600 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften
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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.
Urban planners are often challenged with the task of developing design solutions which must meet multiple, and often contradictory, criteria. In this paper, we investigated the trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of the fundamental elements of urban form: the street network and the building massing. Since formal mehods to evaluate urban form from the psychological and social point of view are not readily available, we developed a methodological framework to quantify these criteria as the first contribution in this paper. To evaluate the psychological potential, we conducted a three-tiered empirical study starting from real world environments and then abstracting them to virtual environments. In each context, the implicit (physiological) response and explicit (subjective) response of pedestrians were measured. To quantify the social potential, we developed a street network centrality-based measure of social accessibility.
For the energy potential, we created an energy model to analyze the impact of pure geometric form on the energy demand of the building stock. The second contribution of this work is a method to identify distinct clusters of urban form and, for each, explore the trade-offs between the select design criteria. We applied this method to two case studies identifying nine types of urban form and their respective potential trade-offs, which are directly applicable for the assessment of strategic decisions regarding urban form during the early planning stages.