6,699 research outputs found
City sustainability: the influence of walkability on built environments
A vital issue in community is providing an easy access to the transport network for different range of community members such
as; very young, old, children and disable people. The functions that walking and walkable area can be support includes
community involvement, health, meeting and gathering and recreation which has positive effects on sustainability and vice versa.
Walkability is the basis of sustainable city. The same as bicycling, walking can be known as âgreenâ type of transportation which
except crowding reduction and also has low level of environmental influence, energy conserving without any air and noise
pollution. It can be more than a purely useful type of travel to shopping, school and work. Also have both social and recreational
importance.
This research aims at supporting urban design knowledge and practice and contributing to the broader field of âwalkabilityâ by
refining the methods and measures used to analyse the relationship between walking behaviour and physical environment and its
impacts on city sustainability. In order to integrate knowledge from theories and research on walkability from different fields and
of different perspectives, it is crucial to first build a broader view and a more comprehensive understanding of how the built
environment influences walking. What has been done during the earlier part of this project, and will be shown in this research, is
to provide a better understanding of the complexity of the relationship between the built environment and walking and also the
complexity that lies in both of these entities, the urban form and walking activity
Urban design and social capital: lessons from a case study in Braunstone, Leicester, UK
A valuable asset in sustainable regeneration is the âcommunityâ with their developed networks, bonds and ties or in other words its social capital which is a useful resource. Braunstone in Leicester is typical of many disadvantaged areas in the UK, with persistent socio-economic problems exacerbated by a poor physical setting. With a large regeneration programme funded by the New Deal for Communities coming to a close, we conducted a case study to explore the impact of improved local facilities and the effect of walkability on social capital. The lessons learnt suggests that responding to needs at a finer grain is vital in developing neighbourhoods for social capital such as responding to the needs of different user groups, responding to local patterns of use and needs of micro localities, and improving the perceptions of neighbourhoods. Local facilities and neighbourhood walkablity provides incentives for longer term residency, and facilitates interaction which helps social capital to grow. Accessing services by walking and using public transport proves vital to engage in social activities, while a poor physical environment, lack of accessible services and public transport negatively affects participation in social and leisure activities. Facilities and buildings provide a mediating role in developing social capital in a community, providing opportunity for social interaction which encourages people to reside in an area for longer. Improving connections beyond the neighbourhood is important to help retain people for longer term residency to develop social capital
Walkability around primary schools and area deprivation across Scotland
Background:
A number of studies based in the US, Canada, and Australia, have found evidence of associations between the built environment (BE) and mode of transport to school, and links between active travel and deprivation. Limited research in the UK compares potential BE supports for walking to school by area deprivation. Within this study, we gathered data on BE attributes previously linked to active travel, i.e., street/path connectivity, and dwelling density, created a composite âwalkability scoreâ (WS) for areas around primary schools across urban Scotland, and explored whether poorer areas exhibit lower scores than more affluent areas, or vice versa. We consider this to be a novel approach as few studies have compared BE features by deprivation across a whole country.
Methods:
Address and road/path maps were obtained and primary schools (Nâ=â937) across mainland Scotland were mapped. Schools were attributed income deprivation scores (scores divided into quintiles (Q1: least deprived, Q5: most deprived)). Catchment area (CA) boundaries, i.e., the geographic area representing eligibility for local school attendance, were drawn around schools, and WS calculated for each CA. We compared mean WS by income quintile (ANOVA), for all local authorities (LAs) combined (Nâ=â29), and separately for the four LAs with the greatest number of schools included in the analysis.
Results:
For all LAs combined, the least deprived quintile (Q1) showed a significantly lower WS (â0.61), than quintiles 3, 4 and 5 (Q2: â0.04 (non-sig), Q3: 0.38, Q4: 0.09, Q5: 0.18); while for Glasgow the second least deprived quintile (Q2) showed significantly higher WS (Q1: 1.35, Q2: 1.73), than middling (Q3: 0.18) and most deprived quintiles (Q4: 0.06, Q5: â0.10).
Conclusion:
WS differ by deprivation with patterns varying depending on the spatial scale of the analysis. It is essential that less walkable areas are provided with the resources to improve opportunities to engage in active travel
Geoweb 2.0 for Participatory Urban Design: Affordances and Critical Success Factors
In this paper, we discuss the affordances of open-source Geoweb 2.0 platforms
to support the participatory design of urban projects in real-world
practices.We first introduce the two open-source platforms used in our study
for testing purposes. Then, based on evidence from five different field studies
we identify five affordances of these platforms: conversations on alternative
urban projects, citizen consultation, design empowerment, design studio
learning and design research. We elaborate on these in detail and identify a
key set of success factors for the facilitation of better practices in the
future
"So go downtown": simulating pedestrian movement in town centres
Pedestrian movement models have been developed since the 1970s. A review of the literature shows that such models have been developed to explain and predict macro, meso, and micro movement patterns. However, recent developments in modelling techniques, and especially advances in agent-based simulation, open up the possibility of developing integrative and complex models which use existing models as 'building blocks'. In this paper we describe such integrative, modular approach to simulating pedestrian movement behaviour. The STREETS model, developed by using Swarm and GIS, is an agent-based model that focuses on the simulation of the behavioural aspects of pedestrian movement. The modular structure of the simulation is described in detail. This is followed by a discussion of the lessons learned from the development of STREETS, especially the advantages of adopting a modular approach and other aspects of using the agent-based paradigm for modelling
Wheels on the Bus: School Transportation as a Reflection of Sprawl
The second half of the twentieth century constituted a change in land use ideology and development practice brought about by the rise of the automobile, increasing economic upward mobility, and privatization of the family home. During this time, the districting and building of public schools similarly changed, turning schools from local community centers to regional and de-contextualized places of education. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which these development practices have caused children to rely on car and bus transportation to get to and from school. Using the variable of distance within a GIS analysis of three case study locations in California, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, we tested the hypothesis that the increasing regionalization of schools in conjunction with the sprawl of developed parcels diminishes walkability to those schools for the children who attend them. Our results suggest that increased distance from schools and the districting mandates for determining school attendance decrease the ability of children to walk to school, reflecting the shift to automobile-centered land use. Our research also suggests that infrastructure-related walkability is further impeded by economic, cultural, and socio-psychological norms that are in many ways connected to or facilitated by the automobile
Design of pedestrian network friendliness maps
This article introduces the concept of pedestrian, or walking friendliness, and presents a methodology for obtaining maps thereof. Walking friendliness is a quality of walking indicator, defined for any given origin in a city, which combines accessibility measures, based on impedance between that origin and destinations, with performance scores for the pedestrian infrastructure linking those origins and destinations. The methodology uses geographic information systems to obtain walking friendliness values and represent them in a map. The approach is demonstrated through a case study for the city of Coimbra, Portugal, for which friendliness maps were derived. The procedure and maps that were produced can be scaled to any size of city.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Building Environmentally Sustainable Communities: A Framework for Inclusivity
Reviews literature on past inequitable and unsustainable urban development and visions for linking sustainability, opportunity, and inclusion. Analyzes possible metrics for measuring sustainability and access as well as next steps for policy
The Digital Life of Walkable Streets
Walkability has many health, environmental, and economic benefits. That is
why web and mobile services have been offering ways of computing walkability
scores of individual street segments. Those scores are generally computed from
survey data and manual counting (of even trees). However, that is costly, owing
to the high time, effort, and financial costs. To partly automate the
computation of those scores, we explore the possibility of using the social
media data of Flickr and Foursquare to automatically identify safe and walkable
streets. We find that unsafe streets tend to be photographed during the day,
while walkable streets are tagged with walkability-related keywords. These
results open up practical opportunities (for, e.g., room booking services,
urban route recommenders, and real-estate sites) and have theoretical
implications for researchers who might resort to the use social media data to
tackle previously unanswered questions in the area of walkability.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of International World Wide Web
Conference (WWW 2015
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