The social logic of space: Buildings and their genotypes

In response to the inadequacy of flood control infrastructures under uncertainties, building community resilience has become a vital concern in modern flood risk management for flood mitigation and recovery options. Relatedly, there has been growing recognition of the importance of community flood resilience measurement, and several tools to measure resilience have been introduced since the turn of this century. However, overall yield from resilience works can be compromised if the measurements do not conform to theoretical basis. By identifying evaluation methodology which takes the multifaceted nature of resilience into account, this study analyzed existing community flood resilience measurement tools. The results show that the importance of assessing and enhancing community competence in flood resilience building is unnoticed by the majority of the analyzed frameworks. Adopting a participatory approach and measurement under uncertainties are overlooked by a significant proportion of the frameworks. Moreover, issues of spatial and temporal interdependencies have received less attention. Consequently, the multi faceted nature of resilience appears inadequately addressed in existing frameworks, and measurements of community flood resilience tend to be inconsistent. The study would support efforts being made to improve consistency and effectiveness community flood resilience measurements and to operationalize the concept of resilience in flood disaster management.

/pdf/community-flood-resilience-assessment-frameworks-a-review-2wgfqq51ma.pdf

Community flood resilience assessment frameworks: a review

Buildings & Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types, Thomas A. Markus. Routledge, San Francisco, CA (1993), 343 + xx pp. £75 Hardback, ISBN: 0415 076 641

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, high-rise buildings could be considered as a hallmark of the contemporary cityscape, and a solution for the continuous urbanisation. 
Many benefits, such as preserving natural and green spaces in the city, and increasing the access to views, light, and air at height could be achieved. However, several impacts of such buildings could affect the social life of residents. The social dimension in recent developments has considerably less attention than economic and environmental 
dimensions. This research aims to develop a method for addressing the social aspect in the design of high-rise residential buildings, which could enhance the social life between neighbours, and improve the well-being qualities, such as privacy and security. 
Computation, as a tool for manipulating ideas, managing design parameters, and solving problems, is adopted to create synergies amongst a community’s cultural, social, and environmental aspects. Currently, the main focus of computational models is primarily limited to building performance, optimisation, and functional requirements. Yet, qualitative factors, such as social, cultural and contextual aspects are also important as they. The study 
aims to offer architects a computational tool that guides the emergence of sustainable solutions for high-rise residential buildings, and leads the building to be in harmony with the context and preferences of users. 
According to social survey conducted by the researcher in the study area, through distributing questionnaires to families from 17 countries, results of 173 responses showed 
that there are lower levels of social interaction between neighbours in contemporary buildings due to the lack of gathering areas. Moreover, the excessive use of glazed facades, and the sudden transition from public to private zones, destructed the privacy of the family and the specifics of the cultural context. On the other hand, the survey exposed potentials and impacts of vernacular houses and neighbourhoods on residents that could have effects 
on social interaction between families and their privacy. Yet, the vernacular model might not be compatible with the requirements of modern constructions while employing the latest technologies and materials. 
The study adopted a critical regionalism approach that creates a balance between tradition and the importance of progress and development. A systematic model of analysis, which combines ‘spatial reasoning’ and ‘space syntax’ methods, was suggested to discover the morphology of vernacular houses and neighbourhoods, and explore spatial topologies that have social or experiential significance. The model added new aspects, such as hierarchy of 
spaces, orientation, type of enclosure, shared surfaces, and geometric properties of spaces, to the justified graph of Hiller and Hanson, as a representation of formal and social realities. 
A total of 13 social indicators, with different units of representation, such as numbers, diagrams, and textual descriptions, were identified, and used to define spatial parameters,rules, and constraints. Results extracted from the analytical process for historical cases showed that courtyards, public spaces, and hierarchy of spaces are major features that have potentials to create a balance between social interaction and privacy. These results were 
combined with principles of shape grammars, and transformed into spatial rules that are associated with parameters and descriptions. 
Grammars that address the design of vernacular houses and neighbourhoods, were combined with requirements of high-rise buildings, and used for the construction of a 
parametric computational tool for the design of vertical residential developments. The developed tool supports the recognition of the design brief for high-rise residential buildings, with the possibility of changing geometric and spatial parameters. Moreover, it offers an alternative method for implementing strategies of social sustainability and maximising the connection with the context, culture, and people. The tool was used by the researcher, in 
addition to professionals and architecture students through an experimental study, to generate different solutions for high-rise residential buildings. The analysis of new 
alternatives showed that most cases achieved successfully principles of social sustainability. 
Moreover, usability evaluation for the tool that assesses the efficiency of the tool in the early stage of the design was conducted through distributing a questionnaire on the same participants. Results of the evaluation process showed that the developed interface offers designers a tool to investigate a class of satisfactory design alternatives that are not expected rather than a single best solution. It gives the user a flexible way to capture the relationship between public and private zones, and insert a series of public courtyards distributed on the different levels of the building, with the possibility of generating a private courtyard inside each apartment. Such a process, which is managed by a set of predefined social and spatial rules, confirming the design process as a balance between creativity and rationality. 
Moreover, it is a transition from standard mass buildings to contemporary-vernacular projects that respect the cultural context, climate, and people.

Towards a socio-spatial parametric grammar for sustainable tall residential buildings in hot-arid regions learning from the vernacular model of the Middle East and North Africa

Purpose




The contribution of neighbourhood structure to residents’ perceptions towards built environment is becoming recognised. Although considerable theoretical evidence exists to support the idea that natural surveillance is related to perceptions of safety, the empirical literature on examining the effect of neighbourhood structure and residents’ attitude towards their neighbourhood on perceptions of safety is limited, especially in developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationships between natural surveillance, perceived disorder, social cohesion and perception of safety in a gated community.




Design/methodology/approach




A total of 250 households from Babolsar, Iran, participated in this study. The structural equation modelling technique was employed to examine the research model.




Findings




The results indicate that natural surveillance is negatively related to disorder and is positively related to social cohesion and perception of safety. The model also shows no significant relationship between social cohesion and perception of safety in the study area. Residents perceived relatively high levels of social cohesion, but their perceptions of safety were moderate.




Originality/value




Findings emphasise the importance of neighbourhood structure and active roles of local communities in enhancing neighbourly relations and perceptions of safety.

Assessing the effect of neighbourhood structure on residents’ perceptions of safety in gated communities: a case study of Iran

As dynamic systems rivers and cities have been in interaction under changing relations over time, and the morphology of many cities has risen through a long and steady struggle between the city functions and the river system flowing inside. This makes river cities an interesting case to study how the presence of geographical features interacts with spatial morphology in the formation of cities. The basis of this research is enabled by utilizing a novel model for cross-city comparison presented by Hillier in his Santiago keynote in 2012 called a “star model”. This is done on large samples of cities investigating concurrent configurations, as well as how the properties in this star model react to specific forms of disturbance. Results illustrate that the foreground network as identified through maximum choice values in cities are more vital to the structure of cities than the bridges. The overall syntactic structure tends to retain its character (degree of distributedness) and the location of its foreground network (which street segments constitute the foreground network) even when bridges are targeted. Furthermore, counter to the initial hypothesis, river cities tend to change less than non-river cities after targeted disturbance of the systems. Finally, the results show that while there is a statistical morphological difference between river cities and non-river cities, this difference is not directly explained through the bridges. Integrating space syntax with statistical and geospatial analysis can throw light on the way in which the properties of city networks and urban structure reflect the relative effect of rivers on the morphology of river cities. The paper, finally, contributes through offering one piece of a better perception of the structure of river-cities that can support strategies of river-cities interaction as well as enhance our knowledge on the constraints and limits to that interaction.

/pdf/rivers-as-integration-devices-in-cities-2860ocjn5b.pdf

Rivers as integration devices in cities

In the wake of climate change and its impact on increasing the number and intensity of floods, adaptability of cities to and resistance against the flood hazard is critical to retain functionality ...

Flood hazard and its impact on the resilience of cities : An accessibility-based approach to amenities in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden

Visibility analysis is one of the key methods in space syntax theory that discusses visual information conveyed to observers from any location in space that is potentially directly visible for the ...

/pdf/visibility-analysis-similarity-and-dissimilarity-in-general-1d2vsj042x.pdf

Visibility Analysis, Similarity and Dissimilarity in General Trends of Building Layouts and their Functions

Flooding is one of the most destructive natural disasters which have rapidly been growing in frequency and intensity all over the world. In this view, assessment of the resilience of the city against such disturbances is of high necessity in order to significantly mitigate the disaster effects of flooding on the city structures and the human lives. The aim of this paper is to develop a method to assess the resilience of a river city (the city of Gothenburg in Sweden), which is prone to flood Hazard, against such disturbances. By simulating flood inundation with different return periods, in the first step, the areas of impact are determined. To assess the resilience, two different methods are followed. One is a syntactic method grounded in the foreground network in space syntax theory and the other is based on measuring accessibility to the essential amenities in the city. In the first method, similarity and sameness parameters are defined to quantitatively measure the syntactic resilience in the city. In the next step, accessibility to amenities and the minimum distance to amenities before and after each disturbance is measured. The results, in general, show that such disturbances affect the city structure and the resilience of the city differently. For instance, the city is more resilient after flooding according to accessibility measures. This clearly means that the answer to the question of resilience is mainly dependent on “resilience of what and for what.”

/pdf/flood-resilient-cities-a-syntactic-and-metric-novel-on-4dcszmip8i.pdf

Flood Resilient Cities: A Syntactic and Metric Novel on Measuring the Resilience of Cities against Flooding, Gothenburg, Sweden

As cities are growing the need for complementary sub centres increases, both in order to distribute amenities and to make resources more accessible for citizens, as well as to relieve the pressure ...

Characterizing urban centres Reading configuration as point, line, field

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