SPACE IN URBAN

DESIGN
THE ART OF CREATING
GREAT SPACES
•Great public spaces are the living room of the city - the place
where people come together to enjoy the city and each other.
Public spaces make high quality life in the city possible - they
form the stage and backdrop to the drama of life. Public spaces
range from grand central plazas and squares, to small, local
neighborhood parks.
•The combination of beautiful architecture with great public
space creates the most beautiful places to live - places that
express a life of richness and tradition, and act as a setting for life
to happen.
TRADITIONS OF THOUGHT IN URBAN
DESIGN
City Beautiful Movement
•the City Beautiful movement was meant to shape the American urban landscape
in the manner of those in Europe, which were primarily designed in the Beaux-
Arts aesthetic. Burnham especially thought of the movement as a mechanism by
which the United States could establish visible and permanent ties to European
Classical traditions. His opponents, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright among
them, wanted to avoid borrowing from and outright replication of European
design and instead invent a new and truly American style.
•The City Beautiful movement emerged at a time in U.S. history when the
country’s urban population first began to outnumber its rural population. Most
city dwellers perceived that cities were ugly, congested, dirty, and unsafe. As
cities grew—an increasingly rapid condition enhanced by an influx of immigrants
at the end of the 19th century—public space was being usurped. With increased
congestion, city dwellers needed open outdoor areas for recreation as they never
had before. In addition, the chaotic approach to sanitation, pollution, and traffic
found in most big American cities affected rich and poor alike, which is how the
City Beautiful movement gained both financial and social support.
VISUAL ARTISTIC
TRADITION
• The visual-artistic tradition reflects an earlier,
more architectural and narrower
understanding of urban design.
Predominantly product-oriented, it tended to
concentrate on the visual qualities and
aesthetic experience of urban spaces, rather
than the myriad cultural, social, economic,
political, and spatial factors and processes
contributing to successful urban places.
SOCIAL USAGE
TRADITION
• Jarvis contrasts the visual-artistic tradition with the
social usage tradition, which emphasises the way in
which people use space and encompasses issues of
perceptions and sense-of-place. Identifying Kevin
Lynch as a key proponent of this approach, Jarvis
(1980: 58) highlights how Lynch shifted the focus of
urban design in two ways: first, in terms of the
appreciation of the urban environment – rejecting the
notion that this was an exclusive and elitist concern,
Lynch emphasised that pleasure in urban places was a
commonplace experience – and, second, in terms of
the object of study – instead of examining the physical
and material form of urban places, Lynch (1960: 3)
suggested examining people’s perceptions and mental
images.
THE PLACE MAKING
TRADITION
•a place-making tradition of urban design has
emerged – a tradition rooted in large part in
the work of the urban design pioneers.
Synthesising the two earlier traditions,
contemporary urban design is simultaneously
concerned with the design of urban places as
physical/aesthetic entities and as behavioural
settings – that is, with the ‘hard city’ of
buildings and spaces and the ‘soft city’ of
people and activities.
DOCUMENT IN THE CITY- THE
SYSTEM OF DESIGN AND
PROCESS OF PRESENTATION

•Systems design is the process of defining the

architecture, modules, interfaces, and data for
a system to satisfy specified requirements.
Systems design could be seen as the
application of systems theory to product
development.
URBAN
PATTERN
•Cities’ complex interdependences between elements and
systems occur in the three dimensional space. An urban
pattern is the combination of buildings’ density, the
prevailing typology of the road network, i.e. ring, grid or
linear, and the width of the streets in comparison with the
height of the buildings and, finally, the features of the
natural environment, that constraints and in the meantime
provides opportunities for cities’ development.
•The type of urban pattern has decisive implications for
emergency management, and in particular for all activities
related to evacuation, positioning of roadblocks, selection of
areas devoted to locate civil protection and rescuers tracks
and devices. A regular grid, such as that characterizing the
original roman-style settlement can be easily found in
colonial cities, in modern expansion areas such as in Volos
in Greece and sometimes also in ancient towns such as
Turin in Italy. Such regular grid guarantees redundancy in
access ways to almost all point shaped element in cities
and fastest in and out travels. Furthermore, the regular grid
permits to better define areas pertaining to predetermined
emergency centres and to distribute rationally services such
as hospitals, fire brigade stations, etc.
•Circular, round grids are more complicated to manage: redundancy is still
guaranteed but not to all locations, avoiding central nodes is virtually
impossible, congestion is more likely in ordinary times and to be expected
and therefore carefully managed in emergencies.
•Linear cities are those that develop along the coast or important
infrastructures such as roads and railways; they are characterized by the
general absence of significant alternatives in case of transportation routes
failures and by the fact they are easily cut in more parts disconnected
from each other that will need to respond a crisis independently from
each other. This was certainly the case in Kobe, Japan, a rather
emblematic example of linear city, hit by the earthquake in 1995.
•Whilst cities generally present a predominant pattern, there may be also
coexistent patterns, particularly in large metropolitan areas that result
from the aggregation of pre-existing settlements once autonomous and of
newly added development zones.
•Different city patterns require city and disaster managers to adopt
different strategies in deciding the location of critical infrastructures, in
defining self reliant zones and in preparing themselves, other agencies
and citizens for contingencies.
Lorca contains both organic and linear patterns
in its street morphology. The city was organized
on a human scale, and is highly walkable. It
provides a low speed of travel within the
narrow streets and a high speed of travel in the
recently built linear pattern.
The pattern is taken from a residential
section of Istanbul. The area includes a
mono-functional housing development
that does not provide functional
feasibility. However, the distribution of
the streets provides accessibility.
•Volos has a grid street pattern that provides a rapid connection between
distant parts of the city. It is highly accessible. Urban blocks are mixed-use,
combining residential, touristic and commercial activities.
•However consideration cannot be limited to the plan layout: buildings,
transportation networks, services, work activities occur in three-dimensional
space. The relation between the latter needs to be considered also vertically.
In the 18th century for example, scholars and architects were already aware
of the fact that the reciprocal ratio between the height of buildings and width
of streets has important implications in case of earthquakes, determining the
possibility or not of buildings standing at the opposite sides of a street
battering against each other; they were also concerned about the amount of
debris that could layer on the road, provoking its closure and the difficulty to
open it rapidly for search and rescue. We may certainly say that such
relationships are relevant also for other risks, such as floods, in determining
for example the time needed to dry up first floors after inundation.
•The urban pattern in the third dimension also has relevant implications during
emergencies, as it implies the ease of carrying and using cranes if necessary,
of maneuvering fire trucks, etc. In modern times different interventions can be
thought of, provided that such relationships are recognized and related to a
variety of indicators of health, sustainability and safety as for the built
environment, whilst considering appropriate dimensions of emergency cars
and devices to be used in constrained environment.