Design Of Urban Environment Research Articles

Point of Decision Design to Address Adolescent Overweight and Obesity.

This study aims to utilize the point of decision design framework to understand how, where, and why adolescents and families make decisions about diet and physical activity and to explore how modifications to the environment can help to promote healthier choices and reduce obesity. Child and adolescent obesity is a critical public health problem. As environmental factors are a primary contributor, understanding the role of design in our surrounding environment highlights an important area of interdisciplinary study. Design strategies have been used successfully to increase stair use and reduce sedentary behavior and can be used to further promote healthier diet and activity choices among adolescents and families. We leveraged the human-centered design-thinking process through (1) qualitative interviews and survey instruments, (2) persona and prompt development, and (3) a design workshop with multidisciplinary stakeholders. Five personas were developed from the qualitative data and used in a design-thinking workshop. During the workshop, participants generated 12 influential factors and nine points of decision which were used to generate 33 solutions spanning the design continuum (from information and policy design to the design of urban, architectural, and interior environments) aimed at improving nutrition and physical activity among adolescents. Additionally, a tool kit was prototyped, which includes interview guides, a persona framework, and a workshop facilitation guide. Our novel process led to the generation of design solutions that can be implemented to expand and improve upon existing interventions for childhood obesity and create environments that encourage positive health outcomes.

Evidence of environmental urban design parameters that increase and reduce sense of place in Barcelona (Spain)

Urban planning design considers sense of place attributed to the environment because it is important to quality of life and influences citizen support for planning proposals. In this paper, the physical and geographic characteristics that increase and decrease levels of sense of place were analyzed. Mediation effects of prior expectations and belief in urban legends attributed to specific environments were controlled for. A total of 1727 residents from 10 different districts of the city of Barcelona participated. Empirical urban parameters were measured for each district (e.g., hectares of parks and rate of streets with noise above 60 dB) and the weight with which they predicted levels of sense of place was objectively quantified. Perceived quality of life and residents' positive expectations of green spaces were measured also. Structural equation modeling (SEM) assessed theory relating green environments to sense of place and tested which urban elements had a detrimental effect. When including the mediating effects of prior expectations and perceived quality of life, urban parameters related to green spaces predicted increases in sense of place between 11% and 40%. Decibels, pedestrian streets, and the number of police arrests predicted systematic reductions in sense of place between 18% and 20%. Accordingly, the authors proposed two urban models of positive and negative feedback on sense of place. Application of these will improve urban planning by enhancing decision making efficacy.

Planning and Designing Natural and Urban Environments with an Adaptive Visualization Framework: The Case of Pazhou Island, Guangzhou, Pearl River Delta

In the planning and design of natural and urban environments, visualization plays an increasingly important role. It has become a core component of communication and dissemination within the various formats of project representation, environmental assessment, workshops, and stakeholder involvement in general. However, as a practical technology, the outputs of our visualizations are, too often, regarded as a static product rather than as a living and evolving tool in and of itself, often due to the inherent restrictions present in both the analog and digital technologies used in data curation and visualization creation. In this paper, we argue that with the increasing complexity and usability of digital technologies, we are now capable of bringing a heightened level of interactive dynamism to planning and design, improving the communicative power of landscape visualization. We introduce a theoretical adaptive visualization (AV) framework, designed to support project meetings and stakeholder interactions with iterative planning and design elements. To demonstrate the merits of the framework, we develop an augmented reality application following AV principles; we discuss the novel design interactions afforded by integrating alongside traditional analog and digital data sources, in an interactive and dynamic application. This is highlighted by a case study from the Pearl River Delta region, with a focus on planning and design for flood risk mitigation.

Sustainable Development for Urban Prosperity in Harmony Between Nature and Architecture

The relationship between nature and architecture is ancient and has differed in different architectural schools or urban cultures in order to achieve urban prosperity. Analysis of the concept of relationship comes through two main concepts: harmony and contradiction developed with the development of the concept of sustainable urban development. This overlap generated new trends in the field of urban design and environmental design together. Hence, the research aims to develop relationships at times in harmony and at times in contradiction according to a range of positive impacts on nature and the environment built on both negativity on the natural environment first, then on human beings secondly, then it examined the effect of one on the other, which appears outwardly, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in opposition, and combines them under the concept of inclusiveness in achieving goals of urban sustainability.

Principles of psychogeography in the urban environment design

The article is devoted to the analysis of the specifics of such a method of studying the urban environment as psychogeography, as well as to the study of the tools of interaction between a person and the urban environment. Attention is paid to the perception of the urban environment by a person, the influence of this environment on the behavior of citizens. The issues of human influence on the formation of the urban environment are touched upon. The aspects of the inclusion of psycho-geographical research in the work of architects and designers are considered.

The wellbeing of adolescents and the role of greenness: A cross-sectional study among Italian students.

Adolescence is a critical period of life, and the level of wellbeing acquired during this stage might have an influence on health status in adulthood. The wellbeing of adolescents is associated with both biological and environmental determinants. To date, few studies have evaluated the effect of exposure to urban green spaces (i.e., greenness) on adolescents' wellbeing. Therefore, the aim of this study is to assess the association between exposure to greenness and the wellbeing of adolescents, accounting for the level of urbanization surrounding schools. In the frame of the 2018 Italian Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC), we analyzed cross-sectional data from the Piedmont Region. Exposure to greenness was quantified by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Schools were geocoded, and a fixed buffer (radius 1,500 m) centered on each school was then built to enable average NDVI calculations. Adolescents' wellbeing was assessed by self-reported psychological, somatic, and psychosomatic health complaints as follows. Respondents were asked how often, in the last 6 months, they had experienced: (a) headache, (b) stomachache, (c) backache, (d) dizziness, (e) feeling low, (f) irritability or bad temper, (g) feeling nervous, and (h) difficulties getting to sleep using the HBSC Symptom Checklist (HBSC-SCL), an eight-item tool. Multivariable, multilevel logistic regression models tested the association between exposure to NDVI and psychosomatic, somatic, and psychological health complaints, one at a time, using schools as a random intercept. In total, 2065 subjects (47.6% girls) aged 11 (48.4%) and 13 (51.6%) years were involved. Greenness was found to be inversely associated with reported psychosomatic (OR 0.72, 95% CI: 0.53-0.98) and psychological health complaints (OR 0.67, 95% CI: 0.49-0.92) in boys only, adjusting for age, urbanization level, and socioeconomic status, and stratifying by gender. Our results support the implementation of future policies for urban environmental design supporting the increase of green spaces, as suggested by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Further studies are needed to confirm our findings.

Impacts of trees-grass area ratio on thermal environment, energy saving, and carbon benefits

Rapid urbanization potentially increases the diversity of building morphological characteristics (e.g., heights), causing urban ecological environment problems, such as urban heat islands, energy loss, and carbon emissions. Greenery (e.g., trees and grasses) can alleviate urban environmental problems, further improving the benefits of cooling effect, energy saving, and carbon emission reduction. With limited land resources, it is significant to effectively combine multiple greeneries and quantitatively optimize the greenery design. This paper designed the trees-grass area ratio (TAR) and explored its effect on the benefits at the community scale. The ranges of 0–90% TARs were considered in the communities as well as three building heights. A low-cost computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method of volumetric source term (VST) was proposed to simulate the thermal environment. Energy performance simulation of buildings was performed. Results indicated that the VST method can reduce computing costs by up to 81% compared with the traditional simulation. Air temperature (T), energy consumption (E), and carbon emission (Ce) decreased with increasing TAR in three types of communities. Carbon sequestration (Cs) linearly increased with increasing TAR. When the TAR was 90%, the maximum reduction of T, E, and Ce were 6 °C, 17.3%, and 20%, respectively. Furthermore, the quantified relationships between TAR, building height, and benefits were proposed. This work can serve as a guideline for the optimal design of urban ecological environment.

Gendered travel behaviour in micromobility? Travel speed and route choice through the lens of intersecting identities

Evidence shows that the use of micromobility vehicles is currently skewed towards young men, who are more likely to adopt risky behaviours, such as fast or aggressive riding. However, research on micromobility travel behaviour founded on GPS data has repeatedly failed to disaggregate findings by gender, or to account for intertwined sociodemographic identities. In this study, we investigate how bike-share cyclists and private e-scooter riders navigate through Barcelona's cycling facilities, and whether intersecting identities (in terms of gender, age and parenthood) influence their performance. Using 911 GPS-tracked trips of 89 participants, we build a multilevel linear mixed effects model that analyses the speed at which cyclists and e-scooter riders travel. The results show that the speed gender gap is particularly salient among e-scooter users, while being almost non-existent among cyclists. The model further indicates that cycling facilities influence riding speed, and that intersecting identities significantly explain how micromobility users circulate through the city. Drawing on theories of performativity and embodiment, we argue that findings pointing to gender differences in travel behaviour might be explained by women's unwillingness to negotiate traffic or tolerate harassment in highly masculinised spaces. These findings contribute to the limited available knowledge on the objective travel behaviour of micromobility users from a gender and intersectional perspective, i.e. recognising the complex way in which multiple forms of discrimination associated with identity combine. We also provide valuable insights into how the design of urban environments and targeted policies can have diverse effects on different micromobility users.

К вопросу комфортной городской среды: социологические аспекты развития (с обращением к кейсу г. Владивостока)

The article contains the author’s generalization of the available research data for the purpose of sociological representation of the urban environment comfort and design tools for its development. The subject of the study is presented as a parameter of socio-spatial development and as a task, the importance of which is articulated at the state level and has its own regulatory, documentary and expert confirmation. The study used methods of content analysis and expert online interviewing of a semi-formalized type. The comfort parameter is shown through a number of target and instrumental components; the conditions for its development are highlighted. Expertly formulated important principles for the development of a comfortable urban environment are as follows: striving for a social balance of interests of the subjects involved; ensuring trust between them; development of the human potential of the city. Digitalization itself and the Smart City concept in particular are neutral tools; their nature and effectiveness depend on what tasks they solve, how they fit into the specifics of certain spaces. A number of related factors and implementation risks are formulated with reference to a specific case; its representativeness to the declared topic is shown. Possible directions for further efforts to address them are noted.

Digital Data and Semantic Simulation—The Survey of the Ruins of the Convent of the Paolotti (12th Century A.D.)

In the presence of architecturally significant ruins, restoring and disseminating the idea of a testimony that has survived the destructive work of time is a cultural and social necessity that the use of advanced methods and tools allows to communicate in a timely and comprehensive manner. The integration of 3D surveying techniques and digital information production and management processes (graphic and alphanumeric, i.e., geometric information) makes it possible to put in place multifaceted and effective strategies. The article aims at describing the process of data acquisition (using applied photogrammetry) of the remains of a medieval cloister located on the outskirts of ancient Oppido Mamertina (RC, Italy). The use of the acquired point cloud, cleaned and optimised, made it possible to extract suitable orthophotos from which to derive the matrix profiles of the vaulted roof system. The information organisation of the model, which can be queried on time despite the generic level of detail, leads us to meditate on the change taking place in the field of documentation for urban environmental design and maintenance.

Integrating multiple models into computational fluid dynamics for fine three-dimensional simulation of urban waterfront wind environments: A case study in Hangzhou, China

A comfortable wind environment in urban waterfront area (UWA) is critical to improving the quality of life of surrounding residents and environment sustainability. In this study, the porous media model was combined with the water–air interface exchange model to conduct high-precision three-dimensional (3D) simulation of the ventilation environment at an urban waterfront. The results of this study indicate that the accuracy of the proposed model is as high as 95%. This model can be used to efficiently simulate urban ventilation and pedestrian wind environment comfort at different heights (1.5, 10, and 30 m) in a certain high-density 3D UWA. The order of ventilation potential of different types of urban areas is road space, green space, and river space. In summer, the pedestrian wind environment around the Gongshu section of the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal was discovered to have low comfort at a height of 1.5 m. In winter, the wind comfort of the UWA on both sides of the canal is greatly affected by the direction of incoming wind, showing satisfactory ventilation performance when reaching heights of 10 and 30m. Accurate and efficient 3D simulation of urban ventilation is very helpful for adaptive planning and design of urban wind environment.

A Decision Support Toolkit for the Design of Children-Oriented Urban Outdoor Learning Environments

Urban rapid development has created poor open spaces and fewer outdoor learning environments for children. This issue highlights the quality design of urban public and open spaces that can significantly help children’s healthy growth and development. The urban plaza is one of the potential urban open spaces that positively affect the development of talent and creativity in children and develop their physical, social, emotional, and cognitive skills. As public art is an encouraging landscape medium, integrating public art in urban plazas can aid substantially in achieving this goal. The lack of a decision support tool for designing inclusive learning environments at urban plazas has persuaded us to develop the children-oriented urban plaza design (COUP) Toolkit. The COUP Toolkit is a universal tool that can aid design professionals and children’s therapists in assessing and evaluating the impact of urban plaza design on children’s skills growth. By applying the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method, it was found that the Urban Oasis type of urban plaza contributes the most to skills development in children (WAlt.3 = 0.336), compared to other types (i.e., street plaza, corporate foyer, transit foyer, street, and grand public place). The COUP toolkit has 14 features for designing the urban plazas embedding the public art. Applying AHP indicated that performance art (W2.2 = 0.106), interactive instrument art (W2.3 = 0.106), and spatial composition (W1.1 = 0.103) are most vital in the design of a children-oriented urban plaza. The COUP toolkit was validated through a case study, the Musical Swings (i.e., 21 Balancoires) urban plaza in Montreal, Canada. The COUP toolkit is a rating system and proposes four grading labels based on the scores earned during the assessment process: gold, silver, bronze, and not-certified. The COUP toolkit determined that Musical Swings is ranked as silver; hence, it needs minor improvements, particularly in providing fountains (WSMC2.5 = 0.57) and wading pools (WSMC2.6 = 0.60) to create a proper learning environment for children.

Possible correlation between nighttime lighting data and building height

This study examined whether nighttime light can be a proxy for building height. It is important for estimating an urban environment and urban design and understanding industrial clusters. However, it is necessary to purchase height data for a wide range of buildings, and it is difficult to obtain data in a time series. In this study, we examined whether it is possible to estimate the height of buildings using nighttime light data. This research focuses on the fact that as the number of windows increases, the amount of light leaking from the windows during the night increases for the entire building. This increases the amount of light emitted by the building. We conducted the first Japanese correlation analysis using a three-dimensional dataset with a resolution of 1 meter that was released by Hyogo Prefecture on 10 January 2020. We also used nighttime light data from the Suomi NPP satellite, which has been in operation since 2011 and is jointly managed by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. The percentage of land occupied by buildings within a 450-meter square of a nighttime light resolution was varied to obtain a higher correlation between buildings and nighttime light. The correlation between the average height of buildings and the luminous intensity of nighttime light within that pixel was calculated. The coefficient of determination was 0.425, which was the best value when the percentage of land occupied by buildings in a pixel was between 70 and 80%. This study found a high correlation between night light and building height. We believe that if a building has a certain size, the night light can be used as a proxy. The results of our research will contribute to understanding the changes and characteristics of urban development and population distribution as urbanization progresses in various regions. Rapid public transportation services, education, and environmental improvement will contribute to urban development and changes in population distribution, which will greatly relieve urban poverty and improve urban security and the environment.

Fusion Development of Public Art and Urban Environment Design Based on Wireless Sensor Data Fusion

Driven by the market economy, the city’s infrastructure has been continuously improved, and the living standards of the people have been continuously improved. The need for the integrated development of public art and urban environmental design has become one of the important tasks in the entire urban construction work. However, in the integrated development, public art and urban environment, as two subjects, have different development histories and complex influencing factors. Combining this information for effective analysis is a computationally and processing intensive task. This paper uses the data fusion method in wireless sensors to study the fusion development of public art and urban environment design and understand the historical development and various characteristics of public art and urban environment design. And we apply it in fusion analysis experiments, use wireless sensors for information collection, use data fusion methods for analysis, and compare with traditional methods. The experimental results show that the wireless sensor data fusion method is used in the research of the fusion development of public art and urban environment design. The average value of associated fusion degree reaches 84.08% and the average value of balanced fusion degree reaches 80.60%, which has certain effectiveness. Popularizing it in the current stage of urban construction can highlight the city’s personality and style and enhance the city’s cultural taste and modern cultural atmosphere.

Wearable Sensor and Its Application in Urban Landscape Design

In order to meet the needs of people for the environment, physical, and psychological needs and to improve the characteristics of local areas, this paper proposes an urban environment measurement method based on wearable sensors. This method mainly relies on the previous questionnaire and tests the wearable sensor physiological data, subjective feelings, scoring tables, interviews, and other experimental methods in the psychological experimental environment. The recognition rate without adding association features was 93.3%, while the recognition rate of adding association features to individual test set verification reached 94.1%, an increase of about 1%. In this paper, naive Bayes and associated feature classification are used to effectively solve the influence of personal subjective factors and make up for the error of measurement data. The wearable sensor can achieve better results in the application of urban environmental measurement and can also be better applied in urban environmental landscape design, providing more effective data for urban landscape design.

What is the sodium and trans-fat content in popular street and takeaway food in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

Street food is part of the Eastern European gastronomy, but there is a knowledge gap on food availability and nutritional composition. The aim was to investigate the street and takeaway food availability and nutritional composition in Sarajevo and Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Street food and takeaway food vending sites were included. Information on vending sites’ characteristics and food availability, and samples of the most commonly available foods were collected (Sarajevo: 80 homemade; 39 industrial, Banja Luka: 80 homemade; 40 industrial), for chemical analysis (total fat, lipid profile, sodium and potassium). Among the vending sites selling food other than fruit (98.3 %), 40.9 % were selling only industrial foods (snacks, biscuits and sweet pastries, ice-cream, chocolate), while 52.7 % were selling only homemade foods (savoury pastries, main dishes, cakes, biscuits and sweet pastries, sandwiches, bread, snacks) and 6.3 %, both. Homemade foods presented higher total fat (16.6 vs. 10.1 g/serving, p < 0.001), sodium (603 vs. 187 mg/serving, p < 0.001) and potassium content (168 vs. 110 mg/serving, p < 0.001), compared to industrial foods. Homemade cake presented the highest mean trans-fat content (2.32 g/serving), whereas homemade beefburger presented the highest mean sodium content (3838 mg/serving). In sum, in urban Bosnia and Herzegovina, commonly available street and takeaway foods, particularly homemade, were high in total fat, saturated, trans-fat and sodium. These findings call for the design of healthier urban food environments.

Urban design as a specialised, evidence-based, coordinated educational and professional endeavour

Urban environments are complex, impacting on climate change, social justice and health globally and locally. Their spatial, social, economic, environmental dimensions are interlinked and must be studied from a complexity viewpoint. Yet, whilst complexity has successfully entered urban scholarship and practice in many fields, urban form, a key component of urban environments, is not yet studied in these terms and consequently they are not yet designed as complex. This paper argues that the discipline of urban design should be (re)defined as the understanding and design of urban environments as places of organised complexity. It can become the discipline best placed to manage a useful global overview of sustainable placemaking. It does so by tracing urban design's historical relationships and attitudes towards the evolution of the city, contrasting definitions of complexity in science, with the deterministic way in which the early urban design practitioners viewed design. It then looks at urban design's relationship with other design professions in the UK and suggest its lack of clarity and efficiency is an enduring consequence of this historic trajectory. Finally, it proposes urban design as the discipline concerned with the understanding and design of complex-adaptive urban environments and advocate its establishment as an independent profession.

Urban environment and health behaviours in children from six European countries.

Urban environmental design is increasingly considered influential for health and wellbeing, but evidence is mostly based on adults and single exposure studies. We evaluated the association between a wide range of urban environment characteristics and health behaviours in childhood. We estimated exposure to 32 urban environment characteristics (related to the built environment, traffic, and natural spaces) for home and school addresses of 1,581 children aged 6-11years from six European cohorts. We collected information on health behaviours including total amount of overall moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, physical activity outside school hours, active transport, sedentary behaviours and sleep duration, and developed patterns of behaviours with principal component analysis. We used an exposure-wide association study to screen all exposure-outcome associations, and the deletion-substitution-addition algorithm to build a final multi-exposure model. In multi-exposure models, green spaces (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, NDVI) were positively associated with active transport, and inversely associated with sedentary time (22.71min/day less (95%CI -39.90, -5.51) per interquartile range increase in NDVI). Residence in densely built areas was associated with more physical activity and less sedentary time, and densely populated areas with less physical activity outside school hours and more sedentary time. Presence of a major road was associated with lower sleep duration (-4.80min/day (95%CI -9.11, -0.48); compared with no major road). Results for the behavioural patterns were similar. This multicohort study suggests that areas with more vegetation, more building density, less population density and without major roads are associated with improved health behaviours in childhood.

Ландшафтный дизайн: особенности проектирования общественных пространств городской среды

The article discusses the features of landscape design in cities of northern latitudes on the example of the development of the project of the alley &amp;quot;Puzzle&amp;quot; in the city of Nizhnevartovsk (Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Russia). Analog projects of urban environment design are analyzed. The concept of the project, its ideological basis, which would correspond to the style and fit into the atmosphere of the city, is revealed; stylistic solutions (minimalism) and spatial composition of the alley &amp;quot;Puzzle&amp;quot; are described; techniques of landscaping are revealed.

The multidimensionality of urban nature: The well-being and integration of immigrants in Finland

Activities in natural environments greatly enhance human well-being and can support the integration of foreigners into a new country. This article explores how residents from different ethnic backgrounds in Turku, Finland appreciated and engaged with urban natural environments and how this engagement benefitted their well-being and, ultimately, their integration. Individuals enjoy activities in nature in particular ways, which may vary according to a person’s physical, social, and psychological characteristics. This is especially true for immigrants who apply traditions from their home countries to the ways in which they interact with their new environment and enjoy activities in nature. Three dimensions of nature experience—social, emotional, and normative—emerged from the research, which, in turn, supported well-being and different types of integration: interactive, identificational, and cognitive. We argue that because these dimensions are an integral part of a person’s identity and cultural background, familiarity with them may prove pivotal to constructing more welcoming and intercultural urban natural environments. Different approaches to engaging with nature should be considered in the design of urban environments and urban nature, as well as in integration programmes, to enhance the well-being and integration of foreign-background populations.