1,720,964 research outputs found
Urban Modality: Modelling and evaluating the sustainable mobility of urban areas in the city-region
No full textThis thesis proposes a framework for evaluating the mobility potential and performance of urban areas in the city region, as an instrument to support urban development that contributes positively to regional sustainable mobility objectives. The research takes a quantitative approach, modelling and measuring the characteristics of a city-region and of its individual urban areas, in terms of travel patterns and socio- economic characteristics of the resident population, and in terms of built environment characteristics. It then explores how the built environment defines the affordances of urban areas for travelling by particular modes of transport, i.e. its walk-ability, cycle- ability, drive-ability and transitability, by developing a typology of what I call their ‘urban modality’. And finally the work combines this typology with the socio-economic characteristics of urban areas to determine their sustainable mobility potential and performance. It focuses on the case of the Randstad region of the Netherlands and its VINEX neighbourhoods, which are an emblematic example of new urban areas created under a policy programme with sustainable mobility objectives. A key stance in this work is the understanding that the location of an urban area in the region can be indicative of its population’s travel patterns, because the built environment (infrastructural) and socio-economic characteristics are interrelated and present strong regional spatial patterns. What types of urban areas support sustainable travel patterns, and what are their spatial characteristics? How do new neighbourhoods compare to the best performing urban areas, and to other areas of the same ‘modality’ type? These are some of the questions addressed in this study. There are two main contributions of this research: the methods for building and analysing integrated multimodal network models, and the framework for contextual performance evaluation using urban area typologies. The integrated multimodal network model combines the various mobility infrastructure networks and the buildings’ land use to create a detailed description of the region, using open spatial data and open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies. The network model’s spatial analysis covers local urban form indicators, such as street layout, network density and land use mix, as well as regional indicators of multimodal accessibility and network configuration (its structure), to give a holistic profile of urban areas across modes and scales of travel. The analysis results go through exploratory data mining and classification procedures to identify urban form typologies of urban areas. It is shown that there is a relation between this ‘urban modality’ of urban areas and the travel patterns of their residents, measured as a set of sustainable mobility indicators related to mode share and distance travelled. For this reason, ‘urban modality’ offers the possibility for ex-ante evaluation of sustainable mobility potential of planned urban areas. Furthermore, when combined with the socio-economic profile of the resident population, ‘urban modality’ defines a context for the ex-post evaluation of sustainable mobility performance of existing urban areas. The evaluation of suburban areas together with the more central historical urban areas gives invariably a high score in sustainable travel to the central areas, and rates the suburban areas negatively. On the other hand, the evaluation of sustainable mobility performance in the context of suburban areas of the same type allows the finer distinction of underperformers that have scope for improvement, and overachievers that provide examples of (relative) success. This contextual evaluation can become a decision support instrument for “hard” and “soft” planning measures involving sustainable mobility targets. Applying this method to the set of VINEX neighbourhoods of the Randstad leads to the conclusion that despite being planned following the same policy objectives, the neighbourhoods have different types of ‘urban modality’, thus present different levels of sustainable mobility potential. Neighbourhoods identified as underperformers within their context can be targeted for soft measures related to transport services, technology and individual attitudes to travel, to fulfil the potential of their ‘urban modality’ type. However, if this potential is not deemed satisfactory or if they already overachieve, only by retrofitting a set of infrastructure and land use characteristics will lead to a different ‘urban modality’ type, and a change in potential. Such a change can be lengthy, costly and sometimes impossible to implement ex-post. The thesis is based on a collection of published articles in peer-reviewed academic publications, with the first and last chapters providing an overview of the research and of its findings, and defining the main narrative thread.UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen
Intensive urbanisation: Levels, networks and central places
No full textUrbanisation is one of the defining issues of our time, shaping a fast-changing world, with our urban economies and societies and urban places produced in the process itself, along with their sustainability and enabling potentials. However the ways we conceive urbanisation leaves a lot of this process extremely unclear. Urbanisation is more than the transition of people from rural to urban modes of production and ways of life. It is an historical process in which the urban world emerges as a tightly structured path-dependant but also non-linear process. The product of this process is a humanly constructed space, or layering of human spaces, that challenges the way we think not just of the city but also of our social grounding in it. Space syntax has gone part of the way to opening a path to our understanding of this process and space through its representations of urban fabrics and their centralities at a fine grain. However, other discourses on the city and urbanisation have considered much larger scales. Here, critical interpretations of Peter Taylor’s ‘world-city network’, sociotechnical systems and space syntax are brought together in order to propose an interpretation of the different spaces, scales and layers of urbanisation, and a model of urbanisation and central place formation that crosses these scale differences. This model can, it is suggested, help us construct strategies for more layered, sustainable and socially enabling urbanisation and central place development in the future.UrbanismArchitectur
Technology and the body public
No full textArakawa and Gins are concerned with the bio-tech creatures we have become – or perhaps the ones we have always been. They see us as creatures-witharchitecture, architecture being for them, and along with language, one of the most basic forms of technique. Their ‘architectural body’ is constitutive of its own existence in an ‘architectural surround’ which is itself part of that constitution. The body here is not enclosed within its own outline but is extended in time and space into its surround; it acts and makes itself – it ‘persons’ in their terms – in an active relation to the surround. Perception and action involve more than a subjective interiority, or simply a biological body, they involve the whole biotech ‘architectural body.’ Arakawa and Gins contribute to a view that human life is distributed, in the world and self-forming in constitutive and heterogeneous relations which mingle the biological and the technological. There is in this view – and pace Heidegger and Ellul – no essential conflict between technology and the human; here, technique becomes a human and anthropological issue.UrbanismArchitectur
Acting across scales: Describing urban surfaces as technical 'fields of action'
No full textThe relation between the global and the local is the traditional concern of space syntax. A ‘form’ and a ‘structure’ of urban fabrics can be represented in images and graph measures using space syntax techniques and these images and measures correlate with observations of how people use and organize those urban fabrics. The implication is that it is the relation between scales which is crucial to understanding how people act in the city and prepare the city for action. The city fabric is (and this has been suggested before) an apparatus for relating scales in action, and one which people use in not yet clearly specified ways in order to do things. Part of the project of space syntax is to build ever more refined descriptions of this constructed apparatus in order to understand better how this all works and to suggest better ways of planning and designing cities. One of the chief challenges facing city-building today is to understand how to plan and design at much larger scales than those of the central urban neighbourhood and area, and in order to do this we need to be clearer about what it is space syntax is actually doing at the scales of central urban fabrics so we can extend this understanding plausibly to descriptions of large metropolitan and megacity regions. The roles of technologies and technical systems in creating the kinds of spaces we act in is a topic of research and debate in discussion about urban form today, and is one we need to address more clearly in space syntax. I discuss these issues in order to show how we may adapt an interpretation of urban technical systems and their relations with one another, and the way this relates to human action, in order to build plausible descriptions of continuous urban surfaces. This paper initiates a project to model urban regions in the Netherlands and Brazil.UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen
History, structure and technique: A reply to Batty and another challenge to space syntax
No full textUrbanismArchitectur
Revisiting public-private gradients in neighborhoods: Towards a "Space of action"
No full textSpatial ‘gradients’ have been discussed before in space syntax. These gradients have been proposed to be significant for the actions, experience and modes of inhabitation of people. Robinson has developed a ‘territorial gradient’ of increasing privacy from the neighbourhood and street to the most intimate spaces of the private house. Read has proposed a measure of the ‘integration gradient’ from the grid of neighbourhood streets to the grid of streets that connects urban neighbourhoods through the fabric of the city. Both these concepts set up a space that notionally orients people towards (or away from) zones or spaces of increasing publicness. The concept of ‘orientation’ offers a way into thinking of these spaces in terms of an established theory of action. This paper will explore and develop these ideas in relation to neighbourhood space and the forms and ‘forms of life’ of neighbourhoods. It will prepare the ground for a comparison 10 neighbourhoods in Amsterdam for the ways gradients are set up in space and for the way people act in and use the public space of these neighbourhoods in relation to these gradients. The work is intended to clarify the terms of a ‘space of action’ of neighbourhoods (as opposed to ‘economic space’ or ‘social space’ understood as reflections of economic or social ‘structure’) and to allow us to begin to comment on the forms of neighbourhoods in terms of the ways they enable or empower people in everyday ways. A further aim will be to propose a way of looking at ‘place-value’ and its variation across city fabrics and how this may have been constructed in order to begin to understand the reasons certain areas persistently maintain value while others equally persistently don’t.UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen
Framing questions of sustainability
No full textSustainability sits at the top of the policy agendas of the EU and other governmental bodies. But sustainability is complex and not one thing, it relates to different sectors and multiple systems, and also to different zones, scales, ‘levels’ those systems occupy. Theoretically and practically we are involved with different questions depending on where the question is bounded and at what scope we want to look at or deal with it. Situation, in a relational sense, matters. Without understanding this contextual, relational and framing factor we can end with inadequate or misleading answers to important questions. Questions need to be framed and framing involves complex topologies of spatial insides and outsides and functional parts and wholes. This relational and framing aspect of sustainability has been radically underconsidered and this paper will propose a method to address this deficit. The approach is ‘materialist’ but also ‘constructivist’, not in the sense of ‘social construction’. Instead it is proposed we live in a reality historically and technically constructed and that the ‘social’, the ‘economic’, the ‘cultural’ and even the ‘environmental’ are what we thus construct. This converges with a so-called ‘technoscience’ perspective, one that has been addressed through ‘actor-network theory’. But there are issues with actor-network theory that the method proposed addresses.UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen
Technology and Transition: ‘Progressive Evolution of Regimes and the Consequences for Energy Regime Change
No full textAbstractTransition of energy systems has been under-theorised. We have argued previously that energy efficiency as a strategy for fossil fuel replacement is inadequate as energy demand is not being reduced by efficiency alone. This paper is intended to elaborate further on the reasons. We require better answers to better questions about the nature of energy regimes and how they resist change. Our present-day socio-technical energy regime is a global integrated technical arrangement based on cheap high-yield energy sources (fossil fuels) with built-in ‘progressive’ social and economic directions. This ‘progressive’ change relies on cheap energy as a resource towards ever greater global integration and economic efficiency. Energy regime change will be not a tinkering at the edges but will require a dismantling of this ‘progressive’ tendency with radical retrogressive economic and social consequences. We conclude a change of our relationship with energy will require the reversal of a contingent ‘progressive’ tendency that is as old as mankind and the necessarily modest building of a new infrastructural apparatus designed to a new ‘end’, or the reversion to previous low or lower demand apparatus based on non-fossil energy sources. Both solutions would imply major social and economic changes which we will deal with in another paper
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