74 Geographie, Raumordnung, Städtebau
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This dissertation investigates the interactions between urban form, allocation of activities, and pedestrian movement in the context of urban planning. The ability to assess the long-term impact of urban planning decisions on what people do and how they get there is of central importance, with various disciplines addressing this topic. This study focuses on approaches proposed by urban morphologists, urban economists, and transportation planners, each aiming the attention at a different part of the form-activity-movement interaction. Even though there is no doubt about the advantages of these highly focused approaches, it remains unclear what is the cost of ignoring the effect of some interactions while considering others. The general aim of this dissertation is to empirically test the validity of the individual models and quantify the impact of this isolationist approach on their precision and bias.
For this purpose, we propose a joined form-activity-movement interaction model and conduct an empirical study in Weimar, Germany. We estimate how the urban form and activities affect movement as well as how movement and urban form affect activities. By estimating these effects in isolation and simultaneously, we assess the bias of the individual models.
On the one hand, the empirical study results confirm the significance of all interactions suggested by the individual models. On the other hand, we were able to show that when these interactions are estimated in isolation, the resulting predictions are biased. To conclude, we do not question the knowledge brought by transportation planners, urban morphologists, and urban economists. However, we argue that it might be of little use on its own.
We see the relevance of this study as being twofold. On the one hand, we proposed a novel methodological framework for the simultaneous estimation of the form-activity-movement interactions. On the other hand, we provide empirical evidence about the strengths and limitations of current approaches.
INTRODUCTION
The research field of sound landscape and public life, initially drew my attention during the master class of ‘Media of the Urban’, originally ‘Medien des Urbanen, which was given by Prof. Dr. Gabriele Schabacher in the 2015 summer semester. For the relevant class, I conducted an conceptual case study in Istanbul, Beyoglu District, with the intention of analysing the perception of the space by urban sound. During the summer 2015 I recorded various sounds of different spatial settings and developed the analysis by comparing the situations. By that time, I realized the inherent property of the sound as a medium for our perception in urban context.
In the 2015-2016 winter semester, I participated in the master class of the architectural project, named ‘Build Allegory’, which was given by Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Heike Büttner. The project was situated in Berlin Westkreuz, AVUS north curve, on the highway and was originally a race track from 1921. In this context, the aim of my project was to answer various questions, main of which was, how does the architectural form shape the sound of the place? And, how does the sound of the place shape the architectural from? Since the place is still serving mainly to the vehicles, although the function has differed, the sound objects and the context have remained. Through the existence of contextual references, I started with creating a computational tool for analysing the acoustic characteristics of this urban setting, which is fundamentally providing results as the sound cloud, driven from the sound ray tracing method. Regarding to this soundscape analysis method, which I developed, this computational tool assisted me to find an optimum reciprocal relation between architecture and sound.
Since I have been working on soundscape in the context of architecture, urban situations, public life and public space, I was determined to produce a comprehensive research in this field and propound the hypothesis; the existence of the reciprocity between the social behaviours in public space and the sound landscape. In which extent does this reciprocity exist? What are the effects of the public life on the sonic configurations of the space and the other way around?