How is an informal transport infrastructure system formed? Towards a spatially explicit conceptual model

Hossein Vahidi,Wanglin Yan

doi:10.1186/s40965-016-0009-9

Abstract

The informal transport infrastructure is an inseparable and critical element of the transportation system in that it provides pedestrian accessibility in planned or unplanned environments. Despite this important role, the informal infrastructure is usually neglected in formal studies, plans, reports or maps. A sophisticated understanding of the different dynamics and mechanisms behind the growth process of the informal infrastructure enables the researchers and practitioners to better plan, conserve and manage open spaces in planned and unplanned environments and helps them predict and manage the growth process of the informal infrastructure in the context of historical cities or informal settlements and model the mutual impacts of infrastructure growth and settlement growth in such areas. In the absence of a holistic spatially and temporally explicit model in the context of GIScience, this research aims to offer an outlook for some of the most important driving forces and aspects of informal infrastructure formation to establish the principal background for developing a spatially explicit, cognitively plausible conceptual model for future research. In this sense, this paper presents a critical review to cover a diverse range of topics in the different disciplines of this area and discuss the theoretical issues on the informal infrastructure formation process to explore, analyze and categorize the role of various human individual and collective-level behaviors and various human and environment interactions in emerging of the self-organizing patterns in the informal infrastructure system.

Highlights

The Organic Transport Infrastructure (i.e., Organic Infrastructure or Trail) system has unplanned and unstructured organic growth
In this paper, some important spatio-temporal aspects of the informal infrastructure formation phenomenon that are necessary for developing a conceptual model of this phenomenon have been reviewed and studied
Reviewing the limited existing literature on this area shows that this topic has not yet received much attention, and further independent studies are needed to clarify the different aspects of the informal infrastructure growth mechanisms

Summary

Introduction

The Organic Transport Infrastructure (i.e., Organic Infrastructure or Trail) system has unplanned and unstructured organic growth. Dynamics and patterns in the formation of an informal infrastructure system An informal infrastructure system is formed as the result of the collaboration of all individuals (i.e., agents) in a group of pedestrians (i.e., social crowd or human crowd) without any centralized control in the environment over time In this term, any single pedestrian is a goaldirected decision-maker that aims to achieve his desired goal by reaching the destination node in the environment of the system. We first consider a flat, obstacle-free and uniform (i.e., unvarying in terms of the walking preferences of pedestrian for traveling on the environment) environment and only focus on understanding and reviewing the collective behavior of single individuals who form the trail system in the Simple and Compound Topology of the origin and destination node(s) as well as the emergent large-scale, self-organized patterns in trail system. Covering or blocking the formed trail (fully or partially) with natural or man-made obstacles such as seasonal floods, swamps, or dams may cause abandonment of the trail (fully or partially) temporarily or permanently

Conclusion

Findings

78. Rajagopal