’, and manufacture places they would define a complex landscape, no longer characterized by the division between industrial and public areas, but where green infrastructures could become new hubs for the territorial development.
Indeed, before war started, projects on the ‘Dead Cities’ were focused on the development of archaeological parks, and their integration with the tourist circuits as ‘frozen’ vestiges of ancient times. This paper, instead, was a preliminar study for the landscape development of the region, aimed to repropose this environmental system as a paradigm for the territorial recovery of the area. The final goal was to turn 'Dead Cities' into 'Living Cities', and to devise projects for new urban configurations following their paradigm
Publics and their spaces: renewing urbanity in city and suburb
No full textIn Europe, the image of the beautiful old city, with its compact morphological structure, dense with public spaces and social interactions, seems to have no relationship with the vast land of suburbia, sprawling outside the ancient perimeter of recognizable historic urban values. Since 1900, new economic demands and social needs have produced a radically different form of urbanization at the urban edge. Planners, urban designers and architects working in Italy understand how to preserve and enhance historic districts and even, using New Urbanist techniques, how to extend that morphology. However, faced with the periphery, they are helpless: its apparent chaos appears to be the inverse of the coherent form of the historic centres.
This polarization hides the fact that these two disparate conditions are mutually constitutive. The city and suburb are actually interdependent. Thus, any intervention on one will affect the other.
Based on this, we will argue for a new approach to urban design. This means acknowledging and accepting the city as the whole that it really is. Doing this work will require a new set of concepts and tools for understanding and intervening in both the urban and the human context. This is particularly important in discussing and investigating existing phenomenon of aggregation in urban
space. Conventional approaches to “public space” research focus exclusively on generalized concepts of space, design, and urban form. Instead we propose to begin with the concept of
“publics”. This will allow people themselves to identify places whose significance have been produced by the community and its social life. These exist in both urban and suburban settings. This
research is informed by American concepts of “everyday space”, ordinary places described as the “connective tissue that binds daily lives together”, although often in ways that are difficult to
perceive. Looking at “lived space” in multiple contexts across city and suburbs in Italy and the US with an open mind, we will demonstrate how these spaces can generate a renewed urbanity.
Urbanity is not a result of a well-designed space, it is shaped by urban uses and daily existence
New Urban Configurations
No full textLa complessità della città contemporanea è dettata dall'elevato numero di agenti del cambiamento coinvolti e dalla incessante destabilizzazione degli equilibri raggiunti nei relativi rapporti di reciprocità. La corrispondente analisi comporta pertanto un approccio multidisciplinare, che trova nella Morfologia Urbana un ampio campo di sperimentazione metodologica. Il volume indaga sistematicamente i modi del fenomeno urbano contemporaneo e le sue diverse interpretazioni, sottoponendo a verifica l'ipotesi di sopravvivenza dell'idea di forma della città. Pertanto il riferimento esplicito a nuove configurazioni esprime un implicito atteggiamento interrogativo. Soprattutto gli autori cercano di comprendere se e in che misura i cosiddetti agenti della trasformazione abbiano ancora un ruolo nella definizione di una idea di forma urbana coerente alle proprie aspettative e se, eventualmente raggiunta, gli stessi soggetti abbiano la capacita di supportarla e riverberarne efficacemente l'azione attraverso la trasformazione ed il governo del territorio, senza per questo dover ricorrere a strumenti suppletivi, quali il Piano nelle sue diverse accezioni, ovvero non riconducibili alle discipline dell'architettura e del progetto urbano
Supplemental material for The spatial distribution and frequency of street, plot and building types across five European cities
No full textSupplemental Material for The spatial distribution and frequency of street, plot and building types across five European cities by Meta Berghauser Pont, Gianna Stavroulaki, Evgeniya Bobkova, Jorge Gil, Lars Marcus, Jesper Olsson, Kailun Sun, Miguel Serra, Birgit Hausleitner, Ashley Dhanani and Ann Legeby in EPB: Urban Analytics and City Science</p
An analytical approach to urban form
No full textThe focus of space-morphology, a specific branch in urban morphology, is to ‘uncover the fundamental characteristics of urban geometries’ (Moudon in Ordering space: types in architecture and design. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, p. 289–311, 1992) and ‘enrich the description of built form in ways that express aspects of performance and function’ (Peponis in Investigative modeling and spatial analysis: a commentary of directions. p. 2, 2014). Two research directions are important when discussing space-morphology, both developed in the UK during the 1970s. First, the work at the Centre of Land Use and Built Form at Cambridge University directed by Leslie Martin and Lionel March and their seminal work ‘the grid as generator’ (Martin and March in Urban space and structures. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972). Recently, this direction received renewed attention with publications such as ‘Streets & Patterns’ by Marshall (Urban Des Int 17:257–271, 2005) and ‘Space, density and urban form’ by Berghauser Pont and Haupt (Spacematrix: space, density and urban form. NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2010). Second, the Unit for Architectural Studies at University College London, directed by Bill Hillier, that developed in what we today know as the Space Syntax laboratory. Besides the description of these two directions in what we call space-morphology, this chapter will discuss how these two directions can be combined and how this can benefit the other schools of urban morphology, not least when it comes to identifying typologies. Typologies, being specific combinations of spatial properties, perform and function in specific ways and can be an effective way to inform urban design and planning practice when they intervene in cities and change these types or add new ones. Such an evidence-based approach puts new demands on the education of architects, urban planners and designers
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