Abstract
In this article we describe some innovative methods for observing the possible impacts of roads, junctions and pathways (movement infrastructures), on community life in terms of their affordances and hindrances for social connectivity. In seeking to observe these impacts, we combined a range of visualization research methods, based on qualitative points-data mapping, graphic representation and urban morphological analysis at local and global geographic scales. Our overall aim in this study was to develop exploratory methods for combining and visualizing various kinds of data that relate to urban community formations in contrasting urban contexts. We focused our enquiry on the perspectives of adolescents in two urban contexts: Liverpool, UK, and Medellín, Colombia. While they contrast in their geo-political and cultural characteristics, these two cities each present polarized socio-economic inequalities across distinctive spatial patterns. We found that adolescents in these cities offer generally localized, pedestrian perspectives of their local areas, and unique insights into the opportunities and challenges for place-making in their local community spaces. We gathered the communities’ local perspectives through map-making workshops, in which participants used given iconographic symbols to select and weight the social and structural assets that they deemed to be significant features of their community spaces. We then sampled and visualized these selective points data to observe ways in which local community assets relate to infrastructural affordances for movement (in terms of network integration). This analysis was based on the theory and method of Space Syntax, which provides a model of affordances for movement across the urban network over various scales of network configuration. In particular, we sought to determine how city-scale movement infrastructures interact with local-scale infrastructures, and to develop methods for observing ways in which these interactions have positive or negative consequences for community formations.
Highlights
Urban communities take shape in specific spatial contexts, involving complicated interplays of relationships among people and things in the urban environment (Gans, 2002, 2006; Logan, 2012)
The movement infrastructures that connect people and environments include roads, street networks, pathways and junctions across local, urban and regional scales (Batty, 2013; Hillier & Vaughan, 2007; Sampson, Morenoff, & Gannon-Rowley, 2002; Urry, 2002). These scales of movement overlap along street segments, which we see when city-wide traffic convergences on local spaces. This overlapping helps people connect to the city network, and in other contexts it gets in the way of community life
The aims of the research posed a methodological challenge in bringing together an understanding of community perceptions of their local spaces and the spatial dynamics of the wider urban network. We addressed this challenge by gathering community perspectives through participatory workshops, and by using Space Syntax as a theory and method of urban morphological configuration, based on the notion of affordances for ‘natural’ movements across street networks
Summary
Urban communities take shape in specific spatial contexts, involving complicated interplays of relationships among people and things in the urban environment (Gans, 2002, 2006; Logan, 2012). The movement infrastructures that connect people and environments include roads, street networks, pathways and junctions across local, urban and regional scales (Batty, 2013; Hillier & Vaughan, 2007; Sampson, Morenoff, & Gannon-Rowley, 2002; Urry, 2002). These scales of movement overlap along street segments, which we see when city-wide traffic convergences on local spaces. In some contexts, this overlapping helps people connect to the city network, and in other contexts it gets in the way of community life. The social and structural assets from which urban communities are formed are inter-dependent with situated, contextual urban forms (Debertin & Goetz, 2013; Gwyther, 2005; Hillier & Hanson, 1984)
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