Measuring Urban Design

Measuring Urban Design PDF Author: Reid Ewing
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 9781610911931
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Measuring Urban Design

Measuring Urban Design PDF Author: Reid Ewing
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 9781610911931
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Value of Urban Design

The Value of Urban Design PDF Author: Great Britain. Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment
Publisher: Thomas Telford
ISBN: 9780727729811
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Urban Experience and Design

Urban Experience and Design PDF Author: Justin B. Hollander
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000178390
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Image of the City

The Image of the City PDF Author: Kevin Lynch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262620017
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Planning and Urban Design Standards

Planning and Urban Design Standards PDF Author: American Planning Association
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118550765
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Get Book Here

Book Description
The new student edition of the definitive reference on urban planning and design Planning and Urban Design Standards, Student Edition is the authoritative and reliable volume designed to teach students best practices and guidelines for urban planning and design. Edited from the main volume to meet the serious student's needs, this Student Edition is packed with more than 1,400 informative illustrations and includes the latest rules of thumb for designing and evaluating any land-use scheme--from street plantings to new subdivisions. Students find real help understanding all the practical information on the physical aspects of planning and urban design they are required to know, including: * Plans and plan making * Environmental planning and management * Building types * Transportation * Utilities * Parks and open space, farming, and forestry * Places and districts * Design considerations * Projections and demand analysis * Impact assessment * Mapping * Legal foundations * Growth management preservation, conservation, and reuse * Economic and real estate development Planning and Urban Design Standards, Student Edition provides essential specification and detailing information for various types of plans, environmental factors and hazards, building types, transportation planning, and mapping and GIS. In addition, expert advice guides readers on practical and graphical skills, such as mapping, plan types, and transportation planning.

Measuring Public Space: The Star Model

Measuring Public Space: The Star Model PDF Author: Georgiana Varna
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317099133
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Urban Systems Design

Urban Systems Design PDF Author: Yoshiki Yamagata
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0128162937
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Get Book Here

Book Description
Urban Systems Design: Creating Sustainable Smart Cities in the Internet of Things Era shows how to design, model and monitor smart communities using a distinctive IoT-based urban systems approach. Focusing on the essential dimensions that constitute smart communities energy, transport, urban form, and human comfort, this helpful guide explores how IoT-based sharing platforms can achieve greater community health and well-being based on relationship building, trust, and resilience. Uncovering the achievements of the most recent research on the potential of IoT and big data, this book shows how to identify, structure, measure and monitor multi-dimensional urban sustainability standards and progress. This thorough book demonstrates how to select a project, which technologies are most cost-effective, and their cost-benefit considerations. The book also illustrates the financial, institutional, policy and technological needs for the successful transition to smart cities, and concludes by discussing both the conventional and innovative regulatory instruments needed for a fast and smooth transition to smart, sustainable communities. - Provides operational case studies and best practices from cities throughout Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, Australia, and Africa, providing instructive examples of the social, environmental, and economic aspects of "smartification - Reviews assessment and urban sustainability certification systems such as LEED, BREEAM, and CASBEE, examining how each addresses smart technologies criteria - Examines existing technologies for efficient energy management, including HEMS, BEMS, energy harvesting, electric vehicles, smart grids, and more

Urban Transformation

Urban Transformation PDF Author: Peter Bosselmann
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610911490
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Complexity, Cognition, Urban Planning and Design

Complexity, Cognition, Urban Planning and Design PDF Author: Juval Portugali
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319326538
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, which resulted from an intensive discourse between experts from several disciplines – complexity theorists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, urban planners and urban designers, as well as a zoologist and a physiologist – addresses various issues regarding cities. It is a first step in responding to the challenge of generating just such a discourse, based on a dilemma identified in the CTC (Complexity Theories of Cities) domain. The latter has demonstrated that cities exhibit the properties of natural, organic complex systems: they are open, complex and bottom-up, have fractal structures and are often chaotic. CTC have further shown that many of the mathematical formalisms and models developed to study material and organic complex systems also apply to cities. The dilemma in the current state of CTC is that cities differ from natural complex systems in that they are hybrid complex systems composed, on the one hand, of artifacts such as buildings, roads and bridges, and of natural human agents on the other. This raises a plethora of new questions on the difference between the natural and the artificial, the cognitive origin of human action and behavior, and the role of planning and designing cities. The answers to these questions cannot come from a single discipline; they must instead emerge from a discourse between experts from several disciplines engaged in CTC.

Restorative Cities

Restorative Cities PDF Author: Jenny Roe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350112895
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Overcrowding, noise and air pollution, long commutes and lack of daylight can take a huge toll on the mental well-being of city-dwellers. With mental healthcare services under increasing pressure, could a better approach to urban design and planning provide a solution? The restrictions faced by city residents around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought home just how much urban design can affect our mental health – and created an imperative to seize this opportunity. Restorative Cities explores a new way of designing cities, one which places mental health and wellness at the forefront. Establishing a blueprint for urban design for mental health, it examines a range of strategies – from sensory architecture to place-making for creativity and community – and brings a genuinely evidence-based approach that will appeal to designers and planners, health practitioners and researchers alike - and provide compelling insights for anyone who cares about how our surroundings affect us. Written by a psychiatrist and public health specialist, and an environmental psychologist with extensive experience of architectural practice, this much-needed work will prompt debate and inspire built environment students and professionals to think more about the positive potential of their designs for mental well-being.