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"Urban design"
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Watering our cities
Urban drainage infrastructure is generally designed to rapidly export stormwater away from the urban environment to minimize flood risk created by extensive impervious surface cover. This deficit is resolved by importing high-quality potable water for irrigation. However, cities and towns at times face water restrictions in response to drought and water scarcity. This can exacerbate heating and drying, and promote the development of unfavourable urban climates. The combination of excessive heating driven by urban development, low water availability and future climate change impacts could compromise human health and amenity for urban dwellers. This paper draws on existing literature to demonstrate the potential of Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) to help improve outdoor human thermal comfort in urban areas and support Climate Sensitive Urban Design (CSUD) objectives within the Australian context. WSUD provides a mechanism for retaining water in the urban landscape through stormwater harvesting and reuse while also reducing urban temperatures through enhanced evapotranspiration and surface cooling. Research suggests that WSUD features are broadly capable of lowering temperatures and improving human thermal comfort, and when integrated with vegetation (especially trees) have potential to meet CSUD objectives. However, the degree of benefit (the intensity of cooling and improvements to human thermal comfort) depends on a multitude of factors including local environmental conditions, the design and placement of the systems, and the nature of the surrounding urban landscape. We suggest that WSUD can provide a source of water across Australian urban environments for landscape irrigation and soil moisture replenishment to maximize the urban climatic benefits of existing vegetation and green spaces. WSUD should be implemented strategically into the urban landscape, targeting areas of high heat exposure, with many distributed WSUD features at regular intervals to promote infiltration and evapotranspiration, and maintain tree health.
Journal Article
Leveraging the Opportunities of Wind for Cities through Urban Planning and Design: A PRISMA Review
Wind has been utilized for passive ventilation and mechanical power since antiquity. As an abundant renewable resource, today, wind is increasingly seen as a critical resource to help tackle issues associated with rapid urbanization and climate adaptation and mitigation, such as improving thermal comfort, providing clean energy, improving air quality, and reducing carbon emissions. Despite the growing importance of wind as an invaluable resource for cities, wind in the context of urban planning and design is a relatively understudied area of research. This study aims to explore the means by which cities that can benefit from wind and ways urban planning and design can help deliver these benefits. The study adopts a systematic literature review methodological approach. The findings disclosed that: (a) improving urban wind environment via sound urban planning and design may enhance urban ventilation and energy performance; (b) better urban ventilation and energy performance enable cities to become climate positive or net zero and relieve the urgent climate crisis; (c) wind sensitive urban design is an emerging research area critical to harvest the benefits of wind for cities. This study offers a novel conceptual framework and research directions for wind sensitive urban design and informs urban planning, design policy and practices.
Journal Article
Big ideas for small spaces : creative ideas and 30 projects for balconies, roof gardens, windowsills and terraces
\"Instructions and photographs show how to make 30 easy projects for the garden using inexpensive or found materials. Provides practical solutions to greening a small and otherwise barren area including outer walls, tiny patios, balconies, courtyards, terraces, windowsills and rooftops. Also includes instructions on the basics of gardening\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A configurational approach to analytical urban design: ‘Space syntax’ methodology
Urban design has always been a challenging task and will remain one because of its inherent complexities and the diversity of the issues that are associated with it. A competent, experienced urban designer can use intuitive methods to deal with these complexities and still achieve a good design, but when projects become more complicated and multifaceted the intuition of the designer is not always adequate to ensure a successful design. This article argues that urban design process can be enhanced effectively by analytical methods that are applied at the specific stages of a design process. These methods can impact the inception of the design ideas, evaluate objectively the design outputs at different stages, assist the further development of the design solutions and reduce the risk of failure during the design process or project implementation. The article argues that for these methods to engage with the design process they have to be spatial in nature, as urban design is eventually manifested in a spatial entity. It is further argued that the analysis of space could bridge between space and the ultimate users of the design – or the people – if space is understood through an analysis of its ‘configurational’ properties. Finally, a configurational approach to analytical urban design is introduced, which is based on the theoretical foundations, analytical methods and modelling techniques of
space syntax
. The application of the methods, their role in urban design process and their contribution to urban design projects are all discussed through the review of a selected number of real-life projects.
Journal Article
Optimization of Urban-Scale Sustainable Energy Strategies to Improve Citizens’ Health
Sustainable energy strategies have been a critical subject for sustainable development, especially in cities. Citizens, as an integral part of the urban environment, play a significant role in urban spaces, as does their health. An accurate understanding of citizens’ mental, social, and physical health in urban settings is required to design and plan better cities. This study aims to assess the level of alignment with health factors in Mahabad, a major medium-sized city in Iran. Previous studies indicate that the built environment can influence health dimensions. Health factors depend to a great extent on how well the environment is formed and how it is put together. This research is a descriptive, analytical, cross-sectional study that analyzes the environment’s psychological elements and physical and mental health factors of Mahabad’s citizens. According to the Cochran model, 384 questionnaires were distributed among households. For data analysis, SPSS 12 and Arc GIS software were used. The main results of this research show that five factors, “Environmental quality”, “Identity and social relationships”, and “Readability”, have the most impact on the physical and mental health of citizens (respondents). These issues are much more pronounced in the downtown neighborhoods. This study showed that urban experts can understand different levels of public health by knowing the historical, social, cultural, and economic factors and characteristics. The result will help decision makers, city authorities, designers, and urban planners to be more informed about citizens’ health and the ways to improve it.
Journal Article
Urban horticulture : ecology, landscape, and agriculture
\"Urban Horticulture, referring to the study and cultivation of vegetation in built environments, is gaining more attention as the world rapidly urbanizes and cities expand. While plants have been grown in urban areas for millennia, it is now recognized that they not only provide food, ornament, and recreation, but also supply invaluable ecological services that help mitigate potentially negative impacts of urban ecosystems, and thus increase the livability of cities. This new compendium, Urban Horticulture: Ecology, Landscape and Agriculture, provides background on key issues in this growing field. The first section introduces ecological landscaping, providing a holistic framework for understanding urban landscapes and horticultural practices, both ornamental and agricultural. The complexity of the field is further illustrated by two different approaches to sustainable ornamental landscape design. The second section examines urban soil and water and their essential roles in regulating and supporting horticultural ecosystem services on which urban populations depend. The third part focuses on pollination, and the importance of urban areas and horticultural practice to this vital service. The fourth section concerns the often overlooked area of domestic gardens and their influence on urban horticulture, and employs community gardens to explore the multi-faceted educational experience they provide, and its adaptability to other socio-ecological contexts. The editor, an experienced multidisciplinary urban planning and policy researcher, has selected studies that will be essential to urban planners, horticulturalists, and residents of cities, as well for all those interested in enhancing urban living through horticulture.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Towards an Informal Turn in the Built Environment Education: Informality and Urban Design Pedagogy
Informal urbanism, ranging from informal settlements to trading and transport, has become integral, but not limited, to the ways in which cities of the global South work. At stake here is the role of the built environment professions in responding to informal urbanism where a poor understanding of the complexities of informality can lead to poor design interventions. Providing a better understanding of how forms of informality work is then a key task for the built environment education, which arguably falls short in this regard. With a particular focus on urban design, we suggest that it is critical to move towards an informal turn in the built environment education to address informality and engage with the dynamics of informal urbanism. We first investigate the scope of urban design and then explore the ways in which urban design education can respond to informal urbanism in its curricula by developing an urban design program on informality as an illustration. The suggested approach can be considered as an initial step towards an informal turn in urban design education. We conclude that while urban design alone cannot solve social and economic problems, including poverty and inequality, its capacity to address the complex challenges of urbanization cannot be overlooked. Urban design education cannot remain isolated from the questions of informality anymore.
Journal Article