Impact of the Spatial Configuration of Streets Networks on Urban Growth: A Case Study of Abha City, Saudi Arabia

Ahmed Ali Bindajam,Javed Mallick

doi:10.3390/su12051856

Abstract

The rapid economic growth of Saudi cities after the discovery of oil in 1960 had some disadvantages, the most significant of which was the rapid search for alternatives to urban development and the acceleration of urban growth in its major cities and villages. That contributed to the implementation of certain planning policies based on the heavy use of large-scale vehicles. These policies have been instrumental in increasing horizontal expansion, which has been linked to the increased need to rely on cars as a means of movement and not to adopt public transport such as metro and railways. In this research, one of the main cities in the Asir region, which is the administrative capital of Abha, which has been evaluated and analyzed. Space syntax is an informative theory that stands on the structure of urban graphs. Utilizing syntactic analysis, the impact of highways and arterial roads on the integration and connectivity orientation in the urban structure of the city is analyzed, and the constraints and opportunities for development in the building use map are identified. Resulting in isolated parts of districts with no pedestrian routes to connect them, this methodology allows us to determine the main points in the structure of the city where pedestrian accessibility can be added in order to provide the remedy to overcome the shortage in the city’s network system (i.e., crossovers, tunnels, etc.). In addition, the impact on the human dimension of the living community, the diversity of land use, and real estate financial classifications were discussed, while the principles of sustainable planning were used to enhance the integration of walkability in the built environment, which was the goal of this study.

Highlights

Urban movements of people, and those facilitated by cars, may play a vital role in the heritage planning of historic cities
The spatial distribution of land use/land cover and socio-economic activity in an urban environment has been studied from various perspectives and scales
The spatial patterns of economic activity within the city’s spatial framework and its relative position highlight using classic city models, for example, concentric zones proposed by Burgess [1], sectors by Hoyt [2] and Alonzo’s model [3], as well as more recent models including those by Kropf [4] and Rotem-Mindali [5]

Summary

Introduction

Those facilitated by cars, may play a vital role in the heritage planning of historic cities. If economic activity is analyzed at a higher level—at street level—the layout of the street network plays a vital role From this perspective, in different cities, the association between economic activity and the configuration of the urban street network was addressed, including Berlin [6], Seoul [7], the Rijnland region, the Netherlands [8], Mexico City [9], Bologna [10], Shanghai [11], Baton Rouge, Louisiana [12], London [13], Bandung City, Indonesia [14], Barcelona [15], Chennai [16], Changchun, China [17], Buenos Aires [18] and China [19]. The complexity of cities is commonly accepted, many Middle Eastern cities seem to be more complicated than other cities due to their particular paths of emergence and growth

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