Movement in workplace environments – configurational or programmed?

In countless case studies space syntax research has found that the configuration of a spatial system offers a powerful explanation to movement flows. However, this relationship is restricted for complex buildings where movement cannot be assumed as random since there may also be a programme that requires specific actions and interactions. A distinction has to be made here according to the nature of the organisation occupying a building: a strong programme building where the interaction and co-presence of people is highly controlled may not allow movement flows to follow configuration. In contrast, a weak programme building with an all-play-all interface might be expected to experience more randomised movement patterns increasing the significance of configuration as determining factor. Though being useful, these assumptions lack the power to fully explain real life movement flows in workplace environments for two reasons: firstly, most workplace environments follow neither purely strong nor simply weak programmes, they lie in-between the two poles and comprise aspects of both systems. Secondly, configuration considered as the crucial cause of movement in an office may even be limited for weak programmes due to the effects exerted by everyday attractors such as the coffee machine, the watercooler or the photocopier, toilets or the building entrances. This paper explores different strategies for explaining observed movement patterns, among them axial and segment analysis. It aims at an in-depth analysis of strong and weak programme aspects in order to find ways of understanding office movement patterns. The data used stems from two case studies representing those ‘in-between’ settings: a university school and a research organisation hosting theoretical physicists. The results suggest that movement in these workplaces may be reflected best by a metric analysis, as opposed to urban movement that follows angularity patterns. Distances seem to matter most in small and well known spaces. Moreover, it can be shown that flows of people can only be explained through configuration whenever it is possible to exclude attractor driven movement. On this basis a new approach is suggested that combines configuration based integration measures with attractor based ones in order to predict actual movement flows in offices

Ruts of Gentrification: Breaking the Surface of Vienna’s Changing Cityscape

Last year, the city of Vienna celebrated the 150-year anniversary of the opening of the Ringstrasse, the central ring road that stands as symbol of the huge structural renewal that accompanied the transformation of the Habsburg empire’s capital into a rapidly growing modern city. The anniversary acquired poignancy on account of the way Vienna’s population is once again growing rapidly, with an estimated ¼ million people to be added to the city’s population over the next decade. While accommodating urban migrants was not a priority in Ringstrasse Vienna, and working class districts are not part of iconic mapped mediations, the current city council, a coalition of Social Democrats and the Green Party, studiously tries to avoid 19th-century urban modernity’s “mistakes” in their efforts to accommodate the growing population, and they let the Viennese, and the world, know. This time, GIS and digital mapping are mobilized for planning, mediating and communicating large-scale development and renewal projects.  This paper looks at the mediations of three crucial sites of contemporary urban transformation in Vienna that mobilize the affordances of new technologies: “Loftcity,” a loft development cum cultural centre on the site of one of Vienna’s largest factories, the Ankerbrotfabrik; the transformation of the district surrounding Vienna’s new Hauptbahnhof; and Aspern, “Vienna’s Urban Lakeside,” a new satellite town promoted as a city of the future. By comparing the historical traces that remain in the mediations of these sites with their 19th-century counterparts, a geocritical reading of Vienna’s gentrification emerges that situates spatial practices in historically grown lines of connectivity, presaging and transcending traditional forms of classification, such as national divides or urban/suburban dichotomies

Ruts of Gentrification: Breaking the Surface of Vienna’s Changing Cityscape

Last year, the city of Vienna celebrated the 150-year anniversary of the opening of the Ringstrasse, the central ring road that stands as symbol of the huge structural renewal that accompanied the transformation of the Habsburg empire’s capital into a rapidly growing modern city. The anniversary acquired poignancy on account of the way Vienna’s population is once again growing rapidly, with an estimated ¼ million people to be added to the city’s population over the next decade. While accommodating urban migrants was not a priority in Ringstrasse Vienna, and working class districts are not part of iconic mapped mediations, the current city council, a coalition of Social Democrats and the Green Party, studiously tries to avoid 19th-century urban modernity’s “mistakes” in their efforts to accommodate the growing population, and they let the Viennese, and the world, know. This time, GIS and digital mapping are mobilized for planning, mediating and communicating large-scale development and renewal projects.  This paper looks at the mediations of three crucial sites of contemporary urban transformation in Vienna that mobilize the affordances of new technologies: “Loftcity,” a loft development cum cultural centre on the site of one of Vienna’s largest factories, the Ankerbrotfabrik; the transformation of the district surrounding Vienna’s new Hauptbahnhof; and Aspern, “Vienna’s Urban Lakeside,” a new satellite town promoted as a city of the future. By comparing the historical traces that remain in the mediations of these sites with their 19th-century counterparts, a geocritical reading of Vienna’s gentrification emerges that situates spatial practices in historically grown lines of connectivity, presaging and transcending traditional forms of classification, such as national divides or urban/suburban dichotomies

The structure of Inter-Urban traffic: A weighted network analysis

We study the structure of the network representing the interurban commuting traffic of the Sardinia region, Italy, which amounts to 375 municipalities and 1,600,000 inhabitants. We use a weighted network representation where vertices correspond to towns and the edges to the actual commuting flows among those. We characterize quantitatively both the topological and weighted properties of the resulting network. Interestingly, the statistical properties of commuting traffic exhibit complex features and non-trivial relations with the underlying topology. We characterize quantitatively the traffic backbone among large cities and we give evidences for a very high heterogeneity of the commuter flows around large cities. We also discuss the interplay between the topological and dynamical properties of the network as well as their relation with socio-demographic variables such as population and monthly income. This analysis may be useful at various stages in environmental planning and provides analytical tools for a wide spectrum of applications ranging from impact evaluation to decision-making and planning support.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables; 1 missing ref added and minor revision

Geospatial analysis and living urban geometry

This essay outlines how to incorporate morphological rules within the exigencies of our technological age. We propose using the current evolution of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) technologies beyond their original representational domain, towards predictive and dynamic spatial models that help in constructing the new discipline of "urban seeding". We condemn the high-rise tower block as an unsuitable typology for a living city, and propose to re-establish human-scale urban fabric that resembles the traditional city. Pedestrian presence, density, and movement all reveal that open space between modernist buildings is not urban at all, but neither is the open space found in today's sprawling suburbs. True urban space contains and encourages pedestrian interactions, and has to be designed and built according to specific rules. The opposition between traditional self-organized versus modernist planned cities challenges the very core of the urban planning discipline. Planning has to be re-framed from being a tool creating a fixed future to become a visionary adaptive tool of dynamic states in evolution

Studying cities to learn about minds: some possible implications of space syntax for spatial cognition

What can we learn of the human mind by examining its products? The city is a case in point. Since the beginning of cities human ideas about them have been dominated by geometric ideas, and the real history of cities has always oscillated between the geometric and the ‘organic’. Set in the context of the suggestion from cognitive neuroscience that we impose more geometric order on the world than it actually possesses, and intriguing question arises: what is the role of the geometric intuition in how we understand cities and how we create them? Here I argue, drawing on space syntax research which has sought to link the detailed spatial morphology of cities to observable functional regularities, that all cities, the organic as well as the geometric, are pervasively ordered by geometric intuition, so that neither the forms of the cities nor their functioning can be understood without insight into their distinctive and pervasive emergent geometrical forms. The city is often said to be the creation of economic and social processes, but here it is argued that these processes operate within an envelope of geometric possibility defined by the human mind in its interaction with spatial laws that govern the relations between objects and spaces in the ambient world

Knowledge Spillover Agents and Regional Development

It is widely recognised that knowledge and highly skilled individuals as "carriers" of knowledge (i.e. knowledge spillover agents) play a key role in impelling the development and growth of cities and regions. In this paper we discuss the relation between the mobility of talent and knowledge flows. In this context, several issues are examined, including the role of highly skilled labour for regional development, the features that characterise knowledge spillovers through labour mobility, the key factors for attracting and retaining talent as well as the rise of "brain gain" policies. Although the paper deals with highly skilled mobility and migration in general, a particular attention will be paid to flows of (star) scientists.Series: SRE - Discussion Paper

Balancing operating revenues and occupied refurbishment costs 2: a Space Syntax approach to locating hoardings

By placing hoardings in publicly accessible areas while carrying out phased occupied refurbishments, a contractor is temporarily redesigning that area. This reconfiguration affects the normal pedestrian flows through such areas. A technique for the analysis of such flows has been developed under a general area of research called Space Syntax. This demonstrates the extent to which visual barriers both constrain and promote pedestrian movement. The main analytical techniques used are Axial analysis and Visibility Graph Analysis which are based upon lines or areas of visibility. Empirical evidence is presented in observations carried out at London Victoria Station before and during a small refurbishment project involving the temporary closure of a single entrance. This evidence is in line with previous Space Syntax studies. The relationship between changes in the station configuration and visitor numbers to retail outlets suggests the need to place hoardings in such a way that both movement and browsing areas remain spatially separated but visually connected. This is also suggested by previous Space Syntax studies and is incorporated into a brief set of general guidelines for clients and contractors to assist the minimisation of disruption to pedestrian movement in publicly accessible areas

City flight migration patterns in the East Midlands

This paper investigates migration to and from the Three Cities of Derby, Leicester and Nottingham. It investigates whether these cities lose more migrants than they gain from more rural parts of the city-regions and the extent to which these flows impact on the demographic profiles of the Three Cities