Sense Of Enclosure Research Articles

User-friendly Streets for a Walkable, Liveable and Sustainable Environment: A Review

Streets are an important element of freely accessible public space and constitute the most significant manifestation of the public domain. They exist to cater for the social and leisure requirements of the public and have a positive association with economic development, public physical well-being and help establish an environment of communal bonding. It is therefore crucial that streets are friendly to all users, a public space which provides a liveable environment for pedestrians with a walkable environment that is inviting, safe, aesthetically pleasing, and equipped with sufficient pedestrian amenities. Thus, this paper aims to examine the physical design features and characteristics of user- friendly streets that contribute to a liveable environment. This review of the literature on liveability and user- friendly streets indicates that many factors influence the degree of liveliness and form and finds that the physical design and characteristics like Proportion and dimension, Sense of enclosure, Scale of street, Transparency, Unity and Quality of View. Also finds the qualities of a user-friendly street such as, Comfort and convenient, Safety and security, and Accessibility and linkages. All factors based on the purpose of physical forms and appearances, socio-economic and characteristics of both users and the residents. As such, a well-designed street environment is essential with the streets as ‘public space’ which can enhance their liveable environments in advance.

An Investigation of the Relationship of Streetscape Visual Enclosure and the Pedestrian Movement in Selected Case Studies in Colombo

An Investigation of the Relationship of Streetscape Visual Enclosure and the Pedestrian Movement in Selected Case Studies in Colombo E. G. W. Thamali Edirisinghe, Dr. Chamali Hewawasam Abstract The streets are the most significant urban feature which unlimitedly open for the general public. Pedestrian activities and physical features directly involved in enhancing the quality and level of functionality of the whole city. Planners need to aware of how pedestrians and street uses think about the street and its designs. Only providing walkable amenities such as sidewalks, micro environmental features, street furniture and more other facilities is not enough. Perceptions or experience that feel by the uses also important to create active street in urban area. Sense of enclosure is a fundamental element of urban planning in European countries. In Sri Lanka also there is a trend of creating high rise buildings along the main highways and it creating more enclosed streets. Hence, this study has investigated the relationship of streetscape enclosure & the pedestrian movement in the Sri Lankan context. For the analysis here used the world wide freely available data of google street view images and pedestrian perception survey. For this study, there were three case studies have selected in Colombo District. Findings of research may important to the arrangement of streets, building blocks, vegetation and other vertical elements along the streets to provide pedestrian-friendly enclosed streets and comfortable streets for street uses. Because findings show the significant association between streetscape enclosures by trees, buildings with pedestrian movement. Walkability is a green type transport method. Therefore, to improve the sustainability of city walkability is an important element. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jea.v8n1a2

London’s Street Markets: The Shifting Interiors of Informal Architecture

This paper examines London’s street markets as overlooked sites of consumer modernity, ‘complex interiors’ that were contested and contradictory spaces within the city. It asks whether the street markets can be seen as ‘architecture’, arguing that, despite their outdoor locations, shifting form, and lack of built infrastructure, the street markets achieved a sense of enclosure and interiority through the particular qualities of their lights, sounds and their crowded occupation of space. The street markets produced complexity as a result of their informality, as a-legal and organic outbreaks of micro-entrepreneurship. The paper covers the 1850–1939 period and examines the specific example of Chrisp Street market in Poplar. In the post-war period, this was formalised as Lansbury Market and relocated into a planned market square. It thus usefully casts light back on the earlier period, as an example of what happened when street markets moved from informal to planned status.

Assessing the urban design appropriateness of xiaoqu: the case of Pujiang Town, Shanghai

A liveable neighborhood is the result of a multitude of factors, actors and circumstances, pertaining, among other things, to the built-environment, the socio-political and the economic context, adjusting over time. As in Shanghai numerous new towns are being built, urbanization growth has been researched mainly from a large-scale and quantitative point of view. A discourse on liveability is a necessary step to combine a more qualitative-based approach. This paper deals with the analysis and possible improvements of Shanghai’s peripheral developments, especially focusing on the neighborhood scale in a middle-class context. A contextualization of the new towns’ inception and main issues will provide the necessary background knowledge, and specific attention will be drawn to the Chinese urban typology of the enclosed compound (xiaoqu). One case study will be analyzed—a relocation area in Pujiang Town (south)—investigated through three urban design factors: diversity of uses, walkability, and green and public space. These will highlight the crucial role of a certain mixture of uses and the need of specific architectural typologies to house them; the contradiction between sense of enclosure and social interaction; the mutating nature of public space. Following new 2016 urban guidelines promulgated by the central government, compounds are required to gradually open up their walls and fences; nevertheless the resistance of residences and historical urban models in China will constitute a challenge to the implementation of these guidelines. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sace.21.4.18926

Parking Retrofits within Historic City Centers and the Potential Effects on Their Walkability: A Comparison of San Luis Obispo and Davis, California

Background Automobile parking in cities can have varied effects on walkability depending on approaches used. This is especially true in historic places that have well-established walkable downtowns. This research asks: 1) What approaches to parking retrofits have been undertaken within the two historic towns of San Luis Obispo and Davis California? 2) How have these approaches impacted walkability? Walkability is generally associated with streets that have human scale, sense of enclosure, and buildings that have minimal setbacks from sidewalks. Both cities in this study contain these types of streets in their downtown predominantly. They both have street parking that can have a positive effect on walkability in that cars serve as buffers between people and traffic. Surface parking lots in fronts of buildings are generally seen as detrimental due to automotive intrusions that break pedestrian flow and endanger walkers. Surface lot behind buildings can preserve many of the qualities that enhance walkability. Parking garages are solutions if the first floor of a parking structure contains commercial spaces. Parking garages with ground floor blank walls create unattractive environments for walkers. Methods The historic core of each city was evaluated using aerial photography and on site observations as case studies. Parking retrofits were inventoried and categorized by type along 20 street segments in each city: Street parking only; surface parking – behind buildings; Surface parking 50% of street frontage; Parking garage – retail on ground floor; and, Parking garage only. These segments were evaluated using descriptive analysis and a scoring instrument that objectively measures urban design qualities in terms of their impact on walkability (counts of people, measurements of various elements, etc.). Results All parking categories were present to varying degrees in both cities. San Luis Obispo’s approaches of placing surface parking behind buildings and using a parking garage that incorporates street level retail appears to have a higher correlation with design qualities that promote walkability. Davis showed a higher reliance on surface parking in front of buildings and a parking garage that presents blank walls to the sidewalk. These conditions showed a lower correlation. Conclusions This study compares parking approaches in two similar towns of California. Results suggest that street parking should be used when possible. Garages that place retail or commercial activity on the ground floor is preferred, in terms if limiting intrusions into the pedestrian realm.

Enclosing difference and disruption: assemblage, heterotopia and the cruise ship

The cruise ship is as much a process as an object. Indeed, while the ship appears stable in its material and affective form, this state is maintained only through the interventions of a vast array of human and non-human agencies. The cascading affects flowing from these interactions allow for alternative sociomaterial orders to be established through the suspension and splintering of fixed notions of time and space. This paper brings the theories of heterotopia and assemblage together, through a speculative realist ontology, to explore these temporal and spatial discontinuities, and the way they can create a sense of enclosure amongst passengers on-board. This theoretical approach is utilized to examine articulations of the cruise ship in the self-solicited blog entries of passengers that demonstrate both the mutable and emergent qualities of the ship and the way in which its seeming enclosure is subject to constant disruption. Rather than a static reading of the ship as a heterotopic ‘other space’, we propose that these spatial configurations are vulnerable to entropic forces and unruly agencies that frame the cruise ship as an emerging, rather than realized object, affording it the potential to enact alternative sociomaterial orders.

Discipline and punish: Exploring the application of IFRS 10 and IFRS 12

Abstract This paper uses IFRS 10 and IFRS 12 as a case study to demonstrate how a sense of enclosure, partitioning, hierarchical surveillance and normalising sanction is used to encourage compliance with new accounting prescriptions. Detailed interviews with corporate governance, financial reporting and financial regulatory experts are used to explore the functioning of Foucauldian power in a practical accounting system. Interviewees also reveal how, even if complete Panoptic control over the consolidation accounting space is not achieved, the disciplinary potential of the new standards is sufficient to support the valid expectation of compliance in the eyes of stakeholders and substitute for a loss of trust in the aftermath of corporate scandal and financial crisis.

Soundscape evaluation in a Catholic cathedral and Buddhist temple precincts through social surveys and soundwalks.

Religious precincts in urban spaces have their own religious spatiality formed by their sociocultural and historical background. It is necessary to identify the spatiality of urban religious precincts in their sociocultural contexts because soundscape perception is determined largely by context. In the present study, social surveys and soundwalks were performed in a Catholic cathedral and in Buddhist temple precincts in Seoul. In the surveys, important spatial functions, sound, and visual components of the Catholic cathedral and Buddhist temple precincts were investigated by principal component analysis. The results showed that the cathedral precincts play a more important role in social functions related to mainly visual components than the temple precincts do, whereas the functions for religious activities related to sound elements are more stressed in the temple precincts. In the soundwalk evaluation, contributions of soundscape and landscape components to tranquility in the two religious precincts were explored. It was found that pleasantness of soundscape and attractiveness of landscape significantly affected the perception of tranquility. In addition, it was revealed that a sense of enclosure could enhance tranquility in urban religious precincts.

Dramatic Play Affordances of Natural and Manufactured Outdoor Settings for Preschool-Aged Children

Concern for child wellness has led play professionals to explore natural playscapes as a means to enhance free play and consequently child development. For preschool-aged children, dramatic play is a particularly valuable free play that advances cognitive skills, social skills, and emotional intelligence. This study compared the dramatic play affordances of natural and manufactured outdoor play settings to determine which afford the most dramatic play for preschool-aged children. Twenty-four 3- to 5-year-olds were observed during daily playtime on a “natural playground” and an equipment-based “manufactured playground.” Behavior mapping identified settings that afforded the most solitary dramatic, sociodramatic and complex sociodramatic play. The study suggests that environments designed with child-scale constructive play props, a sense of enclosure, and natural surroundings are more likely to support complex dramatic play. Intentional inclusion of these design elements may afford greater dramatic play in the preschool play yard.

Dramatic Play Affordances of Natural and Manufactured Outdoor Settings for Preschool-Aged Children

Concern for child wellness has led play professionals to explore natural playscapes as a means to enhance free play and consequently child development. For preschool-aged children, dramatic play is a particularly valuable free play that advances cognitive skills, social skills, and emotional intelligence. This study compared the dramatic play affordances of natural and manufactured outdoor play settings to determine which afford the most dramatic play for preschool-aged children. Twenty-four 3- to 5- year-olds were observed during daily playtime on a “natural playground” and an equipment-based “manufactured playground.” Behavior mapping identified settings that afforded the most solitary dramatic, sociodramatic, and complex sociodramatic play. The study suggests that environments designed with child-scale constructive play props, a sense of enclosure, and natural surroundings are more likely to support complex dramatic play. Intentional inclusion of these design elements may afford greater dramatic play in the preschool play yard.

Dorothy Wordsworth's "gratitude to insensate things": Gardening in "The Grasmere Journals"

... am I fanciful when I would extend the obligation of gratitude to insensate things? (WW Letters, 274-75) In this paper, I analyze Dorothy Wordsworth's presentation of nature in the Grasmere Journals from perspectives: wild nature in and around Grasmere and the that Dorothy cultivates at Dove Cottage. Dorothy Wordsworth's attraction to images and objects of refuge in nature--nest-like summer houses, natural bowers in a mountain scene, protected and secluded slips of ground--all reveal her domesticating impulses, her desire to make the un-home-like places and objects of the world homey and welcoming. When she sees a threatening scene, she attempts to find a way to redeem it with an image of protection or hope. similar asethetic operates in the Dorothy nurtured around Dove Cottage. This garden, which came about primarily through Dorothy's imagination and labor is a microcosm of the large drama of gardening history, in which women gardeners embraced spaces when the reigning aesthetics valued the grandeur and sweeping views of the landscape park. Dorothy's commitment to her small orchard and smaller garden (DW, Letters, 295), her diminutive garden-making, was both a financial necessity and an imaginative desire. As William later claimed in the sonnet Nuns fret not at their convent's room, there are advantages to working within a narrow plot of ground--in this case, two or three yards of ground between us and the road.(WW Letters, 275). Two different theoretical works have helped formulate my ideas about Dorothy Wordsworth, nature, and gardening: Gaston Bachclard's The Poetics of Space and John Dixon Hunt's Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory. First published in 1958, Bachclard's phenomenological meditation on what he calls simple images of felicitous space argues that humans are attracted to such spaces of intimacy, memory, and dreams as houses, rooms, nests, shelters, and corners. Bachclard illuminates several of the images in Dorothy Wordsworth's writing, her constant desire to recapture a lost intimacy associated with the safety and comfort of home. Her early imagination is not haunted by the uncanny but obsessed with the homey. And how does Dorothy's fit into the meaning of gardens and their history? In Greater Perfections, Hunt states that Gardens are privileged ... because they are concentrated or perfected forms of place-making (11). For Hunt, the garden, a subset of landscape architecture, is a constructed place that always involved some type of enclosure, even if only the sense of enclosure that is implied by the concentration of effects. As an enclosed (whether literally or suggestively) and constructed space, the involves an interplay of within and without, a preoceupation with the meaning of real and implied boundaries. This interplay is central to Dorothy's version of place-making, which I have called home-making. She yearns for the protection of bench and bower, but is keenly aware of the world outside and of herself and her as objects of interest: A coroneted Landau went by when we were sitting upon the sodded wall. The ladies (evidently Tourists) turned an eye of interest upon our little and cottage (Moorman, 25). Sitting on the wall that she and William have made, the boundary between inside and beyond, Dorothy participates in both worlds at the moment that the pricey (and regal sounding) carriage goes by. She seems not only aware of but also amused by her status as an object of interest. As John Murdoch explained in The Discovery of the Lake District: Northern Arcadia and its Uses, a catalogue from an exhibit at the Victorian & Albert Museum in 1984: Until Humphrey Repton published views of his own house, the Hare Street Cottage, in 1816, the idea that the cottage, especially in a constricted site, close to a road and with other houses pressing in, could be the creation of an aesthetically sophisticated sensibility, was not widespread. …

Behind the School Walls: The School Community in French and English Boarding Schools for Girls, 1810–1867*

This article develops a comparative analysis of lay boarding schools for girls in France and England in the first part of the nineteenth century, demonstrating that the character of school life in the two countries differed markedly. Contemporary observers such as Matthew Arnold, Henry Montucci and Jacques Demogeot visited boys' schools on either side of the Channel and contrasted the “barrack‐life” of lycées in France with the more domestic arrangements of English public schools, but they did not visit the private boarding schools for girls that were multiplying in both England and France in the first half of the nineteenth century. Evidence collected from inspection records, school memoirs and pedagogical treatises, however, reveals differences between female establishments on either side of the Channel that echoed, but were not identical to, the contrasts between English and French boys' schools. Different ideas on the nature and role of women interacted with the separate educational traditions of the two countries to construct two distinct institutional models of female schooling which could be termed “domestic” for England, and “conventual” for France. The article compares female institutions in the two countries to uncover some of the key features of these distinct models of schooling. In highlighting the way ideas about gender shaped school communities, it points to differences in the prevailing conception of femininity on either side of the Channel. English girls' schools tended to be small in size and self‐consciously familial and homely in atmosphere and organization. Many schoolmistresses deliberately limited the number of pupils they would accept in order to preserve the intimate and domestic character of their establishments. This reflects the influence of a conception of femininity emphasizing women's maternal nature and domestic role, and women teachers' need to conform to this ideal in order to preserve their middle‐class status. French schools, by contrast, were more often large, hierarchically organized establishments. Unlike their English counterparts, they tended to be housed in buildings specially adapted as schools. The institutional character of French schools owed much to the educational patterns of convent schooling and to the powerful position occupied by women in religious orders. The differences between these two conceptions of the school affected the conditions of school life and relations between pupils and teachers in concrete ways. In England, schoolmistresses tended to cultivate warm relationships with their pupils, and often characterized their role in maternal terms. Naturally, in practice not all relationships between teachers and their charges were as harmonious as the language of motherhood might suggest, yet at a time when spinsters might be labelled “redundant” or “unnatural”, drawing on a maternal metaphor was one of the ways in which schoolmistresses, who were for the most part unmarried and childless, could reconcile their situation with prevailing ideals of femininity. At the same time, motherhood was the only socially legitimate position through which a woman could exercise authority. In keeping with the familial atmosphere, warm relations between pupils were also encouraged in English girls' schools, and girls often enjoyed considerable liberty in the collective “room of one's own” that school could offer. In France, schoolmistresses tended to maintain more distant relations with their pupils, drawing on the precedents established by women in religious orders to develop authoritative public personae. At the same time, pupils were strictly supervised and attempts were made to limit the intimacy of friendships between schoolgirls. Schoolgirl memoirs are peppered with references to “the school walls” that heightened pupils' sense of enclosure and contained them within a rigid system of discipline and order. In practice, girls at school were often able to establish warm friendships with their peers and to circumvent the rules, yet such intimacies and rebellions went against the grain. The school regulations preserved in the archives evoke strictly ordered days and continual supervision of pupils; they reveal a preoccupation with order and discipline and the same suspicion of female autonomy that Bonnie Smith and Gabrielle Houbre have identified in the work of Catholic educators whose central concern was the preservation of a feminine innocence. The interaction of differing ideas about the nature and role of women with distinct inherited educational traditions and with contrasting ideas about the state's role in education resulted in the construction of two distinct models of female schooling in England and France. The effect was that if, in both countries, the stated aim of the education provided by girls' boarding schools was to educate girls for motherhood, behind the school walls the character of daily life in English and French establishments differed in significant ways. Comparing the structure of schools and experience of schoolmistresses and their pupils in these different institutions highlights the ways in which ideas about gender helped shape the school community and uncovers the roots of the contrasting evolution of female education on either side of the Channel.

Plenary Paper: The Magic Circle of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Plenary PaperThe Magic Circle of Laura Ingalls Wilder Virginia Wolf (bio) Seven years ago I left Kansas, where I grew up some twenty-five or so miles from where the little house on the prairie once stood, to come to Wisconsin, where I now live some twenty-five or so miles from where the little house in the big woods once stood. I was glad to leave the drab plainness of Kansas for the green or white, tree-filled beauty of Wisconsin, and my gladness found expression when I wrote "The Symbolic Center: Little House in the Big Woods." In the first Little House book, Wilder admirably captures my feeling for the Wisconsin landscape, especially for the north woods where every winter I retreat to a rented cabin for a week of skiing and rest. Whenever I have read "The Symbolic Center," however, someone in the audience has inevitably asked me to speak about the parallels between Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. Finally, curiosity led me to reread the second novel, and I came full circle back to Kansas only to discover, as I continued to read the remaining five books about Wilder's growing up, how central the circle is to the meaning and structure of Wilder's series. In "The Symbolic Center," I have, of course, already suggested that in the first Little House book a center for the circle exists in Wilder's synthesis of house and big woods, a vision of harmony arising from the fluid status of oppositions. And I note there that the novel is cyclical, moving from autumn to autumn and from Chapter 1, "Little House in the Big Woods," to Chapter 13, "The Deer in the Wood." Wilder, in other words, uses style and structure to unite the oppositions characteristic of human existence: home and universe, domesticity and wildness, light and dark, big and little, play and work, reality and dream, time and eternity. But the fundamental vehicle for this union is place—the image of a little house in the big woods. What I did not perhaps sufficiently stress in "The Symbolic Center," on the other hand, is that the house is the focal point, the exact center in Wilder's first novel. The primary experience here is one of safety, snugness, and enclosure. The big woods are remote. We are less aware of them than of the little house. They, in fact, contribute to our sense of enclosure, blocking our view of what's distant from the little house and sheltering—even hiding—the little house from foes and strangers. We are, therefore, less aware of the circle than of the center. But when we turn to Little House on the Prairie, the situation is the exact reverse. Our attention is focused on the circle, and the center, paradoxically, becomes a moving house, a covered wagon, or a skeleton house open to the light, air, and danger of the wild, endless prairie. As Dolores Rosenblum points out, Little House on the Prairie is no less visionary than Little House in the Big Woods. Here Wilder focuses on big rather than little, universe rather than home, wildness rather than domesticity. But in both books oppositions are held in tension so that if in the second one we experience what Gaston Bachelard calls "intimate immensity," we might very well say the first one offers immense intimacy. As Little House in the Big Woods nurtures Laura and the reader, then, engendering the bliss of security within, Little House on the Prairie releases them into the universe, evoking the bliss of freedom without. The image of freedom creates the most powerful of Wilder's many magic circles. In her words, "Kansas was an endless flat land covered with tall grass blowing in the wind. Day after day they traveled in Kansas, and saw nothing but rippling grass and the enormous sky. In a perfect circle the sky curved down to the level land, and the wagon was in the circle's exact middle" (13). As Bachelard suggests (Chapter 10), the circle as an archetype is evocative in its capacity to suggest both movement and stasis, security...