Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

For centuries, landscape architects, architects, and urban planners have been designing outdoor green spaces for one to contemplate. In today’s urban realm, we can understand a contemplative space more specifically as one joining esthetic and environmental values with mental health benefits for its visitors. So far, the concept of contemplativeness of a space has not been operationalized and a definitive list of design principles of such a space has not been developed. In response to this gap of knowledge, we have identified a set of features that may be used in order to design and create a space of contemplation within seven categories: Landscape Layers, Landform, Vegetation, Light and Color, Compatibility, Archetypal Elements, and a Character of Peace and Silence. The developed framework is based on development and analysis of a Contemplative Landscape Questionnaire. This instrument was developed based on literature review and Delphi expert evaluation of multiple landscapes. The statistical tests on the Contemplative Landscape Questionnaire revealed satisfactory reliability and validity measures, which provided evidence-based support for the efficacy of designed spaces. This approach could enhance the practice of landscape architects and urban designers by reinforcing intuition-based designs with scientific evidence. The developed framework can also serve to identify contemplative spaces for subsequent research purposes.

Many empirical studies assessing the economic benefits of urban green space have continually documented that green space tends to increase both value and sale price of nearby residential properties. Previous studies, however, have not fully captured the quality of neighborhood level landscape spatial patterns on housing prices. To fill this literature gap, this study examined the association between landscape spatial patterns of urban green spaces and single-family home sale transactions using a spatial regression model. The research was conducted through the analysis of 11,326 housing transaction records from 2010 to 2012 in Austin, TX, USA. Variables measuring the structural, locational and neighborhood characteristics of housing were coupled with Geographic Information Systems, remote sensing and FRAGSTATS to calculate several landscape indices measuring the quality of existing landscape spatial patterns. After controlling for any spatial autocorrelation effects, we found that that larger tree and urban forest areas surrounding single-family homes positively contributed to property values, while more fragmented, isolated and irregularly shaped landscape spatial patterns resulted in the inverse. The results of this research increase awareness of the role of urban green spaces while informing community design/planning practices about the linkages between landscape spatial structure and economic benefits.

The Traditional Chinese Private Garden is a historically and socially significant landscape type that features multiple complex planning elements. Whereas there are many different examples of Traditional Chinese Private Gardens, the small gardens of Suzhou make up a distinct subset. This paper describes a method for mathematically capturing and then parametrically generating, new instances of what might be called the small ‘Suzhou type’, which features some of the same social and cognitive spatial properties as the historic cases. The research commences with a mathematical analysis of three historic Suzhou Traditional Chinese Private Gardens before using connectivity graphs to investigate their properties. Mathematical measurements derived from the Traditional Chinese Private Gardens are then used as rules for a parametric system to generate new instances of the Suzhou type. In the paper, three new Suzhou type connectivity and spatio-typological systems are generated and tested against the properties of the historic cases. Through this process, the paper demonstrates a method for capturing distinct social and cognitive properties in a parametric system and thereby derives possible new insights into these important heritage sites. This method may also be applied to the analysis and generation of different spatial types.

This paper presents a hybrid approach that selectively merges aspects of both the theories of Shape Grammar and Space Syntax to investigate spatial design patterns. The paper describes the development of a generic Justified Plan Graph (g-JPG) grammar. This grammatically nuanced, syntactically derived approach is then demonstrated through a more specific JPG (s-JPG) grammar to identify spatial design patterns in the rural domestic architecture of Glenn Murcutt. The results are then discussed in terms of Murcutt's architecture from four perspectives: grammatical transformation of syntax, epistemological questions, similarity or disparity and finally in terms of JPG variations. The findings of this paper suggest that the combined analytic approach facilitates the exploration of both the grammatical and syntactical genotypes of sets of architectural designs.

From Ebenezer Howard’s concept of garden cities to visions of the sustainable development of ecocities, people have engaged in numerous attempts to curb hazards of residential environments and excessive capitalized development resulting from mass industrialization. However, many countries have adopted widely used green building assessment tools to conduct neighborhood sustainability assessment of ecocities. An ecocommunity assessment tool of Taiwan was established according to current green building policies, the content of which focuses on technological aspects rather than on the closely correlated social and economic aspects within ecocities. To thoroughly review neighborhood sustainability assessment tools, this study conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of internationally renowned assessment tools and tools used in developed Asian countries. This study concluded that (a) a number of countries have proposed neighborhood sustainability assessment tools that strongly emphasize resource and energy categories but neglect economic development; (b) the neighborhood sustainability assessment tools in Asia possess special characteristics; and (c) indicators of neighborhood sustainability assessment tools must enable mutual links and public participation.

A description grammar, in conjunction with a shape grammar, serves to generate verbal descriptions of designs, next to the spatial descriptions. These verbal descriptions can also assist in guiding the generative process. This paper presents a general notation for descriptions and description rules that accounts, extensively if not entirely, for many of the applications of description grammars found in literature. Specifically, a review of the notation with respect to these description schemes supports the explication of its strengths and limitations and the identification of future work. A follow-up paper revisits selected applications of description grammars and demonstrates the applicability of this general notation to these case studies.

A description grammar, in conjunction with a shape grammar, serves to generate verbal descriptions of designs, next to the spatial descriptions. These verbal descriptions can also assist in guiding the generative process. This paper revisits applications of description grammars found in literature and demonstrates how they can be recast and redeveloped to make use of a general notation and implementation for description grammars. The review of this notation was the topic of a previous paper; this paper is both meant as an illustration and as a confirmation of those review analysis results.

Urban development cannot proceed without the commitment of multiple actors, because decision-making processes have become more and more interdependent. This article supports better decision-making in brownfield redevelopment projects in cases where the project realization depends on a public–private partnership between a municipality and a developer. In a broader sense, in this research, we investigate how the negotiation process in brownfield redevelopment projects can be improved by providing an understanding of the characteristics of a brownfield area and the interaction between the parties involved. In order to improve the process, a negotiation decision model is proposed. This is a hybrid model consisting of five phases. Its novelty lies in the combination of a latent class model and a strategic choice model that can be formulated as a prescriptive-interactive approach in decision theory. The hybrid negotiation model is applied to a reconstructed case study in order to present its possibilities. Accordingly, three applications of the model are introduced, and in each application the beneficiary is a municipality. Although using decision models for brownfield redevelopment projects has already been thoroughly studied, there is little evidence concerning the prescriptive-interactive component built into existing models.

This article highlights the importance for urban planning, of the under-researched notion of superstar destinations. Furthermore, it presents and compares destination choice models that generate a convex demand for destination quality, and thereby explain and predict the existence of so-called superstar destinations. When compared to their competition, superstar destinations are much more popular than differences in quality between the superstar and other destinations would suggest at first sight. Although convexity of demand for quality is a known precondition for the existence of superstars, it remains unclear what mechanism might cause this imperfect substitution between different quality levels. The article proposes several choice models that generate a convexity of demand for quality, thereby paving the way for (modelling) the existence of superstar destinations. These models are compared using numerical simulations, which show that each of the proposed models has the potential to generate superstar effects, although for most models the effect decreases for larger choice sets. Results suggest that including reference-dependency into choice models helps overcome this potential limitation, as it leads to superstar effects for larger choice sets typically encountered in real life destination choice situations.

At European level, the different methodologies used for the classification of urban areas rely on the spatial allocation of population to 1 km² grid cells, failing therefore to identify small-sized settlements that play an important role in urban systems mostly composed by small towns, such as the Portuguese. This paper reports the development of alternative methodologies which overcome the problem stated, successfully enabling the automated recognition and delimitation of small-sized urban settlements – the prime goal of this work.

Two alternative methodologies (A and B) were developed and later compared. The settlements identified by A are clusters of census tracts, previously classified using an urban–rural typology proposed by the authors. In B an adaptation of the Urban Morphological Zones methodology published by the European Environment Agency was used, whereby settlements are clusters of specific Land Use/Land Cover classes combined with the urbanised areas defined by Municipal Master Plans.