Public/private urban interfaces: type, adaptation, assemblage

Freeth

Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and

et al. 2018

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.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual engagement with urban street edges: insights using mobile eye-tracking

Freeth

Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and

et al. 2018

“…I define them based on a morphological typology: here, a 'type' does not refer to an 'archetype' that can be replicated in different contexts. Rather, it is shown by a diagram depicting something that works in general while still being geared toward the particularity of each instance [43][44][45]; in such a diagram, the spatial arrangement of shops is able to imply the ways in which a shopping center 1) operates economically and 2) influences the production of urban public life [44]. The 'main street' is largely derived from the 'pedestrian street', where a pedestrian flow is lined by various shops and is centered on a street intersection.…”

Section: Retail Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilient Forms of Shopping Centers Amid the Rise of Online Retailing: Towards the Urban Experience

Rao

2019

Sustainability

The rapid expansion of online retailing has long raised the concern that shops and shopping centers (evolved or planned agglomerations of shops) may be abandoned and thus lead to a depletion of urbanity. Contesting this scenario, I employ the concept of 'retail resilience' to explore the ways in which different material forms of shopping may persist as online retailing proliferates. Through interviews with planning and development professionals in Edmonton (Canada), Melbourne (Australia), Portland (Oregon), and Wuhan (China); field/virtual observations in a wider range of cities; and a morphological analysis of key shopping centers, I find that brick-and-mortar retail space is not going away; rather, it is being increasingly developed into various shopping spaces geared toward the urban experience (a combination of density, mixed uses, and walkability) and may thus be adapted to online retailing. While not all emerging forms of shopping may persist, these diverse changes, experiments, and adaptations of shops and shopping centers can be considered a form of resilience. However, many emerging shopping centers pose a threat to urban public life.

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

“…The latter is important with respect to the quality of public spaces and to an active street life, referring back to Jacobs (1961) 'eyes on the street' concept. Here, the length of the plot frontage is found critical for establishing this relation (Alonso de Andrade et al, 2018;Dovey et al, 2017;Dovey and Wood, 2015). Plot frontage length is frequently measured as frontage-to-depth ratio (Dovey et al, 2017;Sevstuk et al, 2016); this is relevant for rectangular plots but cannot capture the same relation for irregularly shaped plots.…”

Section: Starting Points For Classification: Geometric and Configuratmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards analytical typologies of plot systems: Quantitative profile of five European cities

Bobkova

Pont

Marcus

2019

The importance of the plot (also referred to as 'property') as one of the fundamental elements of urban form is well recognized within the field of urban morphology. Despite the fact that it is often described as the basic element in the pattern of land divisions, which are essential as organizational frameworks for urban form, studies offering comprehensive descriptions and classifications of plot systems are quite scant. The aim of the paper is to introduce a classification of plot systems into typologies based on five European cities, in order to distinguish particular spatial differences and similarities in terms of their plot structure. The proposed typologies are developed using unsupervised k-means cluster analysis based on numeric attributes derived from central theories in urban morphology. The introduced typologies are essentially configurational, allowing collective systematic properties of plot systems to be captured. Numeric attributes include plot differentiation (or plot size), plot frontage and compactness ratio, corresponding to essential qualities of plot systems such as the capacity to carry differences in space, the ability to operate as interface between street and building and providing a framework for evolution of built form over time. All three attributes are translated into configurational measures in order to capture the context of the plot system, rather than the parameters of individual plots. The combination of these deductively defined variables with algorithmically defined classification methods results in seven plot types that can be used to scale up traditional urban morphological analysis to whole city regions and conduct substantial comparison of patterns within, but also between these regions. Further, it also makes it possible to describe commonly recognized plot patterns and discover new ones.