Location-based density and diversity – adding attraction variables to space syntax

Abstract

The central variables in any urban model are distance and attraction (Wilson 2000). Space syntax research has contributed to the development of new geometric descriptions and measures of distance that have proven successful when it comes to capturing pedestrian movement. However, the description and measurement of attractions has not been central to the field. An important exception is the development of Place Syntax analysis, which concerns new methodologies and software that opens for analysis not only of different kinds of accessibilities in the street network in itself, but also analysis of the accessibility within the network to different forms of attractions, for instance, residents or retail (Ståhle et al 2005). Place Syntax analysis is a generic form of analysis, why we may choose to analyse the accessibility to particular socio-economic attractions, but we may also conceive of a model of ‘pure’ spatial form – a kind of architectural model of the city. For instance, Place Syntax analysis has been applied in different kinds of density analysis, transforming density measures from area-based measures to location-based measures (Ståhle et al 2005). In this paper, we extend such spatial attraction to not only include the variable of density but also diversity and present results from an extensive empirical study including four European cities, paving the way towards a more complete architectural model of the city including both the analysis of distance and attractions.

Street network and home-based business patterns in Cairo’s informal areas

“…First, this article mainly considered space syntax metrics to test the effects of street network pattern on the distribution of economic activities. Utilizing tools that can combine space syntax measurements with conventional measurements of attraction can be considered for future research (Marcus et al, 2019). Also, there are undoubtedly other morphological properties of the built environment that could have a wide range of socio-economic implications and, therefore, could be explicitly included in future work.…”

Multiscale Accessibility—A New Perspective of Space Structuration

“…Other studies vary in the element on which the accessibility analysis is based, such as buildings, roads, plots, etc. [125][126][127][128]. Accessibility studies vary in the scale and size of analysis, starting from a limited area of a neighborhood or urban area, moving to a city, metropolitan, or region, and even reaching the national scale [7,[15][16][17][18]117,[129][130][131][132][133].…”

Spatial dynamics of long-term urban retail decline in three transatlantic cities

“…1 Despite these (potentially growing) theoretical shortcomings, the presumption of retailers' discrete decision making to seek locational advantages along lines of agglomeration, centrality and connectivity still holds. Over the past decades, studies continue to demonstrate the correlation between retail location and street centrality and connectivity, either through the Space Syntax definition of the ‘movement economy’ ( Hillier, 1996 ; Hillier & Hanson, 1984 ), or other methods that define the propensity of streets and street segments to attract (pedestrian) traffic, hence retail land use ( Marcus et al, 2018 ; Porta et al, 2006a , Porta et al, 2006b ; Stahle et al, 2003 ). While most of these models have been applied to cities in Europe, Asia and South America, urban scholar Andres Sevtsuk (2014) recently demonstrated that American locations with better accessibility, traffic, and clustering attract more retailers through a self-created land use dataset and street accessibility metrics.…”