Centrality and connectivity in public transport networks and their significance for transport sustainability in cities

The promotion of public transport as a backbone of mobility in urban agglomerations, or at least as an alternative to the dominance of the automobile, has become a prominent policy focus in most large cities around the world. However, while some cities have been successful in shifting car journeys onto rail and buses, others are struggling despite considerable effort to make public transport more attractive. This paper provides a brief overview of success factors for public transport and then takes the configuration of public transport networks as a vantage point for policy evaluation. The development of centrality and connectivity indicators for the public transport network of Melbourne's north-eastern suburbs delivers an instrument for assessing the congruence of the systems with the geographical structure of central areas and urban activities in these cities. It is hypothesised that a higher number of convenient transfer points and a choice of routes to users (network connectivity), as well as a high degree of spatial overlap and integration between public transport infrastructure and urban activity centres and corridors (centrality of facilities) will lead to a greater role for public transport in the mobility patterns of the city as a whole

Plot-based urbanism : towards time-consciousness in place-making

Some of us have recently argued that what we still miss is the serious consideration of the factor of time in urbanism, or, in other words, a deeper "time conscious" approach (Thwaites, Porta, Romice, & Greaves, 2008). Inevitably, that means focusing on change as the essential dynamic of evolution in the built environment, which in turn leads to re-addressing concepts like control, self-organization and community participation. After time and change have been finally firmly placed at the centre stage, the whole discipline of urban planning and design, its conceptual equipment as well as its operational toolbox, reveals its weaknesses under a new light and calls for the construction of a different scenario. This paper poses the problem of this scenario in disciplinary terms, it argues about its premises and outlines its essential features. The scope of this paper is not to deliver a comprehensive model for a new approach to urban planning and design, but to set the right framework and rise the right questions so that we can start thinking of issues such as urban regeneration, informal settlements and massive urbanization, community participation and representation, beauty and humanity in space, in a different way

The psychology of engagement : communities in action

Design has a strong effect on people, hence it ought to be based on a clear understanding of the way in which people engage with the environment around them

Multiple centrality assessment in Parma : a network analysis of paths and open spaces

One of the largest of Europe, the recently realized university campus 'Area of the Sciences' in Parma, northern Italy, has been planned for a comprehensive programme of renovation and revitalization with a special focus on vehicular accessibility and the quality of open spaces. As part of the problem setting phase, the authors, with Rivi Engineering, applied Multiple Centrality Assessment (MCA) - a process of network analysis based on primal graphs, a set of different centrality indices and the metric computation of distances - in order to understand why the existent system of open spaces and pedestrian paths is so scarcely experienced by students as well as faculty and staff members and why it appears so poorly supportive of social life and human exchange. In the problem-solving phase MCA was also applied, turning out to offer a relevant contribution to the comparative evaluation of two alternative proposed scenarios, leading to the identification of one final solution of urban design. In the present paper, the first professional application of MCA, an innovative approach to the network analysis of geographic complex systems, is presented and its relevance in the context of a problem of urban design illustrated

Street centrality and land use intensity in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

This paper examines the relationship between street centrality and land use intensity in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Street centrality is calibrated in terms of a node's closeness, betweenness and straightness on the road network. Land use intensity is measured by population (residential) and employment (business) densities in census tracts, respectively and combined. Two CIS-based methods are used to transform data sets of centrality (at network nodes) and densities (in census tracts) to one unit for correlation analysis. The kernel density estimation (KDE) converts both measures to raster pixels, and the floating catchment area (FCA) method computes average centrality values around census tracts. Results indicate that population and employment densities are highly correlated with street centrality values. Among the three centrality indices, closeness exhibits the highest correlation with land use densities, straightness the next and betweenness the last. This confirms that street centrality captures location advantage in a city and plays a crucial role in shaping the intraurban variation of land use intensity. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Non-equilibrium control of quantum systems and their phases

In the last years, one of the major aim of the condensed matter area of interest, at the same rate of fundamental research, is to produce new and substantial breakthrough innovations to be applied in the information technology world. Indeed, semiconductor-based devices have constantly improved their performances thanks to the ability of continually shrink the components inside chips. In this process, however, physical components cannot be reduced in size infinitely. All matter consists of atoms and, at the atomic level, particles behave according to the laws of quantum mechanics. With this respect, the control of quantum systems is becoming fundamental to go beyond the present technology and the engineering of powerful phases of matter, very hard to obtain in standard conditions, is one of the main goals people are trying to achieve. The realization of quantum computation devices, in this sense, strongly depends on these new ideas success. In this respect, researchers have faced the difficulty, both from the theoretical and the experimental points of view, to control the state of a quantum system. Quantum control, i.e. the control of quantum phenomena, is becoming one of the major concerns in condensed matter physics, even if results obtained in the recent past are mainly confined to static systems in equilibrium, due to the difficulty to experimentally manipulate out-of-equilibrium quantum systems and the absence of an efficient general theoretical framework to describe non-equilibrium dynamics. In this thesis, I address these currently open questions by inspecting several different condensed matter models, using various methods to drive the system out of equilibrium and focusing on its dynamical features as well as the properties of its equilibration towards a thermal or, more interestingly, non thermal steady state. I discuss the possibility to manipulate various systems to give rise to peculiar dynamical behaviors and corresponding steady states with properties not attainable in thermal equilibrium, ranging from quantum phase transitions and their dynamical counterparts to superconductivity

Borel summability of ϕ44\phi^{4}_{4} planar theory via multiscale analysis

We review the issue of Borel summability in the framework of multiscale analysis and renormalization group, by discussing a proof of Borel summability of the $\phi^{4}_4$ massive euclidean planar theory; this result is not new, since it was obtained by Rivasseau and 't Hooft. However, the techniques that we use have already been proved effective in the analysis of various models of consended matter and field theory; therefore, we take the $\phi^{4}_4$ planar theory as a toy model for future applications.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures. Notations revised, and other minor change

Masterplanning for change : lessons and directions

Unprecedented worldwide urbanisation, financial instability, climate change and emerging new lifestyles are challenging the capacity of cities to attract and retain people and activities. Particularly, as many masterplan-driven developments realised from the second half of last Century have been criticised for their inability to cope with changing needs and uncertainty of future outcomes and for their incongruity with native physical, socio-economic and environmental contexts, the need to reform conventional approaches to masterplanning is now pressing. As cities competitiveness and success depends on their capacity to meet these manifold challenges, a new generation of masterplans has emerged over the recent years to respond more clearly to the sustainability agenda. However as we become increasingly aware that cities are inherently unstable and prone to unpredictable change over time, to complement the concern for sustainability, resilience as applied in the field of system-ecology needs now consideration. The paper argues that re-evaluating masterplanning against the theoretical framework of resilience would help defining a reformed approach, referred to as “Masterplan for Change”, more openly aimed at giving strategic direction and spatial quality to places, while accommodating modification over time. However the role of resilience in guiding urban design and masterplanning is still marginal. Hence, the fundamental link between sustainability and resilience is clarified and a preliminary list of guiding principles of “Masterplan for Change”, emerged from combination between urban design sustainability and socio-ecological resilience principles, suggested