Analyzing the Configuration of Multimodal Urban Networks

This article proposes urban network models as instruments to measure urban form, structure, and function indicators for the assessment of the sustainable mobility of urban areas, thanks to their capacity to describe the detail of a local environment in the context of a wider city-region. Drawing from the features of existing street network models that offer disaggregate, scalable, and relational analysis of the spatial configuration of urban areas, it presents a multimodal urban network (MMUN) model that describes an urban environment using three systems—private transport (i.e., car, bicycle, and pedestrian), public transport (i.e., rail, tram, metro, and bus), and land use. This model offers a unifying framework that allows the use of a range of analysis metrics and conceptions of distance (i.e., physical, topological, and cognitive), and aims to be simple and applicable in practice. An implementation of the MMUN is created for the Randstad city-region in the Netherlands. This is analyzed with network centrality measures in a series of experiments, testing its performance against empirical data. The experiments yield conclusions regarding the use of different distance parameters, the choice of network centrality metrics, and the relevant combinations of multimodal layers to describe the structure and configuration of a city-region.UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Urban form and multi-modal mobility patterns

UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Modality Environments: A Concept For Sustainability And Vitality In The Multi-Modal City

This paper reviews an idea of vital local high-street places with their walking spaces and economies founded in interfaces between neighbourhood and city (between walking and public transport/bicycle movement infrastructures). It then extends this idea to higher scales, considering interfaces between city and region, which have already been theorised as ‘mobility environments’ (Bertolini & Dijst 2003) focusing on places and modal transfer points in new regional cities of high mobility. High-streets and mobility environments are both central places and our way of describing them suggests a new definition of central places as interfaces between normative (but also technically-infrastructually supported) political spaces (neighbourhood, city and region). It also clarifies the role of scale in place theory and we will deal with this in a following paper. Here we introduce ideas of ‘modality places’ and ‘modality environments’. The ‘modality environment’ is concerned with areal and network transportation forms in whole fabrics and resulting conditions of sustainability and urbanity. Modality environments are understood in terms of transportation networks and the social and functional factors (like sustainability and urbanity) they produce. Modality environments are seen as lived environments built around movement infrastructure grids that distribute everyday urban functions. Ideally modality environments would be simple clear grids that distribute all or close to all the functions of everyday life so that a walking grid or a bicycle grid that gets adults to work, their children to school and includes shopping and recreation would be walking or bicycle modality environments. They would be expected to have high levels of direct visibility-legibility in the way urban elements present themselves to a mobile community. Modality environments would also include the central places (like high-streets or mobility environments like stations) at which people would transfer to other modality environments. We will use a notion of ‘movement culture’ to indicate the convergence of land uses and mobile communities mediated in information-rich networks. We are concerned first with how modality environments (for cycling or walking for example) may afford more sustainable lifestyles. We are concerned in addition with the ways they can be designed to include central places as zones of urbanity and vitality and as socially and culturally mixed centres. We start not with a principle of accessibility of/from nodes in an extensive space but with the idea that particular social and political territories (communities and polities) are already articulations of distinct modality environments. We demonstrate using the case of the Amsterdam metropolitan area.Spatial Planning and Strateg

Amsterdam and its Region as a Layering of Socio-Technical Systems

Space syntax reveals structure in the plans of cities. It misses however an explanation of how this structure arises and what it means. We argue political geographies are structured by the way we have constructed them historically as social organisation, and the means (technique) we have used. These structures depend on a layering of state of the art socio?technical networks constructed at different times in history. These networks internalise their own orders as particular ‘technological rationalities’ which give meaning to the objects subjects and practices they contain. They have also, as an aspect of these rationalities, a strongly normative character, fixing in place geographical entities like neighbourhoods, cities, regions etc. They fix these through the ‘structures of places’ they contain – networks of ‘isotopic’ locations (neighbourhood places; city places; regional places) whose scale and relation with places of other scales is fixed by the network involved and by the part?whole normativities of neighbourhood to city; city to region; etc. relations. This all constitutes a profound level of organisational order, embedded in the real world, that passes under the radar of reductive and ‘theoretical’ thinking. It is not so much pre?conceptual as about the historical and material realm in which geographical concepts and percepts arise. This level of order is what space syntax is in an indirect way finding. It is also a level of order we can use in a far more direct way as a means of modelling our built environment. This paper is an exploratory attempt to reveal the significant elements of this order in the case of Amsterdam, preparatory to modelling them. It begins by reviewing previous work done to show that what space syntax reveals is an effect of the interface of ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘city’ as these were realised technologically in urban infrastructures installed in the industrial era. It goes on to show pre?industrial and post?industrial Amsterdam are forms in their own right and that there are path?dependent processes of transformation between each of these forms. These processes of transformation establish articulations between these different forms, the articulations themselves becoming the vivid centres and the way the different forms (or layers) of the city work together. We conclude that the idea of modelling these human organisational orders embedded in infrastructures so as to reveal the active centres they produce in urban fabric seems plausible.UrbanismArchitectur

Patterns of sustainable mobility and the structure of modality in the Randstad city-region

UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Central places and modality environments: An historical architecture of urban places

UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Unsupervised classification of evolving metropolitan street patterns

UrbanismArchitectur

Introducing spatial variability to the impact significance assessment

The concept of Circular Economy has gained momentum during the last decade. Yet unsustainable circular systems can also create unintended social, economic and environmental damage. Sustainability is highly dependent on a system’s geographical context, such as location of resources, cultural acceptance, economic, environmental and transport geography. While in some cases an impact of the proposed change may be considered equally significant under all circumstances (e.g. increase of carbon emissions as a main contributor to the global climate change), many impacts may change both their direction and the extent of significance dependent on their context (e.g. land consumption may be positively evaluated if applied to abandoned territories or negatively if a forest needs to be sacrificed). The geographical context, (i.e. its sensitivity, vulnerability or potential) is commonly assessed by Spatial Decision Support Systems. However, currently those systems typically do not perform an actual impact assessment as impact characteristics stay constant regardless of location. Likewise, relevant Impact Assessment methods, although gradually becoming more spatial, assume their context as invariable. As a consequence, impact significance so far is also a spatially unvarying concept. However, current technological developments allow to rapidly record, analyse and visualise spatial data. This article introduces the concept of spatially varying impact significance assessment, by reviewing its current definitions in literature, and analysing to what extent the concept is applied in existing assessment methods. It concludes with a formulation of spatially varying impact significance assessment for innovation in the field of impact assessment.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Environmental Technology and Desig

Evaluating sustainable urban development using urban metabolism indicators in urban design

Urban metabolism is a multi-disciplinary approach to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate resource flows in urban systems, which aims to provide important insights into the dynamics of cities to make them more ecologically responsible. It has been also introduced into the urban design domain, however most of the attempts concern only tracking of energy and/or material flows to reduce environmental impacts by redesigning closed loops in a specific area. The hypothesis of this paper is that the concept of urban metabolism, and its indicators, could play an important role in advancing the science and practice related to sustainability in urban design and development. At the moment, however we lack indicators to support evaluation of urban design related decisions from the perspective of urban metabolism. The aim of this paper is to explore the application of urban metabolism indicators in urban design based on their characteristics. It reviews development periods of the concept and analytical models of urban metabolism, in order to identify crucial urban metabolism indicators for urban design. Next, these urban metabolism indicators are classified regarding type of analytical model, accounting method, indicator type, and indicator level. Finally, several suggestions are offered on how to integrate urban metabolism indicators into urban design. In addition, directions for future research on the topic are discussed.Environmental Technology and Desig

Quantitative comparison of cities: Distribution of street and building types based on density and centrality measures

It has been argued that different urban configurations-planned vs. organic, treelike vs. grid like-perform differently when it comes to the intensity and distribution of pedestrian flows, built density and land uses. However, definitions of urban configurations are often rather abstract, ill-defined and at worse end in fixed stereotypes hiding underlying spatial complexity. Recent publications define morphological typologies based on quantitative variables (e.g. Barthelemy, 2015; Serra, 2013a; Gil et al., 2012; Berghauser Pont and Haupt, 2010) and solve some of these shortcomings. These approaches contribute to the discussion of types in two ways: firstly, they allow for the definition of types based on multiple variables in a precise and repeattable manner, enabling the study of large samples and the comparison between both cities and regions; secondly, they frame design choices in terms of types without being fixed and so open up for design explorations where the relation between the variables can be challenged to propose new types. This paper explores the typologies defined by Serra (2013a) and Berghauser Pont and Haupt (2010) further, as these target two of the most important morphological entities of urban form, namely the street network and the building structure. The purpose is to gain a better understanding of how types are composed and distributed within and across different cities. The method is based on GIS and statistical modeling of four cities to allow for a comparative analysis of four cities: Amsterdam, London, Stockholm and Gothenburg. For the street network, we process the Road-Centre-line maps to obtain a clean network model, then run segment angular analysis to calculate the space syntax measures of betweenness at different metric radii, defining the "centrality palimpsest" (Serra, 2013a). For the building structure, we process elevation data to obtain building height, then run accessible density analysis for all building density metrics (FSI, GSI, OSR, L) using the Place Syntax Tool (Berghauser Pont and Marcus, 2014). The street and building types are defined using cluster analysis (unsupervised classification), following a similar approach to Serra (2013a). The result is a typology of street ('paths') and building types ('places'), with different profiles of centrality and density across scales. The spatial distribution and frequency of these types across the four cities gives an objective summary of their spatial structure, identifying common as well as unique traits.OLD Urban Composition