Walkability Compass—A Space Syntax Solution for Comparative Studies

Abstract

The ongoing discourse on air quality and climate changes positions walkability as a pivotal point of sustainable urban planning. Urban studies examine a city’s walkability in terms of pedestrian flows, design qualities, and street network topology, leaving walkability comparative frameworks under development. Building on the space syntax theory, this research introduces a “walkability compass”, a four spatial indicator-designed tool for city walkability assessment and comparison. The tools are being tested on eight Baltic region cities: Vilnius, Kaunas (LT), Malmö (SE), Riga (LV), Tallinn (ES), Gdansk, Bialystok, Lublin (PL). The nine-step method framework integrates four indexes: Gravity (Gr), Reach (Re), Straightness (St), and Population density (Pop). The “walkability compass” results reveal significant Re and St correlations; thus, visual and cultural aspects become the main factors in pedestrian-friendly cities. The spatial pattern typology has matched similar cities (Malmö and Kaunas) to work closely on sustainable urban planning development. In all case studies, specific walkability zones were mapped, but the Gr zones turned out to be the most compact ones (the Z-score of Gr was ranged from 355.4 to 584; other indexes oscillated between 209.4 and 542.6). The walkability mapping results are publicly shared via WebMap to stimulate the participatory discussion on case studies cities further development.

Pedestrian Accessibility Assessment Using Spatial and Network Analysis: A Case of Sofia City

“…It was considered vital to start with the network in order to gain more understanding of the movement in the city. This understanding could be further developed in a comparison between not just neighbourhoods but cities (Zaleckis, K., Chmielewski, S., Kamicaityt, J., Grazuleviciute-Vileniske, I., Lipinska, H., 2022).…”

Exploring walkability research trends based on systematic literature review (SLR) by applying PRISMA

“…Lastly, the thematic analysis is also used to analyze the walkability studies, which is mainly a qualitative approach. The findings of walkability studies of the existing research are generally aimed to have contribution or implication on planning and design practices and policies for urban designers (Fonseca et al, 2022a(Fonseca et al, , 2022bKoohsari et al, 2021aKoohsari et al, , 2021bBari and Tekel, 2022;Gao et al, 2022), architects (Koohsari et al, 2021a(Koohsari et al, , 2021b, urban planners (Qazimirsaeed et al, 2022;Zaleckis et al, 2022), engineers (Gao et al, 2022) and policymakers (Nakamura, 2021;Pajares et al, 2021;Kwon and Akar, 2022;Kunaratnam et al, 2022;Bayar and Yilmaz, 2022), in relation to the built environment that could encourage walking to promote active mobility (Pajares et al, 2021), street vitality (Wangbao, 2022), livable street (Lee, 2021) and health communities (Sylvers et al, 2022;Yang et al, 2022). The conceptualization of walkability as shown on Figure 5.…”

“…based on SLR methods such as space syntax (Yuan et al, 2022;Zaleckis et al, 2022), GIS (e.g., Zaleckis et al, 2022), empirical Bayesian kriging (EBK), urban network analysis (UNA) (Yang et al, 2022), QGIS (Manzolli et al, 2021;Santilli et al, 2021), machine learning technique (e.g., deep learning (DL) (Yuan et al, 2022) and virtual reality (VR) (Nakamura, 2021). Furthermore, physical audit data collection includes an established instrument including the walkability index (Kwon and Akar, 2022), Neighborhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS) (Herbolsheimer et al, 2021), International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) (Hsieh and Chuang, 2021) and personal activity such as the daily travel data (Kwon and Akar, 2022).…”

“…, 2022), architects (Koohsari et al ., 2021a, 2021b), urban planners (Qazimirsaeed et al. , 2022; Zaleckis et al. , 2022), engineers (Gao et al.…”

“…, 2022), followed by map-based approach (e.g., OpenStreetMap (OSM)) that then is analyzed by applying spatial/mapping/modeling methods such as space syntax (Yuan et al. , 2022; Zaleckis et al. , 2022), GIS (e.g., Zaleckis et al.…”