Speaker
Description
While Transit Oriented Development has been a long-standing paradigm in sustainable urbanism, there remains a common disconnect between the specific approaches of transit infrastructure and service planning on the one hand, and the internal design of local neighbourhoods on the other hand. This connect is partly owed to disciplinary barriers and the associated differing professional cultures, leading to an understanding of the initiatives of other disciplines as passive input rather than a call for open-ended, constructive collaboration. Accessibility tools have had some success in overcoming such incompatibilities in planning practice, yet they often originate within the thinking of particular disciplines themselves and subsequently focus on optimising outcomes specific to particular decision making tasks over others.
This contribution conducts an experiment to combine two contrasting accessibility tools representing different (if not unrelated) schools of thought and practice, and test their potential for common, synergistic applications. Space Syntax calculates the to- and through-movement potentials of street and road network in built environments, thus measuring qualities such as spatial and functional integration of infrastructures at different scales including (but not limited to) the suitability of the public realm for active transport, while remaining largely silent on public transport (particularly off-street) and the distribution of land use activities. Spatial Network Analysis for Multimodal Urban Transport Systems (SNAMUTS) is a tool to analyse and visualise public transport network performance in relation to its land use context, taking a metropolitan or region-wide perspective down to the level of activity clusters, but providing insufficient geographical detail for relevant output at the pedestrian scale.
A combination of Space Syntax and SNAMUTS can help planners and decision makers better understand the interfaces of public transport and street-based accessibility in the context of promoting walkability, reducing car dependence and improving the wider economic benefits of urban investment. Alongside case study examples from Amsterdam, Auckland, Barcelona and Oslo, this paper demonstrates the added insight enabled by the co-application of both tools in terms of comparative accessibility performance between cities and over time, the discernment of spatial dynamics specific to each city, and how transdisciplinary policy making can capitalise on these.
References
Curtis C, Scheurer J (2016) Planning for Public Transport Accessibility. An International Sourcebook, Routledge.
Curtis C, Scheurer J (2010) Planning for Sustainable Accessibility: Developing Tools to Aid Discussion and Decision Making. Progress in Planning, 74(2) 53-106
van Nes A (2021a) Spatial configurations and walkability potentials. Measuring urban compactness with space syntax, Sustainability 2021, 13, 5785.
van Nes A (2021b) The Impact of Ring Roads on the Location Pattern of Shops in Town and City Centres. A Space Syntax Approach, Sustainability 2021, 13(7), 3927.
van Nes A, Yamu C (2021) Introduction to Space Syntax in Urban Studies, Springer Nature.
Ye Y, van Nes A (2014) Quantitative tools in urban morphology: Combining space syntax, spacematrix and mixed-use index in a GIS framework, Journal of Urban Morphology, 18 (2) 97-118.
Scheurer J, Woodcock I (2021) The impact of bus network reform on the resilience of Melbourne’s public transport system. 42nd Australasian Transport Research Forum (ATRF), Brisbane (QLD), Dec. 2021
Scheurer J, Curtis C, McLeod S (2017) Spatial Accessibility of Public Transport in Australian Cities: Does it relieve or entrench social and economic inequality? Journal for Transport and Land Use, 10 (1) 911-93
| Keywords | Accessibility tools; public transport; walkability; space syntax; transdisciplinarity |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
