2019 June - 27 articles
Research demonstrates that homeless individuals use urban space in adaptive and endemic ways. Investigations at city and neighborhood scales would benefit from attention to homeless use of abandoned housing. We employ the pattern language approach de...
Beauty. Christopher Alexander’s prolific journey in building, writing, and teaching was fueled by a relentless search for Beauty and its meaning. While all around him the world was intent on figuring out how to simplify, Alexander came to embrace com...
Combining multivariable statistics and geostatistics with landscape metrics, we attempted to quantify the spatial pattern of urbanization in the city of Niamey, Niger. Landscape metrics provided local quantification of both landscape composition and...
Traditional methods of counting bicyclists are resource-intensive and generate data with sparse spatial and temporal detail. Previous research suggests big data from crowdsourced fitness apps offer a new source of bicycling data with high spatial and...
Autonomous vehicles will significantly affect mobility conditions in the future. The changes in mobility conditions are expected to have an impact on urban development and, more specifically, on location choices, land use organisation and infrastruct...
Urban sprawl is nowadays a pervasive topic that is subject of a contentious debate among planners and researchers, who still fail to reach consensual solutions. This paper reviews controversies of the sprawl debate and argues that they owe to a failu...
Christopher Alexander published his longest and arguably most philosophical work, The Nature of Order, beginning in 2003. Early criticism assessed that text to be a speculative failure; at best, unrelated to Alexander’s earlier, mathematically...
Participatory action combined interventionist research approaches can offer possibilities for community-based facilities and institutions attempting to re-engage with their communities and assert their presence. St. Cuthbert’s Church is a herit...
Green roofs are important infrastructures to address the effects of climate change in urban areas. However, most studies and applications have been done in cooler and wetter regions of the northern hemisphere. Climate change will lead to more extreme...
Human ecology, a stream of planning, was developed by Park, Burgess, and Hoyt. This theoretical model emphasized mobility and assimilation as natural paths to housing. This essay offers an analysis of its influence on urban theory and policymaking in...
Sustainable development decisions generally require citizen participation in the decision process to avoid public resistance and objections in the long term. Because of the involvement of non-experts, the uncertainty of the decision is increased, and...
African cities are at increasing risk for disasters, including floods. Pikine, Senegal—located on the outskirts of the Dakar metropolitan region—has experienced regular floods since 2005 due to a rising water table, dense settlement, and inadequate d...
As the world’s largest urban regions continue to expand, a concomitant rise in non-communicable diseases, particularly type 2 diabetes, poses an increasingly ominous challenge to experts in the field of public health. Given that the majority of...
Affordable housing is increasingly developed, financed and managed by a mix of state, third-sector, market and community actors. This has led to the emergence of various hybrid governance and finance arrangements. This development can be seen as part...
Understanding human movements in the face of natural disasters is critical for disaster evacuation planning, management, and relief. Despite the clear need for such work, these studies are rare in the literature due to the lack of available data meas...
Residential streets, particularly in automobile-dependent suburban locations, have frequently been perceived as ecologically unsustainable, antisocial, unhealthy, and aesthetically dull from an urban design perspective. However, residential streets c...
Rapid urbanisation all over the world poses a serious question about urban sustainability in relation to food. Urban agriculture can contribute to feeding city dwellers as well as improving metropolitan environments by providing more green space. Aus...
Within the broad field of walkability research, a key area of focus has been the relationship between urban form and capacities for walking. Measures of walkable access can be grouped into two key types: permeability measures that quantify the ease o...
Student mobility is a subject of very in-depth study in the urban sciences in the United States while it is little addressed in the literature on Europe, especially for Mediterranean countries such as Italy. The present paper focuses on Viterbo, a ci...
In recent decades, municipalities around the world have been developing community policies and seeking to apply them in their cities. They use methods for exchanging information and opinions on decisions, policies, plans and strategies and involve an...
To identify and evaluate architect Christopher Alexander’s theory of wholeness, this article draws on the work of British philosopher J.G. Bennett, who developed a conceptual method—what he called systematics—to clarify phenomena by...
Although the importance of urban infrastructure resilience can be inferred, its terminology remains convoluted within the literature due to a lack of systematic review from a sustainable development planning perspective. This review paper was designe...
The 2008 crisis entailed a turning point in the process of creating and managing cities and territories. There has been a change from a city model, based on expansive growth, which was also speculative and deregulated, had provoked an unprecedented e...
A growing body of research has applied intelligent transportation technologies to reduce traffic congestion at signalized intersections. However, most of these studies have not considered the systematic integration of traffic data collection methods...
As more cities adopt bike share systems, questions regarding equity, accessibility, expansion, and bikability arise. Baltimore City implemented bike share in 2016 with plans to expand it up to 57 stations. This paper introduces a new methodology for...
The evolution of urban form is a slow and complex process driven by various factors which influence its pattern of occurrence (time, shape and directions) over time. Given the ever-increasing demand for urban expansion, and its negative effects on tr...
The usage of greenery systems as nature-based solutions to assist in urban cooling in summer time as well as urban warming in wintertime is considered a scientific validated approach in urban planning. The objective of this research is the investigat...
