When planning for the development of an area, be this for its growth, downgrade, or simply for the rationalization of its current state, GIS tools are very useful in that they can offer an effective representation of the interaction between socio, economic and physical factors.The Community Potential Analysis is an example of such GIS tools, and includes both an evaluative and a propositional dimension.

Download the full pdf document:cpa

Sergio has been invited to speak at the “Les rencontres de la Ville” seminar in Paris  on September 29th 2011 (download the Programme). His lecture, entitled “Comment penser la place des services dans le fonctionnement de l’espace urbain?” has been recorded in video and is available here: LINK TO VIDEO along with those by Jean-Francois Revah and Charles Rojzman. Sergio’s talk is in Italian, translated in French.

Ref: Gimenez, J. Amabile, L. Graham, S. (2011) Barras: and experiement, Working Papers of the Urban Design Studies Unit at University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK.

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Ombretta delivered the keynote speech entitled “Planning for change. A question of scales, tools and responsibilities” at the IAPS International Network Symposium held in Daegu, Korea, on October 10th 2011.

The University of Sheffield, The University of Strathclyde and the University of West of Scotland are pleased to announce that the 22nd IAPS Conference entitled, Human Experience in the Natural and Built Environment: Implications for Research Policy and Practice, will take place at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow from the 24^th to the 29^thJune 2012.

In accordance with the IAPS mission, the Conference will explore human behavior and experience in both the built and natural environments and will focus on the relationship between research, practice and policy and how this can significantly impact on socially and environmentally sustainable development.

The Conference intends to achieve its main goal by tracing and recording development in research, identifying future research strategies, and critically strengthening research links with professional practice and policy making. This will be done within three themes: Geography and Context (urbanisation and planning in developed and developing countries); Planning, Design and Evaluation in Human Environments; Policy Implementation and Management.

In exploring the inter-relationships between research, policy and practice, the Conference seeks to address questions such as when, how and why should these areas come together? By addressing these questions theConference aims to highlight the importance of multi-disciplinary research and critical thinking, the potential impact of environment-behaviour research on policy and practice and future areas for collaboration and implementation of expertise.

The Conference will also feature a jointly organised thematic event with the Council for European Urbanism: ‘Evidence-based Design: a promising new basis for progress on real changes in the built environment.’  Please stay tuned for more details.

Ref: Porta, S. Da Fontoura Costa, L. Morello, E. Viana, M., Strano, E. Venerandi, A. Romice, O. (2011), Plot-Based-Urbanism and Urban Morphometrics: Measuring the Evolution of Blocks, Street Fronts and Plots in Cities, Working Papers of the Urban Design Studies Unit at University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK.

Download the Urban Morphometrics paper.

Generative urban design has been always conceived as a creation-centered process, i.e. a process mainly concerned with the creation phase of a spatial transformation. We argue that, though the way we create a space is important, how that space evolves in time is ways more important when it comes to providing livable places gifted by identity and sense of attachment. We are presenting in this paper this idea and its major consequences for urban design under the title of “Plot-Based Urbanism”. We will argue that however, in order for a place to be adaptable in time, the right structure must be provided “by design” from the outset. We conceive urban design as the activity aimed at designing that structure. The force that shapes (has always shaped) the adaptability in time of livable urban places is the restless activity of ordinary people doing their own ordinary business, a kind of participation to the common good, which has hardly been acknowledged as such, that we term “informal participation”. Investigating what spatial components belong to the spatial structure and how they relate to each other is of crucial importance for urban design and that is the scope of our research. In this paper a methodology to represent and measure form-related properties of streets, blocks, plots and buildings in cities is presented. Several dozens of urban blocks of different historic formation in Milan (IT) and Glasgow (UK) are surveyed and analyzed. Effort is posed to identify those spatial properties that are shared by clusters of cases in history and therefore constitute the set of spatial relationships that determine the morphological identity of places. To do so, we investigate the analogy that links the evolution of urban form as a cultural construct to that of living organisms, outlining a conceptual framework of reference for the further investigation of “the DNA of places”. In this sense, we identify in the year 1950 the nominal watershed that marks the first “speciation” in urban history and we find that factors of location/centrality, scale and street permeability are the main drivers of that transition towards the entirely new urban forms of contemporary cities.

Ref: Porta, S. Romice, O. (2010), Plot-Based Urbanism: Towards Time-Consciousness in Place-Making, Working Papers of the Urban Design Studies Unit at University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK.

Download Plot-Based Urbanism.

Some of us have recently argued that what we still miss is the serious consideration of the factor of time in urbanism, or, in other words, a deeper “time conscious” approach (Thwaites, Porta, Romice, & Greaves, 2008). Inevitably, that means focusing on change as the essential dynamic of evolution in the built environment, which in turn leads to re-addressing concepts like control, self-organization and community participation. After time and change have been finally firmly placed at the centre stage, the whole discipline of urban planning and design, its conceptual equipment as well as its operational toolbox, reveals its weaknesses under a new light and calls for the construction of a different scenario.

This paper poses the problem of this scenario in disciplinary terms, it argues about its premises and outlines its essential features. The scope of this paper is not to deliver a comprehensive model for a new approach to urban planning and design, but to set the right framework and rise the right questions so that we can start thinking of issues such as urban regeneration, informal settlements and massive urbanization, community participation and representation, beauty and humanity in space, in a different way.

The paper examines the geography of three street centrality indices and their correlationswith various types of economic activities in Barcelona, Spain. The focus is onwhat type of street centrality (closeness, betweenness and straightness) is moreclosely associated with which type of economic activity (primary and secondary).Centralities are calculated purely on the street network by using a multiple centralityassessment model, and a kernel density estimation method is applied to both streetcentralities and economic activities to permit correlation analysis between them.Results indicate that street centralities are correlated with the location of economicactivities and that the correlations are higher with secondary than primary activities.The research suggests that, in urban planning, central urban arterials should be conceivedas the cores, not the borders, of neighborhoods.

We made it. It seemed impossible, but we made it. Doing it better than last year looked really difficult, as the students’ feedback was excellent after our Govan course in 2009-2010. And here we go, This is our students’ feedback 2010-2011, which refers to our course at the Barras. After all, it is not great surprise, as this year we have benefited from exceptional circumstances, including the extraordinary commitment of a bunch of local organizations and stakeholder which allowed us to organize an on-site, hands-on real learning experience for our students. And, above all, we have had exceptionally motivated and brilliant students. Thanks to all these fantastic people, again: we will never forget it.

And here we have the results (see our internal survey):

- The learning experience has been rated “excellent” by the 77% of respondent students; the remaining 23% rated it “very good”.

- Descriptors and Assignments have been rated “excellent” by the 91% of respondents.

- Staff performance has been rated “Excellent” or “very good” by the 95% of respondents.

Isn’t this stunning? Of course it is, but that is not all. This year, we improved our feedback procedure by running a National Student Survey (NSS)-like exercise. We therefore included in a questionnaire the same 22 questions that constitute the NSS. Here you see the results. One above all: guess how many students felt fully confident to report being “satisfied with the quality of the course”? Well, all of them. A bold 100%. Which is bad news of course. Why? Well, we can only get worse next year (believe it?).

Michael Mehaffy will lecture on “SUSTAINABLE URBAN FORM: The Modern Structure of Walkable Cities”. The lecture will take place at Department of Architecture of University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, on Tuesday May 10th at 6.00pm. The event, partnered by Glasgow City Council and the Sustainable Glasgow Initiative, will be opened by the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Professor Scott MacGregor, and introduced by Richard Billingham of Sustainable Glasgow Initiative.

“Sustainability” is a dangerously vague term.  At its heart it is the common-sense idea that we should be able to carry on developing a prosperous and healthy civilisation, free of decline or calamity.  But in practice, we are learning that we must certainly not “carry on” as usual. To meet the challenges of the future, we must change our ways of doing business.  And we must begin to be very concrete about what that means.

Increasingly, the challenges of the future will play out in cities, where increasing numbers of the Earth’s population now live.  New evidence shows that the form in which we build and rebuild cities plays a much larger role than we had realized in resource use, carbon emissions and other “metrics” of sustainability.   Michael Mehaffy’s work at the University of Strathclyde is focussed upon one aspect of this problem, the crucial interface between the scale of vehicular mobility (like that of cars, lorries and trains) and the scale of pedestrian activity within a neighborhood.  This work carries important practical consequences for the design of viable streets and neighbourhoods.

In his lecture, Mehaffy will draw comparisons to a number of cities around the world that are seeking to restore the balance between the scale of the pedestrian and that of the vehicle.  One of these will be his home town of Portland, Oregon, where he works with the Portland Sustainability Institute.  He will consider lessons for the City of Glasgow and the work of its new Sustainable Glasgow initiative, on which he is collaborating.

The list of invited speaker includes:

• Dr. Marc Barthélemy Institute of Theoretical Physics, CEA, Saclay, France.
• Prof. Andy Adamatzky and Jeff Jones International Group for Unconventional Computing, University of West England, UK.
• Prof. Michael Batty CASA Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College of London, UK.
• Prof. Vito Latora Complex Systems Laboratory, University of Catania , Catania, Italy.
• Prof. David Levinson NEXUS Economics and Urban Systems Research Group,Department of Civil Engineering and Networks, University of Minnesota,USA.
• Prof. Luciano Da Fontoura Costa Institute of Physics Sao Carlos, San Paolo University, Sao Paolo, Brazil.
• Prof. Ernesto Estrada ICCS, Institute of Complex Systems at Strathclyde and Department of Mathematics and Department of Physics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK.
• Dr. Marc Durand Laboratoire Matiere Systemes Complexes, University Paris Diderot, Paris, France.

ECTN Workshop will address problems associated with the evolution of complex transportation systems. While the main focus of the workshop is on urban systems, contributions from other fields, such as physics and biology are also extremely welcome, because of the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of the questions we want to be addressed! It is now clear that describing and understanding the growth of transportation systems is one of big scientific challenges for the next years and this workshop will contribute to define the common advances and future challenges across a multidisciplinary area of knowledge.

Transportation networks play a fundamental role for the organization of natural, technological and cultural systems. The form and the properties of a number of systems are intrinsically linked with their underlying transportation networks: the growth of cities is shaped by their streets pretty much in the same way as the growth of organisms depends on the existence of a well developed circulatory or transportation system.

Emanuele is showing off his work on network configuration and biking habits at Mobil.TUM 2011 in Munich, DE, on April 7-8 2011. His talk, entitled “The contribution of urban form in encouraging everyday walking and cycling in English cities” is the product of a joint effort with Tim Jones aimed at understanding the impact of street network configuration on the habits of inhabitants in their everyday life over a number of cases at the scale of the neighborhood.

Michael Mehaffy is going to start a one-year collaboration with UDSU supported by the Sir David Anderson Bequest Fund

The Urban Design Studies Unit at Department of Architecture has secured funding from the Sir David Anderson Bequest Fund to support Michael Mehaffy’s one-year collaboration on issues of sustainable urban design theory, practice and education. The Fund is aimed at supporting “the field of science and technology … to invite distinguished persons preferably from corresponding institutions on the continent of Europe or failing that America to visit the University…to take an active part in the teaching and/or research”.

The project matches the SDA contribution with support form the Faculty of Engineering and the Department of Architecture to ensure Michael’s work on a programme of 6+6 months starting on Jan 15th 2011, during which he will:

- Substantially contribute to studies of urban morphology by finalizing ongoing work on the “400mts rule”, an evidence-based theory of evolutionary urban form.

- Expand the international profile of the MSc in Urban Design by organizing an international workshop and seminars as integrated part of the course experience.

- `Finalize the proposal for a new, distance learning based, Higher Programme in Urbanism especially oriented to attract international and part-time students.

Michael Mehaffy is an internationally prominent researcher in the relation of urban morphology to climate change and sustainability, and the emerging set of urban design tools known as “sustainable urbanism,” “morphogenetic design” and “evidence-based design.” He is also a well-respected inter-disciplinary scholar integrating work in complexity science, urban design, philosophy of science and other fields. His leading stature in the field was recognized when he was invited to present a paper at last year’s International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen, a briefing session for the Copenhagen treaty negotiations. In November of this year he was invited to present a paper on urban morphology and its impacts at the prestigious Athens Dialogues on Culture and Civilization, an interdisciplinary forum sponsored by the Onassis Foundation in partnership with the Universities of Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and others. Michael’s cross-sector background has contributed to his leading expertise in emerging new models of design theory, integrated with new insights of evolutionary biology and other fields like computer and network sciences. Michael is one of the closest collaborators with the design pioneer Christopher Alexander, where he has helped to develop new approaches to pattern languages and morphogenetic design. Michael is the former Director of Education at The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment in London, where he was responsible for creating a new professional education programme in sustainable urban design (now a Masters’ degree programme at the University of Oxford). He was also Coordinator of ESUA/EDUAC (www.esua.org), a pilot project for the creation of a new curriculum in sustainable urban development funded by the European Union’s Leonardo da Vinci Programme. Michael is also a prominent member of the Congress of New Urbanism in the US, an organization that stands at the forefront of innovation in the practice of sustainable urbanism and is noted for its close working relationship with the Obama administration. Michael sits on the editorial boards of three peer-reviewed international journals of Urban Planning and Design, and his 2008 paper for the Journal of Urbanism was reported to be the most downloaded paper in the journal’s history.