Speakers
Description
The university is an educational institution fostered at developing and sharing the human knowledge through a socio-cultural system of physical spaces, services and people. Its long history and diachronic evolution are deeply interconnected with the hosting urban environment, representing an attractor for temporary communities of students, scholars, researchers, professors, with specific needs and habits that activate dedicated networks of urban functions and spaces.
The presence and action of the academic community have activated urban infrastructures related to accommodation, mobility, welfare, leisure, etc. that has extended the physical space of universities out of the institutional buildings, overlaying and interacting with the urban environment.
Thus, the urban dynamics activated by the university as a system result in a continuous negotiation of urban spaces (neighbourhoods, squares and streets, residential or commercial areas, etc.) between residents, public administration, university management and academic temporary citizens.
This project stands on the hypothesis that the integration and interaction between local and temporary communities, with its consequent positive and negative socio-economic side effects, is related to the spatial configuration of universities in the urban environment, affecting, for example, demographic balance, real estate market, overpopulation/depopulation of urban areas.
In fact, the presence and distribution of university buildings and services generate a network of preferred pathways and urban polarities that, working as attractors (Camiz 2017), orient the people movement in the urban space, affecting also its perceived morphology in terms of distances, accessibility, spatial inclusion or segregation.
The methodology proposed here is based on the well known approaches of Space Syntax analysis (Hillier et al., 1993) and it aims at investigating the spatial configuration of urban space considering university polarities as point attractors.
A comparative framework is defined, at a national scale, considering the three main Italian metropolitan areas per number of universities and students (Rome, Milan and Naples) as a relevant sample for the complexity of the interaction between university community and urban environment.
For the scope of this work we consider as point attractors the university buildings along with the external spaces that hosts dedicated services for studying (libraries, study rooms, etc.), sleeping (student housing, accommodations and residencies) and eating (canteens).
The specific methodological steps include i) the collection of available open data on universities and on the urban mobility network (roads, railways, stations, public transportation stops and routes); ii) the identification of significant service areas and pathways for the university community; iii) the Space Syntax analysis, weighted considering the action of point attractors (Turner, 2007).
As a first result, it will be presented an overall integration score of the university in the urban space, and a first comparative evaluation of the selected case studies, with the aim of providing a generalizable methodology and workflow, to be applied to other urban areas.
This may provide urban designers, planners and policymakers with insights on the relation between the university and the city, giving also information for adopting specific strategies to minimize the negative impact of academic community temporariness taking advantage of the university attractiveness.
References
Hillier B, Penn A, Hanson J, Grajewski T, Xu J. (1993) Natural Movement: Or, Configuration and Attraction in Urban Pedestrian Movement. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 20 (1), pp. 29-66.
Camiz, A. (2017) Diachronic transformations of urban routes for the theory of attractors. Proceedings 24th ISUF 2017 - City and Territory in the Globalization Age. Presented at the 24th ISUF 2017 - City and Territory in the Globalization Age, Universitat Politècnica València.
Turner, A. (2007) From Axial to Road-Centre Lines: A New Representation for Space Syntax and a New Model of Route Choice for Transport Network Analysis. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34, pp. 539–555.
| Keywords | university; temporary community; space syntax; spatial segregation; mobility |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
