Planning Adaptation: Accommodating Complexity in the Built Environment

Obsolescence and vacancy are part of the traditional building life cycle, as tenants leave properties and move to new ones. Flux, a period of uncertainty before the establishment of new direction, can be considered part of building DNA. What is new, due to structural disruptions in the way we work, is the rate and regularity of flux, reflected in obsolescence, vacancy, and impermanent use. Covid-19 has instantly accelerated this disruption. Retail failure has increased with even more consumers moving online. While employees have been working from home, rendering the traditional office building in the central business district, at least temporarily, obsolete. This article reflects on the situation by reporting findings from an 18-month research project into the practice of planning adaptation in the English built environment. Original findings based on interviews with a national sample of local authority planners, combined with an institutional analysis of planning practice since the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, suggest that the discipline of planning in England is struggling with the reality of flux. There is a demand for planning to act faster, due to the speed of change in the built environment, and liberal political concerns with planning regulation. This is reflected in relaxations to permitted development rules and building use categories. However, participants also indicate that there is a concurrent need for the planning system to operate in a more measured way, to plan the nuanced complexity of a built environment no longer striated by singular use categories at the local level. This notion of flux suggests a process of perpetual change, turbulence, and volatility. However, our findings suggest that within this process, there is a temporal dialectic between an accelerating rate of change in the built environment and a concomitant need to plan in a careful way to accommodate adaptation. We situate these findings in a novel reading of the complex adaptive systems literature, arguing that planning practice needs to embrace uncertainty, rather than eradicate it, in order to enable built environment adaptation. These findings are significant because they offer a framework for understanding how successful building adaptation can be enabled in England, moving beyond the negativity associated with the adaptation of buildings in recent years. This is achieved by recognizing the complex interactions involved in the adaptation process between respective stakeholders and offering an insight into how respective scales of planning governance can coexist successfully.

Bus ridership and its determinants in Beijing: A spatial econometric perspective

Understanding the temporal and spatial dynamics and determinants of public transport ridership play an important role in urban planning. Previous studies have focused on exploring the determinants at the station level using global models, or a local model, geographically weighted regression (GWR), which cannot reveal spatial autocorrelation at the global level. This study explores the factors affecting bus ridership considering spatial autocorrelation using the spatial Durbin model (SDM). Taking the community in Beijing as the basic study unit, this study aims to explore the temporal and spatial dynamics of bus ridership and identify its key determinants considering neighboring effects. The results show the following: (1) The temporal dynamics are quite distinct on weekdays and weekends as well as at different time slots of the day. (2) The spatial patterns of bus ridership varied across different time slots, and the hot areas are mainly located near the central business district (CBD), transport hubs, and residential areas. (3) Key determinants of bus ridership varied across weekends and weekdays and varied at different time slots per day. (4) The spatial neighboring effects had been verified. This study provides a common analytical framework for analyzing the spatiotemporal dynamics and determinants of bus ridership at the community level.

Understanding Thai Urban Pedestrian Culture During Noon Break: How Sidewalk Users Experience the Walking Infrastructure in Bangkok, Thailand

The noon break or lunch hour in Bangkok’s central business district (CBD) is when pedestrians wander around for various activities and purposes, in addition to having a meal, within a limited time frame. It is the only break from their daily working routines for energy recovery or socializing, which, in turn, increases readiness to continue working in the afternoon. Commercial activities preferred by pedestrians during this break contribute to increased economic activity. Since pedestrian behavior depends on the cultural context, this research aims to understand Thai urban pedestrian culture that benefits the public, both socially and economically, and to investigate pedestrians’ experience of the physical quality of their walking infrastructure, reflecting their preferences. According to the information gained from observation, a field survey of four hundred thirty observations, and descriptive statistics, the urban pedestrian culture in the CBD of Bangkok is a combination of various activities related to a way of life; 69.4% and 44.9% of observed pedestrians have secondary and tertiary purposes. These multi-purpose trips during lunch hours include having meals, shopping, recovery from work, socializing, and taking care of business or running errands. The routine of lunch outings declined only slightly after the start of the pandemic in early 2020 compared to the pre-pandemic level (81.8% compared to 94.9%). Socializing has strong presence in the culture; 90.5% of group outings occur at least once or twice a week. On the physical side, the walking infrastructure, mainly comprising sidewalks, is used for circulation and as a place for social and economic settings. Using hierarchical cluster analysis, pedestrians’ concerns about the physical environment were divided into five groups, as follows: Cluster 1, people concerned about thermal comfort, surface conditions, and sidewalk obstructions. Cluster 2, people concerned about thermal comfort and walking distance. Cluster 3, people concerned about level changes and walking distance. Cluster 4, people concerned about surface conditions and sidewalk obstructions. Lastly, cluster 5, people concerned about sidewalk obstructions, traffic safety, and level changes. In conclusion. significant problems experienced or causing concern to pedestrians include sidewalk obstructions of flow due to insufficient width of the walking space as well as blockages caused by utility infrastructure, or social or economic activities, walking distance, surface conditions of sidewalks, level changes, thermal comfort, and traffic safety, respectively. These experiences and concerns reflect pedestrians’ preference for better quality of walking infrastructure. Therefore, inducing walkability is a promising physical strategy for promoting and sustaining Thai urban pedestrian culture.

Applying Geographic Information System Methodologies to Estimate the Catchment Area Accessibility of Park-and-Ride Facilities

Park and Ride (P&R) systems play a potentially important role in transportation planning to decrease the undesirable effects of private cars in the Central Business District (CBD). In order to achieve this objective, an essential component to be investigated is the catchment areas of these P&R facilities. However, a limited number of studies have applied the Geographic Information System (GIS) to study the spatial boundary accessibility of the catchment areas of P&R. This study aims to analyze the spatial boundary accessibility of the catchment areas of P&R facilities using three GIS methods. The first method uses geometric shapes to analyze the catchment areas of P&R facilities according to regular shapes, such as parabolas or circles. The market area is the second method used to analyze travel time via the tool ArcGIS Network Analyst to determine the catchment area of P&Rs. Finally, the dynamic accessibility method determines how accessible a facility can be through a study of the spatial boundary accessibility of P&Rs based on the travel time and distance between zones and P&R. The result shows that the static methods identify the spatial boundary accessibility through the calculation of the size of the shape of each P&R separately, while the dynamic method identifies the level of accessibility in detail for all P&R and also the accessibility of each zone to reach a facility. In conclusion, the dynamic accessibility method presents better accuracy than static methods in order to estimate the spatial boundary accessibility of the catchment area of P&Rs.

LAND RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT DECISIONS IN CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT (CBD) OF THE TAMALE METROPOLIS IN GHANA

Tamale Metropolis have been experiencing a significant increase in economic activities especially with the influx of occupation, tertiary institutions, industrial explorations and usage of the town as the main transit route to other parts of the Northern Region and Ghana as a whole. Development of a Central Business District (CBD) has become very crucial for Tamale Metropolis as is seen in other parts of Ghana but this can best occur only depending on Land Resource Development Decisions (LRDD) taken by developers as every Central Business District backbone is on the built environment. This study explored the land resource development decisions in the Tamale Metropolis. The primary data for the study was obtained mainly through interviews with property owners within the Central Business District of Tamale Central. Existing literature both published and unpublished were also secured and reviewed. The study found out that there are more ripped for redevelopment properties than redeveloped properties within the Central Business District of Tamale Central with a source of funding being the major challenge towards redevelopment. Education, occupation and income are key things that were revealed to have a significant influence on the issue of redevelopment decisions within the Central Business District of Tamale. The study recommends that there should be awareness creation on the various aspects of redevelopment to developers within the Tamale Metropolis by the Tamale Metropolitan Assembly, the introduction of a by-law on redevelopment within the CBD of Tamale by the Tamale Metropolitan Assembly Town and Country Planning Department and a special mortgage scheme by mortgage institutions/financial institutions in Ghana to support low-income developers in Tamale Metropolis to contribute to development and redevelopment of the housing industry thereby reducing the housing deficit of Ghana. Keywords: Land, Resource, Development, Redevelopment, Redevelopment Decisions, Central Business District (CBD). Tamale Metropolis, Northern Region, Ghana.

Vehicular Channel Characterization in Urban Environment at 30 GHz considering Overtaking and Traffic Flow

To realize reliable and stable millimeter-wave (mmWave) vehicular wireless communication, the research of vehicular channel characteristics in the dense urban environment is becoming increasingly important. A comprehensive research on the channel characteristics for 30 GHz vehicular communication in the Beijing Central Business District (CBD) scenario is conducted in this paper. The self-developed high-performance ray-tracing (RT) simulator is employed to support intensive simulations. Based on simulation results, the effects of multiantenna and beam switching on the key channel parameters are analyzed, as well as the impact of different traffic flows. The results can provide theoretical and data support for the evaluation of vehicular channel characteristics and will help for the design of the vehicular communication system enabling future intelligent transportation.

Dead Among the Living: Burning Bodies in Inner City Wellington

<p>The architecture of cremation has struggled to embrace an identity; it has remained ambiguous in its architectural typology and religious association since it was first introduced into western society. Additionally, the absence of a ritual place for death in urban life is one manifestation of the contemporary idea that death does not belong in the modern living city. Death is seen as having no place in a society obsessed with youth and vigour; it has become an architectural taboo. The increased reluctance to physically address death as the inevitable consequence to life has resulted in death associated architecture eroding to the point where it has become absent in our everyday lives. With the expansion of Wellington during the 1800’s, cemeteries formerly on the outskirts (Mount and Bolton Streets) became engulfed by the sprawling city. Overflowing with corpses by the 1900’s, these sites now remain dormant, eliminating any opportunity for the public to ‘see’ death daily. Situating a crematorium within a Wellington urban context will not only address this issue, but also successfully meet the demand for more burial spaces, as Makara Cemetery is nearing capacity, and Karori Cemetery is already full. A site located in the ‘dead centre’ of Wellington’s central business district becomes the testing ground for a new urban crematorium – one that aims to reduce the anxiety around death by inclusion of it within people’s everyday lives. It aims to provide mourners with a more meaningful experience, and the general public a cosmopolitan necropolis. The presence of an urban crematorium and columbarium provides continual opportunities for people to reflect on their own mortality, honour and remember the dead, and be reminded to live while they can. A methodological approach of testing architectural sequences in relation to pattern language theory will allow for a thematic progression for mourners from sorrow to acceptance through the use of light, shadow, and sectional arrangements. This investigation into the meaningfulness of relationships between people and buildings, life and death, translates into spaces ready to be further invested with meaning by mourners.</p>