Restorative Urban Open Space: exploring the spatial configuration of human emotional fulfillment in urban open space. ABSTRACTThe capacity of outdoor settings to benefit human well-being is well established by research. Examples of restorative settings can be found throughout history and are still applied today in health care facilities, as healing or restorative gardens for the sick, but their wider significance in the urban public realm remains insufficiently explored. This paper presents a conceptual framework for restorative urban open space based on mosaics of linked and nested spaces woven into the urban fabric. The concept synthesizes the theory of centres, pioneered in the 1970's and refined in recent work by architectural theorist Christopher Alexander (2001), with material relating to social and ecological dimensions of outdoor spatial configuration (Hillier and Hanson,1984; Forman,1995; Porta and Renne,2002) The concept argues for fundamental properties of order, as integrations of locational, directional and transitional spatial experience, which are present in the natural and cultural world and associated with human psychological benefit. This spatial arrangement may offer potential to resurrect people's connection with intuitively preferred forms and strengthen beneficial relations between human functioning and the spatial environment.

This study provides empirical insight into the extent to which pedestrians visually engage with urban street edges and how social and spatial factors impact such engagement. This was achieved using mobile eye-tracking. The gaze distribution of 24 study participants was systematically recorded as they carried out everyday tasks on differing streets. The findings demonstrated that street edges are the most visually engaged component of streets; that street edge visual engagement is impacted by everyday social tasks as well as the spatial and physical materiality of edges on differing streets; and that street edges, which attract a lot of visual engagement while undertaking optional tasks, also attract greater amounts of visual engagement while undertaking necessary tasks. These findings offer new insight into urban street edge engagement from the direct perspective of street inhabitants and in doing so provide greater understanding of how street edges are experienced.

This chapter deals with those aspects of the design of cities that have been shown to affect quality of life. Whilst direct causal relationships between physical space and well-being are often difficult to establish, physical space certainly does play a significant part in shaping the way we engage with it, informing the individual and collective sense of attachment to our own environment; this will become increasingly important, with the urbanization process predicted to grow, a significant part of which in conditions of informality. The aim of this chapter is to gather relevant and recent research that highlights advances in the study of the reciprocal effect between urban form and urban life and use this to compile an agenda for future thinking, research and practice in the field of socially sustainable urban design.The thrust of this agenda is centered on the concept of control. Since urbanization is an ongoing phenomenon and life in cities is now the norm for the vast majority of people, the traditional role of design needs to be reconsidered to give way to more collaborative and flexible forms of conceptualization, creation, occupation and management of space. This is important in order to relieve pressure on land and institutions, and instill an overall proactive and reciprocal attitude towards space itself, and space as a form of collective and social life.The chapter will highlight that urban quality of life rests on four core themes of: material well-being; emotional and personal development; interpersonal relationships; and physical well-being. These themes provide an organizational framework for exploration of how they are manifest at the metropolitan, neighbourhood and pedestrian levels of scale. KeywordsCities, urban form, control, urban design, quality of life, metropolitan scale, neighbourhood scale, pedestrian scale. Email author OutlineFrom an overview on recent trends in urbanization, we will introduce the notion of control as a key to read the following text and in particular we will: 1. contextualize the concept of control in relation to the fields of both quality of life (QoL) and urban form. In fact, the literature in both domains shows that there is a mutually reciprocal relationship between aspects of quality of life and urban spatial structure; 2. review established and recent research on the relationships between QoL and urban form, structured around metropolitan, neighborhood and pedestrian scales, which illustrates the centrality of control in shaping our cities and allowing quality of life to be fulfilled within them; 3. propose a conceptual framework for socio-spatial urban design, which is sensitive to the relative importance of predictive/structural and loose/flexible urban elements in the production and management of urban space, and their critical role in affording their users a sense of control; 4. suggest the need for a reconceptualization of city form away from an assemblage of material and spatial elements towards a more integrated sense of a city as a mutually d...

This paper develops a conceptual framework of transitional edges to enhance understanding of the social value of urban street edges. Building from theoretical principles associated with socio-spatial understandings of urban realms, transitional edges conceptualise urban street edges as integrations of their social, spatial and material dimensions. This is captured in a tripartite structure highlighting socially relevant properties of transitional edges that act along them (extent), across them (laterality) and within them (locality). This provides a foundation for developing an approach to practical application based on identification and evaluation of transitional edges as assemblages of territorialised segments. To progress this, a developmental study of a length of Sharrow Vale Road in Sheffield, UK was carried out to explore how theoretical principles of the transitional edge conceptual framework could be translated for practical application. This reveals the potential of transitional edges to highlight that locally focused small scale change and adaptation may be significant to the social potential of urban street edges. As a result, the current study sets out theoretical and practical foundations for a conceptual framework of transitional edges which will support development of an extensive funded programme of transitional edge case study research.

Existing knowledge of street edge experience has often been constructed using methods that offer a limited opportunity to gain empirical insight from the first-hand perspective of pedestrians. In order to address this, mobile eye-tracking glasses were used during the current investigation to provide a detailed understanding of pedestrian visual engagement with street edges along both non-pedestrianised and pedestrianised urban streets. Through this, the current study advances empirical knowledge of street edge experience from a perspective that has previously been challenging to capture and quantify. The findings demonstrate that people visually engage with street edge ground floors more than their upper floors, that visual engagement is distributed more towards the street edge on the walked side of non-pedestrianised streets than the opposite side, and that visual engagement with street edges of pedestrianised streets is balanced across both sides. The study findings also highlight how the everyday activities of pedestrians and different streets being walked often influence the amount of visual engagement within these street edge areas. These insights provide a new understanding that develops existing knowledge of pedestrian street edge experience. Significantly, they also provide an empirical foundation from which to examine how design intervention can become more considerate of peoples’ routine use of and experiential engagement with street edges along non-pedestrianised and pedestrianised urban streets.