Measuring Urban Design

Measuring Urban Design
Author: Reid Ewing
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-07-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781610911931

What makes strolling down a particular street enjoyable? The authors of Measuring Urban Design argue it's not an idle question. Inviting streets are the centerpiece of thriving, sustainable communities, but it can be difficult to pinpoint the precise design elements that make an area appealing. This accessible guide removes the mystery, providing clear methods to measure urban design. In recent years, many "walking audit instruments" have been developed to measure qualities like building height, block length, and sidewalk width. But while easily quantifiable, these physical features do not fully capture the experience of walking down a street. In contrast, this book addresses broad perceptions of street environments. It provides operational definitions and measurement protocols of five intangible qualities of urban design, specifically imageability, visual enclosure, human scale, transparency, and complexity. The result is a reliable field survey instrument grounded in constructs from architecture, urban design, and planning. Readers will also find a case study applying the instrument to 588 streets in New York City, which shows that it can be used effectively to measure the built environment's impact on social, psychological, and physical well-being. Finally, readers will find illustrated, step-by-step instructions to use the instrument and a scoring sheet for easy calculation of urban design quality scores. For the first time, researchers, designers, planners, and lay people have an empirically tested tool to measure those elusive qualities that make us want to take a stroll. Urban policymakers and planners as well as students in urban policy, design, and environmental health will find the tools and methods in Measuring Urban Design especially useful.

Urban Experience and Design

Urban Experience and Design
Author: Justin B. Hollander
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000178358

Embracing a biological and evolutionary perspective to explain the human experience of place, Urban Experience and Design explores how cognitive science and biometric tools provide an evidence-based foundation for architecture and planning. Aiming to promote the creation of a healthier and happier public realm, this book describes how unconscious responses to stimuli, outside our conscious awareness, direct our experience of the built environment and govern human behavior in our surroundings. This collection contains 15 chapters, including contributions from researchers in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, France and Iran. Addressing topics such as the impact of eye-tracking analysis and seeing beauty and empathy within buildings, Urban Experience and Design encourages us to reframe our understanding of design, including the narrative of how modern architecture and planning came to be in the first place. This volume invites students, academics and scholars to see how cognitive science and biometric findings give us remarkable 21st-century metrics for evaluating and improving designs, even before they are built.

Urban Transformation

Urban Transformation
Author: Peter Bosselmann
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2012-09-26
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1610911490

How do cities transform over time? And why do some cities change for the better while others deteriorate? In articulating new ways of viewing urban areas and how they develop over time, Peter Bosselmann offers a stimulating guidebook for students and professionals engaged in urban design, planning, and architecture. By looking through Bosselmann’s eyes (aided by his analysis of numerous color photos and illustrations) readers will learn to “see” cities anew. Bosselmann organizes the book around seven “activities”: comparing, observing, transforming, measuring, defining, modeling, and interpreting. He introduces readers to his way of seeing by comparing satellite-produced “maps” of the world’s twenty largest cities. With Bosselmann’s guidance, we begin to understand the key elements of urban design. Using Copenhagen, Denmark, as an example, he teaches us to observe without prejudice or bias. He demonstrates how cities transform by introducing the idea of “urban morphology” through an examination of more than a century of transformations in downtown Oakland, California. We learn how to measure quality-of-life parameters that are often considered immeasurable, including “vitality,” “livability,” and “belonging.” Utilizing the street grids of San Francisco as examples, Bosselmann explains how to define urban spaces. Modeling, he reveals, is not so much about creating models as it is about bringing others into public, democratic discussions. Finally, we find out how to interpret essential aspects of “life and place” by evaluating aerial images of the San Francisco Bay Area taken in 1962 and those taken forty-three years later. Bosselmann has a unique understanding of cities and how they “work.” His hope is that, with the fresh vision he offers, readers will be empowered to offer inventive new solutions to familiar urban problems.

The Image of the City

The Image of the City
Author: Kevin Lynch
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1964-06-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262620017

The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

Measuring Public Space: The Star Model

Measuring Public Space: The Star Model
Author: Georgiana Varna
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2016-05-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317099133

In the rapidly expanding public space debate of the past few years, a recurring theme is the ’loss of publicness’ of contemporary urban public places. This book takes up the challenge to find an objective way to prove or disprove this phenomenon. By taking the reader through a systematic and multi-disciplinary literature review it asks the deceptively simple question: ’What is publicness?’ It answers this by first developing a new theoretical approach - ’The dual nature of public space’, and secondly a new analytical tool for measuring it - ’The Star Model of Publicness’. This pragmatic approach to analysing public space is tested then on three new public places recently created on the post-industrial waterfront of the River Clyde, in the city of Glasgow, UK. By seeing where and why certain public places fail, direct and informed interventions can be made to improve them, and through this contribute to the building of more attractive and sustainable cities. By adopting a multi-disciplinary approach to shed light on this ’slippery’ concept, this book shows how urban design can complement other disciplines when tackling the complex task of understanding and improving the built environment’s public realm. It also bridges the gap between theory and practice as it draws from empirical research to suggest more quantitative approaches towards auditing and improving public places.

Emergent Urbanism

Emergent Urbanism
Author: Assoc Prof Tigran Haas
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2014-10-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1472407466

In the last few decades, many European and American cities and towns experienced economic, social and spatial structural change. Strategies for urban regeneration include investments in infrastructures for production, consumption and communication, as well as marketing and branding measures, and urban design schemes. Bringing together leading academics from across a range of disciplines, including Douglas Kelbaugh, Ali Madanipour, Saskia Sassen, Gregory Ashworth, Nan Elin, Emily Talen, and many others, Emergent Urbanism identifies the specific issues dominating today’s urban planning and urban design discourse, arguing that urban planning and design not only results from deliberate planning and design measures, but how these combine with infrastructure planning, and derive from economic, social and spatial processes of structural change. Combining explorations from urban planning, urban theory, human geography, sociology, urban design and architecture, the volume provides a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview, highlighting the complexities of these interactions in space and place, process and design.

The Value of Urban Design

The Value of Urban Design
Author: Great Britain. Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment
Publisher: Thomas Telford
Total Pages: 118
Release: 2001
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780727729811

Good urban design offers strong competitive advantages and does not necessarily cost more to deliver. This ground-breaking report examines the way in which superior urban design adds value by increasing the economic viability of development and by delivering social and environmental benefits.

To Scale

To Scale
Author: Eric J. Jenkins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2008
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0415954002

This powerful reference features one hundred famous urban plans all drawn to the same scale, each accompanied by a one-page summary of the site discussing its history, design and lessons for future urban design.

GIS in Sustainable Urban Planning and Management

GIS in Sustainable Urban Planning and Management
Author: Martin van Maarseveen
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1351379089

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.1201/9781315146638, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. GIS is used today to better understand and solve urban problems. GIS in Sustainable Urban Planning and Management: A Global Perspective, explores and illustrates the capacity that geo-information and GIS have to inform practitioners and other participants in the processes of the planning and management of urban regions. The first part of the book addresses the concept of sustainable urban development, its different frameworks, the many ways of measuring sustainability, and its value in the urban policy arena. The second part discusses how urban planning can shape our cities, examines various spatial configurations of cities, the spread of activities, and the demands placed on different functions to achieve strategic objective. It further focuses on the recognition that urban dwellers are increasingly under threat from natural hazards and climate change. Written by authors with expertise on the applications of geo-information in urban management, this book showcases the importance of GIS in better understanding current urban challenges and provides new insights on how to apply GIS in urban planning. It illustrates through real world cases the use of GIS in analyzing and evaluating the position of disadvantaged groups and areas in cities and provides clear examples of applied GIS in urban sustainability and urban resilience. The idea of sustainable development is still very much central in the new development agenda of the United Nations, and in that sense, it is of particular importance for students from both the Global South and Global North. Professionals, researchers, and students alike will find this book to be an invaluable resource for understanding and solving problems relating to sustainable urban planning and management.

Urban Design and People

Urban Design and People
Author: Michael Dobbins
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 710
Release: 2011-08-24
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1118174232

This introduction to the field of urban design offers a comprehensive survey of the processes necessary to implement urban design work, explaining the vocabulary, the rules, the tools, the structures, and the resources in clear and accessible style. Providing a comprehensive framework for understanding urban design principles and strategies, the author argues that urban design is both a process and a collaboration in which the different forces involved are knit together. Moving from the regional scale down to the scale of places, the book examines the goals and strategies of the urban designer from the viewpoints of the private sector, public sector, and community. The text is illustrated throughout with photographs and drawings that make theory and practice relevant and alive.