Walking in Urban Areas What makes the difference

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Walking in Urban AreasWhat makes the difference?

• Anzir Boodoo

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Contents

• Walking and car free living
• Walking and city life
• Walking and space
• Walking and sense
• Connecting walking to urban form
• Aims
• Research Questions
• Method
• What should this achieve?

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Walking and car free living

• A car free living environment should allow good
  accessibility on foot, for example to local shops
  or public transport services
• More generally, modal shift from the car to
  public transport and walking needs a walking
  environment that people feel comfortable in
• various built environment features, such as
  street width, block length, sidewalk width, the
  presence of sidewalk buffers, etc, may create an
  environment that is judged to be 'comfortable.
  (Alfonzoa, 2008)

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Walking and city life

• A lot of work has connected walking and the
  quality of urban life. Some of this comes from
  the psychogeography (Evans, 2008) and
  flâneurial (stroller) traditions (Binns, 2008
  de Certeau, 1984) which focus on the experience
  of being within the city
• The experience of city life has also influenced
  Jan Gehl (1999) and others, although this tends
  to be a more European tradition
• The New Urbanist tradition (Baran, 2008
  Erenhalt, 2008 Katz, 1994) values close walking
  distances highly

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Walking and space

• Walking is a movement through space, the points
  we pass through connect physical cartesian
  space to perceptual space
• Space Syntax deals with movement through space
  and can predict locations where more pedestrians
  will be found, at better connected points on the
  street network (Hillier, 2004 2008)

Ruth Conroy Dalton
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Walking and sense

• Walking differs from other modes of transport by
  direct interaction between the pedestrian and
  their environment (Gehl, 1999)
• Researchers have used the ideas of sensewalking,
  capturing what people feel and sense during a
  walk (Adams, 2008 Clark, 2008)
• Nold (2008) used GPS units to record walking
  routes, and measured galvanic skin response along
  the route to indicate arousal (good and bad)

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Connecting walking to urban form

• There have been a large number of studies looking
  at the connections between urban form and walking
  (Cervero, 2002)
• Much US research focuses on New Urbanist
  neighbourhoods, a reaction to sprawling car based
  suburbs involving Neo Traditional Development
  (Ewing Cervero, 2002)
• Modelling the urban environment has frequently
  resulted in problems of multicollinearity as
  aspects of urban form tend to vary together
• Other studies have used Pedestrian Environment
  Factors (Greenwald Boarnet, 2002) or Level of
  Service measures (Muraleetharan Hagiwara, 2007
  Tight et al., 2004), which involve some
  subjective judgement in the allocation of
  categories
• Many studies have focused on number of walking
  trips
• This study aims to use less subjective measures
  of urban form and more subjective measures of
  human interaction

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Proposed study

• Aims
• To produce a language for describing urban form
• To explore the connections between the physical
  nature of urban form and how people perceive it
• To assess the current orthodoxy relating to
  walkable environments

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Research Questions

• How does the nature of the urban environment
  affect the perceptions of pedestrians?
• What do ordinary people consider important about
  walkable environments?
• Is the New Urbanist philosophy appropriate for
  the UK (it has influenced guidance such as The
  Manual for Streets (DfT et al., 2007)
• Does the accepted wisdom on walkability
  resonate with how people perceive their
  environment?

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Method

• Urban form analysis
• Identification of Urban Structural Units (Osmond,
  2006)
• Grouping of units into a taxonomy reflecting key
  areas of similiarity
• Space Syntax (determining levels of integration
  of the street network and how this affects
  walking (Baran, 2008 Hillier, 2004)
• Determination of walking routes (including areas
  of high and low integration)

OpenStreetMap
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• Walking interviews
• Group based commented circuits (cf. Tahrani,
  2008 Tight et al., 2004) featuring first
  experts (eg planners) then ordinary people
• Group scenario should foster debate
• Tagging of comments to location to compare with
  physical properties (cf. Nold, 2008)

Christian Nold
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What should this achieve?

• Identify the connections between perceived
  space and real or cartesian space (cf. de
  Certeau, 1984)
• Overlay subjective properties (thoughts
  feelings) onto objective properties of urban form
  (Urban Structural Units, Syntactical Integration
  etc.)
• Improve understanding of the connections between
  urban form and perception

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References

• Adams, M. (2008). Sensory urbanism Sensewalking
  as a methodological device. Researching Social
  Relations in urban environments, ESRC Workshop
• Alfonzoa, M., Boarnet, M. G., Day, K., Mcmillan,
  T., and Anderson, C. L. (2008). The relationship
  of neighbourhood built environment features and
  adult parents walking. Journal of Urban Design,
  13(1)2951.
• Baran, P. K., Rodrìguez, D. A., and Khattak,
  A. J. (2008). Space syntax and walking in a new
  urbanist and suburban neighbourhoods. Journal of
  Urban Design, 13(1)528.
• Binns, L. (2007). Regeneration and the cultural
  quarter A flâneurs tour. Approaching the city.
  RGS-IBG Urban Geography Group.
• Cervero, R. (2002). Built environments and mode
  choice toward a normative framework.
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• Clark, A. (2008). Understanding community Mobile
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• de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday
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  91110. University of California Press.
• DfT, DCLG, and WAG (2007). Manual for Streets.
  Thomas Telford.
• Erenhalt, A. (2008). The walkability revival.
  Governing. http//www.governing.com/articles/0802a
  ssess.htm , Accessed 1 February 2008
• Evans, A. (2008). Psychogeography the next 50
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• Ewing, R. and Cervero, R. (2002). Travel and the
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• Gehl, J. (1999). Walking A mode of transport
  -but much more, Walk21 Conference
• Greenwald, M. and Boarnet, M. G. (2002). Built
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• Hillier, B. (2004). Space is the machine. Space
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• Hillier, B. (2008). Spatial sustainability
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• Katz, P. (1994). The New Urbanism Toward and
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• Muraleetharan, T. and Hagiwara, T. (2007).
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• Nold, C. (2008). Describing place. volume
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• Osmond, P. (2006). Morphological classification
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• Tahrani, S. and Moreau, G. (2008). Integration of
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• Tight, M., Hodgson, F., and Page, M. (2004).
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