On both sides of the Atlantic, downtown shops need to stick together to survive

Downtowns on both sides of the Atlantic have been under threat for decades: first from the rise of suburban malls, and now from the growing popularity of internet shopping. In new research which studies a century of retail change in Detroit and The Hague, Conrad Kickert and Rainer vom Hofe find that the closer shops are to each other, the ..

Active Centers - Interactive Edges.

This dissertation explores the deteriorating relationship between architecture and public space plaguing many Western urban cores as a result of economic, cultural, political and social forces. It investigates the question of how and why ground floor frontages have been transformed, by comparing the urban cores of The Hague (Netherlands) and Detroit (United States) over the past century. Frontage interactivity is defined as the combination of physical transparency, functional permeability and perceptual hospitality, and is mapped in both urban cores over the span of a century in 10 to 25 year intervals. Interactivity is categorized into four tiers, based on fourteen functional frontage types, ranging from highly interactive retail businesses to dwellings and less interactive offices, parking structures and warehouses. Patterns of physical and functional fringe belt formation and urban erosion are found in the maps and statistical analyses. These analyses demonstrate a pattern of fringe interactivity decline, amplified by an acceleration of decline at the level of the street segment – pointing to the contagion of vacancy and inactive land uses. This interactivity erosion is usually followed and amplified by a rapid morphological change, often fueled by large-scale urban renewal interventions – a pattern that is surprisingly similar in both cities. The forces behind frontage transformation are illustrated by separate histories of The Hague and Detroit. The demonstrated forces and patterns of change are integrated into a set of conclusions, finding significant similarities between both case studies. From an economic, social and cultural perspective both cities have faced and still face similar challenges, albeit amplified in Detroit. The relationship between buildings and public space has deteriorated significantly in downtown Detroit as a result of socio-economic decline, amplified by a culture favoring progress over sustaining a collective memory. The Hague’s inner city has benefited from a somewhat finer balance between progress and permanence, often due to fierce public and political debates. The conclusions are followed by a set of recommendations for how to counter frontage deactivation, focusing on the role of economics, diversity, curbing fear and auto-mobility, and critical mass in reshaping the architecture of public life.PhDArchitectureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110405/1/kickert_1.pd

Infrastructure landscapes : automobility and granularity in São Paulo and Detroit

This paper presents a cross-cultural comparison of the social, cultural, institutional and physical context and impacts of automobility and urban granularity in two global automotive capitals: Detroit and São Paulo. It uses a combination of descriptive history and comparative mapping to describe and measure urban change due to automobile intervenions. It finds that both cities, under quite similar forces, have actually taken divergent pathways toward infrastructure landscapes

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Surveying density, urban characteristics, and development capacity of station areas in the Delta Metropolis

The combination of growing mobility needs and dwindling transportation budgets in the Dutch Delta Metropolis has raised the need for smarter use of existing public transport infrastructure. A significant portion of this smarter use may come from strengthening the ties between infrastructure improvements and transit-oriented development. To further this goal, the Delta Metropolis Association has developed SprintCity (SprintStad in Dutch), a serious game and planning support tool that engages stakeholders in transit-oriented development to explore interaction between transport and land use, as described in Bertolini’s node–place model. However, its underlying database has proven insufficient to draw conclusions regarding urban character and development capacity around stations. This paper focuses on morphological research that aims to improve this database by exploring the density and urban morphology of station areas in the Delta Metropolis beyond readily available statistics, and discusses the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of this survey. The surveying of station areas in 2010 was conducted by a team of six researchers, based on the Spacemate\ua9 methodology developed by Berghauser Pont and Haupt. The methodology allows detailed quantitative measurement of the density and spatial characteristics of clearly demarcated urban districts, defining their so-called ‘spatial fingerprint’. The resulting database of 850 districts in 55 station areas has served descriptive goals, strengthening the realism in the SprintCity game, and serves as the database for further establishing the development potential of station areas

Evidence-based design: Satellite positioning studies of city centre user groups

In an era of increasing competition between urban cores, positive pedestrian experiences become crucial in attracting visitors and retaining residents. The dichotomy between use and evaluation of public spaces enables the prioritisation of urban design and management interventions in an age of austerity. When spaces are highly used but evaluated as poor, they warrant improvements over other spaces. The results therefore substantiate evidence-based design that achieves significant yet cost-effective improvements of the city centre pedestrian experience. This paper presents an approach to understanding city centre pedestrian behaviour and experiences by deploying global positioning system tracking technology. This technology enables accurate measurement of routing and behaviour in public space. Differences between the use of public spaces in the city centre of Delft by visitors and residents are measured by tracking the behaviour of three user groups. This measured behaviour is supplemented by questionnaire results to understand the evaluation of public spaces in central Delft.UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen