Making religious buildings more accessible: The case of mosques in Abu Dhabi’s and Dubai’s neighborhoods

More than a house of worship, religious buildings have a critical and authoritative role in the social and political life of people. Yet, such places of divine and spirit have received limited attention in transportation and urban planning research. This research evaluates accessibility to one kind of religious institution: mosques. The article studies the ease of access to mosques at walkable distances of 400 m and 800 m radii in twelve selected neighborhoods in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Analysis uses the gravity metric under two network scenarios: streets only, and the combined network of streets and alleys. Gravity values demonstrate three types of accessibility to mosques: plots without access, plots with minimum access to one mosque, and plots with choice access to more than one mosque. Findings show neighborhoods have experienced an erratic decrease in accessibility to mosques. In both cities, percentages of plots with an overall accessibility to mosques, (sum of both minimum and choice), were higher in the pre- and-early-suburban phases. With the inclusion of alleyways, the overall accessibility percentages increased in many cases. The study reveals that good pedestrian accessibility results from an effective interplay between street design, plot densities, network intersection density, strategic placement of alleys, and mosques’ ratio and spatial distribution

Making religious buildings more accessible: The case of mosques in Abu Dhabi’s and Dubai’s neighborhoods

More than a house of worship, religious buildings have a critical and authoritative role in the social and political life of people. Yet, such places of divine and spirit have received limited attention in transportation and urban planning research. This research evaluates accessibility to one kind of religious institution: mosques. The article studies the ease of access to mosques at walkable distances of 400 m and 800 m radii in twelve selected neighborhoods in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Analysis uses the gravity metric under two network scenarios: streets only, and the combined network of streets and alleys. Gravity values demonstrate three types of accessibility to mosques: plots without access, plots with minimum access to one mosque, and plots with choice access to more than one mosque. Findings show neighborhoods have experienced an erratic decrease in accessibility to mosques. In both cities, percentages of plots with an overall accessibility to mosques, (sum of both minimum and choice), were higher in the pre- and-early-suburban phases. With the inclusion of alleyways, the overall accessibility percentages increased in many cases. The study reveals that good pedestrian accessibility results from an effective interplay between street design, plot densities, network intersection density, strategic placement of alleys, and mosques’ ratio and spatial distribution

Title: Post-pandemic planning: Do we have enough and efficient access to parks?

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has placed neighborhood parks as a key asset in mitigating the negative implications of extended lockdowns, when parks turned into a sanctuary for residents. With increased scholarly work focusing on developing pots-pandemic neighborhoods, providing access to community parks via efficient routes, is central to such debate. Network connectivity provides a comprehensive assessment of the efficiency of network systems.Methods: A total of 16 samples, from the city of Abu-Dhabi, have been selected to study their network connectivity, with regard to accessing parks. Three distance-based connectivity measures are used: the pedestrian route directness (PRD), the count of redundant routes Redundancy Count (RC), and the route redundancy index (RI). The samples reflect different street’s typologies and their urban form attributes are quantified.Results and Discussion: Connectivity analyses results are interrupted with regard to the quantified physical attributes. Findings indicate that gridded, and semi-gridded layouts provide more direct routes to parks, but less route’s redundancy. Conversely, interlocked, and fragmented networks, when having sufficient intersection densities, have less direct routes but more redundancy. The inclusion of alleyways proved to alter typologies into gridded ones and improve both route directness and redundancy. The majority of the selected samples reported sufficient levels of route directness. The current design and planning guidelines, implemented by the Department of Transport and Municipalities are overly descriptive with regard to how neighborhood parks are accessed; therefore, the study’s methodology provides a possible more evidence-based approach to policy development