Recreating Urban Density Through Public Transportation PDF Download

Author: Binita Mahato
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
Cities have evolved in response to the changing modes of transportation. The need to accommodate different forms of mobility has shaped the physical pattern of cities over centuries. This impact on urban form still varies with different modes of transportation. Public and private transportation systems have impacted the urban landscape in different ways. While public transportation has been more prolific as a controlled and dense form of urban growth, private transportation has provided the freedom to sprawl. Witnessing centuries of urban sprawl brought by the advent of automobile era, cities today seek a sustainable, manageable and dense urban future. Built on the relationship of urban form and transportation, many cities have experimented with ways to use public transportation infrastructure as a tool to reshape urban form and redirect the future growth in a desired path. However, the impacts of transit on urban form have been far beyond just the science of place making or policy decisions. Often times these attempts have resulted in unforeseen consequences of unpredictable growth of the built environment. This necessitates the scope of studying instances of successful use of transit infrastructure as a tool to create or recreate urban density. Bordeaux, France is one of the leading cities in integrating transit with urban place making. Fairly new in this trend, it is an efficient premise on which a transit-density relationship can be analyzed and learned. This research aims to understand the essentials that establish this relationship through a case study approach on the densification and tram project of Bordeaux. The study scrutinizes selected existing literature on the perspectives of urban density to prepare a methodology for the case study on Bordeaux. The impacts of the tramway project on the urban landscape of Bordeaux have been analyzed with three different perspectives on urban density. First, a descriptive case study evaluates the evolution of the city from old tram to the new tram and relates the association of different urban projects with respect to the tramway network. It then measures the impacts of this new tram project with quantifiable measures of urban density. In the end, the study investigates the impacts of transit on the visual aspects of urban form and density. The research assesses the interrelationship between the tramway network and the urban form on the basis of the findings from these three analyses. The descriptive case study, quantitative and qualitative analyses altogether illustrate the effectiveness of public transportation as a tool to recreate urban density in the context of Bordeaux.