Smart Data for smart Government-A show case from Abu Dhabi Distribution Company

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has become an important and smart tool in planning, and serving the community, the local authorities and governments, decision makers and planners, etc. This paper is a showcase of GIS application in planning and managing the water infrastructure system in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), in particular the maintenance. It emphasizes the importance of smart data in decision making and smart planning. The paper presents first a description of the Abu Dhabi Distribution Company (ADCC), the data provider, and an overview of the use of GIS in its different departments, as an example of how Abu Dhabi government is going toward smart planning and sustainable development. The paper also explains in berif the causes/ types of damages that may occur in the water supply systems precisely the pipes. The practical part of the paper presents the case study and explains the methodology. The research work consists of mapping by using GIS the locations of the accidents that happened in the water pipes in different time periods in the Abu Dhabi central area. It also localised and mapped the types of damages identified as technical or caused by a third party. This represents the uniquness of the paper, as it presents this data for the first time as a geopatial information to a decision maker at ADDC, unlike the non-spatial data that was used before. The paper ends by discussing the findings and presents the results of the discussion with one of the decision makers at ADDC Company, and includes some recommendations. The objective of the work presented in this paper is to show through a case study how Smart Data can help Governance to be Smart

A Visionary Study on Urban Neighbourhood Models in Kabul City Based on Actual Surveys

This paper explores a new neighborhood model with the primary school district. This scale is well known as Perry’s neighborhood unit theory all over the world. So, this paper deals with (1) the spread and familiarity of Perry’s theory in especially Islamic planning context; (2) spatial analysis of current urban neighborhoods in Kabul City through a survey in district nine; (3) measurement of densities on population, dwelling unit, household, and pupils in the case study area, and (4) visionary proposals on urban neighborhood models based on several scenarios in the near future and its implications. The findings are: (1) Gozar is an institutionalized fundamental element of the city governance body in Kabul City; (2) there are wide ranges of the spatial sizes and the divisions of Gozars; (3) ‘Urban Gozar’ as an elemental neighborhood organization in the modern sense is forming through transformation; (4) the neighborhood unit of Perry can be an appropriate urban model for urban neighborhoods in Islamic cities and towns specially Kabul City

Editorial introduction

With rapid urbanization and the hunger for new architectural trends, buildings built since the 1960s face the threat of being classified as old and with no value. Lately governments in the Gulf region, such as in Abu Dhabi have paid attention to such buildings and have taken steps to safeguard their modern cultural heritage and building stock (Chabbi & Mahdy, 2011a, 2011b; Yildirim, 2015). The first paper by Husnéin (2017) discusses the importance of this topic and explores the role that the built cultural heritage (Damlūji, 2006) can play to improve the public realm within a sustainable urbanism

A Study on the Space Layout and Configuration of Shopping Malls in Relation to Pedestrian Movement Behavior - Case of UAE

The research aims to understand the relationship between the popularity and attractiveness of commercial buildings, shopping malls and any relationship with visitor satisfaction. This would assist in designing new malls or commercial buildings, predict their degree of popularity, and help achieve both higher revenue resulting from increasing the number of visitors and their satisfaction, comfort and enjoyment of the space. This study will focus on the relationship between shopping mall popularity and wayfinding. Planned and unplanned visits to some specific areas inside the malls will be considered. These areas are: 1- Facilities: prayer rooms, and washrooms, etc.; 2- The largest areas in size and often with the highest number of visitors: food courts, cinemas, play areas; and 3- ATM machines. The objective of this paper is to verify three hypotheses: 1. The popularity of a mall is positively related to visitor satisfaction with wayfinding in the mall; 2. The popularity of a mall is positively related to visitor satisfaction with the location of facilities in the mall; 3. The location of facilities in a mall is positively related to visitor satisfaction with wayfinding in the mall. Surveys were conducted in the city of Abu Dhabi and the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) technique was used to verify these hypotheses

Urban plaza design process using space syntax analysis: El-Houria plaza, Biskra, Algeria

The quality of urban public space in general, and urban plazas in particular, has been a concern and a major challenge for designers in setting rules and principles to its layout and its design; functional and aesthetic. Environmental and behavioural research contributes importantly to the understanding of the interaction between user and space, to well respond to users’ real needs; and to have design grounded in social understanding. In pertinent literature, it is common to argue that the most important measures of the success of an open space is attributed to its location, design, and use. In this matter, space syntax provides theory and method to analyse the correlation between spatial properties and people behaviour; understanding this interaction helps in design, with improved design leading to more functional places. This paper instigates from the assumption that human behaviour in space is highly dependent on visibility generated by the built environment configuration, and it aims to look into the correlation between the use of space and spatial quantitative measures, i.e. the syntactic properties of an urban plaza. It also aims to look into how to integrate space syntax analysis as a tool in the plaza layout design process. This work will be carried out on the analysis and the design proposal of the most frequented public place in Biskra, Algeria, “El-Houria plaza”. The analysis process consists of overlapping space syntax method (Depthmap), behaviour mapping and various qualitative analysis techniques such as questionnaire and mental mapping. The results show that plaza spatial use is highly dependent on visibility and that the accessibility (visual access) and the connectivity to the surrounding are the key parameters to its functioning. The results also indicate that there is a high correlation between the human behaviour and the syntactic properties in selecting places to do definite activities. Furthermore, it is shown how visibility becomes the principal feature in the layout proposal of this plaza

(Section A: Planning Strategies and Design Concepts)

Open spaces provided in mass housing schemes is considered as one of largest issues in public mass housing, and their use by the inhabitants has been a concern and a topic of interest of many fields, where the focus is on inhabitant behavior in space according to either inhabitant/inhabitant or inhabitant/space relation. This open space constitutes a structuring space for the large housing estates, by the ties that connect between the buildings that compose it and the inhabitants who use it. Amongst the various deficiencies that mass housing schemes particular present today is the inability of promoting successful open spaces, which is mainly reflected by patterns of their use, therefore produce an abandoned, deserted, and degraded spaces, this is generally an indication that something is wrong with their layout design, in this regard, this paper revolves around the use of open public space in the 1000 collective housing units in the city of Biskra (Algeria), which provides a variety of open spaces forms, hence; to know how the spatial configuration and the site organization affect the way spaces are used by the inhabitants, based on the hypothesis that the use of open public spaces in mass housing is intimately linked to the visual fields produced by the spatial configuration. The analysis process draws on two methods, an observation in-situ to explore why in the neighbourhood, some parts are more occupied and more preferred by people than others, using the technique of behavioural mapping, i.e. people counting and spatial use mapping, taking into consideration three age groups (children, adults, elderly), further to look for links between visibility and spatial use, a syntactic analysis is carried out to analyze visibility properties using Depthmap software. The results of this study indicate that the visual factor, the buildings arrangements, and the site organization in the mass housing substantially affect the use and the quality of their open spaces

Editorial introduction: Green Planning

This special issue deals with research presented at the biannual SPSD conference held in Seoul, South Korea in 2017. Specifically, about half of the presentations (total 68) were submitted in full length, aiming for official publication in IRSPSD and from these, this issue was initially based on nine papers. Five papers were finally accepted and comprise this special issue