Street Furniture Research Articles

Sidewalk design in multi-cultural settings: a study of street furniture layout and design

Public space, and all the complexities surrounding its creation and management, continues to be the domain of urban designers. In multi-cultural societies, the users of public space come from a diverse range of social and ethnic backgrounds, each with some unique needs and interests. Because of this, it can be assumed that social, cultural, and economic characteristics of people living in an area should be evident in the design and use of the public spaces. The research reported in this paper identifies the sidewalk design characteristics and furniture arrangements that can foster social activities amongst people from diverse cultural backgrounds. The research followed a mixed, multi-staged methodology. Stage one used structured field observations and surveys of street users. Three suburban centre streets in two New Zealand cities were studied in this way to understand the patterns of usage along their length. Stage two sought people’s preferences for different street design configurations through an on-line survey. The main conclusion from this research is that the seating preferences of different ethnicities are in many ways similar. However, people make specific decisions on where to sit based on the location, orientation and arrangement of seating and how it relates to different land-use activities. The findings confirm that a complex set of factors influence social activity along streets and that, in light of this, designers should become familiar with the diverse needs and expectations of those who make use of the sidewalks.

Fresh and Hardened Properties of 3D High-Strength Printing Concrete and Its Recent Applications

3D printer is the device that quickly produces the models designed on the computer using different materials without the need for a mould. In this study, the properties of the 3D printer developed by Iston and the complementary components such as concrete pump, concrete transmission hose, printer nozzle head which are synchronized with this printer are given. In addition, the mix design of fibre-reinforced and grain size limited high-performance concrete, which is used in this printer, and properties of fresh and hardened concrete are examined. In this context, mechanical properties of casted and printed specimens were compared. In addition, mechanical behaviour of printed samples in different directions was also investigated. Results of both compression and flexural tests show the mechanical properties of the printed specimens differed slightly in directions. When the casted and printed samples are compared, the strength of the casted samples is slightly higher than the printed samples. Although the mechanical properties of the casted and printed samples differed, targeted results were obtained for the strength of the printed samples. In the last part of the study, examples of street furniture produced in 3D printer using white cement mixture for decorative purposes are given. Although there are studies in the literature about 3D concrete printing, there are not any studies on street furniture produced in 3D printer.

A survey of factors affecting the citizen’s behaviors in Mashhad, Iran

This paper attempts to understand affecting attributes associated with behavioral patterns in Mashhad city of Iran. In this regard, video camera tracking, in situ observation, and interactional checklist survey were employed to record citizen’s activities and behaviors. Therefore, the research attempts to recognize the effects of dynamic elements of street furniture, the main land-uses, and the mean concentration of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) on the behavioral issues. Then, a research procedure was made to expose the relationships between citizen’s behavioral issues and their affecting factors using a correlation test. Results revealed that most citizen’s activities in all street locations belong to meeting and talking (33%), walking to enjoy (29%), and seeing and visiting (18%), respectively. Thus, social and optional behaviors were observed as dominant citizen’s manners in the study area with mean values of 43% and 35%, respectively. Statistically, the correlations revealed the significant positive correlations between social behaviors and crowded type of visit (R = 0.58) around the holy shrine of Imam Reza. The social behaviors, affecting by religious motivation, disclose the environmental adaptation and physiological coping against overcrowding, air noises, and pollutant stresses. Hence, the religious motivation in the city center regularly drives the citizen’s social behaviors more than physical elements of space or natural environment. An important recommendation to modify this spatial and social interaction is using a land-use planning approach by separating the inherent missions of the urban system from the pilgrimage function. In this regard, the central district of Mashhad should be considered as pilgrimage activities and their following social behaviors, while all main land-uses should be dispersed through the other districts to regulate the optional and essential behaviors of citizens.

Greenway model as a support of Makassar smart city

The problems that occur in Makassar City explain that the existing open green space does not meet the standards of the Ministry of Public Works PUPR, manipulated for urban scale, the proportion of green open space is 30% while Makassar City only has green open space of 13%. One of which is part of the green space is the greenway. The purpose of this study is to determine how the greenway model to support Makassar City as a Smart City. This research method uses quantitative methods proposed in the greenway model where data is collected by questionnaire and processed by statistical analysis techniques. The data is quoted using statistical analysis, namely Structural Equational Modeling or abbreviated SEM. The results of this study indicate that the Model Greenway as a support of Makassar Smart City has an elongated pattern to follow along the road, diverse vegetation, shady and neatly arranged, as well as land cover that is able to connect the air, maximize the aesthetics and constraints of roads and buildings, the availability of waiting places and bicycle paths and pedestrians, being a link to a larger, more comfortable and pleasant green space, the availability of street furniture and disability-friendly facilities, having good drainage channels and a well-organized electricity network, and providing road and pedestrian connections so as to provide security for pedestrians. This research can be made as a consideration in the planning and design of Makassar City to meet the needs of green space that can support Makassar City as a Smart City in terms of a Smart Environment.

Street Furniture for Seniors

Street furniture is an independent discipline. It addresses detailed solutions of products designed for human use in an exterior environment. Based on present-day studies, senior citizens constitute the fastest growing segment of the population. The sample element with defined ergonomic parameters has been defined by analyzing the standard and most used component of street furniture – bench, by the comparison of used materials and chosen construction. During the comparison and the subsequent conclusions, a great emphasis was placed on the functionality and durability of the individual components. The categories of street furniture have been based on the study of production programs of mainstream furniture manufacturers in Europe, and on the research of factors influencing street furniture. With the basic material of the supporting structure, the sitting and leaning sections and based on the measurements and defining of materials, a sample construction design has been proposed, and supporting element of concrete, steel and wooden constructions including their surface treatment has been described.

Sustainable Street Furniture

Street furniture are installed in different locations of a city, are daily used by a large public, and have the closest contact and most dynamic interaction with people and the environment. Hence, they have a great responsibility to benefit the society and urban development. In this paper, we focus on street furniture for adopting the concept of sustainability through the local cities.This paper presents an experiment which is conducted at Art University of Isfahan (AUI) in order to explore the promises and challenges of designing for deep sustainability within different contexts of the city (Isfahan). The main objective of the experiment is to develop design interventions which affect and guide the community toward sustainability. Specifically students are asked to design street furniture or define an urban intervention which is not neutral but improves sustainability within the context. Finally, the proposed design interventions are evaluated based on their level of success for establishing sustainability. Final results indicate that although a common approach was applied for all the projects in in this experiment, the developed design interventions are not equally contributed to sustainability. While some of the projects only focused on eco-design strategies, some projects succeeded to provide a higher level of sustainability within their context and developed more influential and longer-term sustainable design interventions. It is achieved by the projects that conducted behavioral, social and contextual analysis in order to enhance environmental responsible behavior among the public (e.g. raise public awareness of sustainability, sensate or educate people, or support sustainable behavior). This paper is the extended version of the paper that has been published in the proceedings of the Creative Construction Conference 2018 (Allameh and Heidari, 2018).

Urban landscape improvement by small architectures Case study: Al-Kadhimiya Shrine

Focus on all elements that might improve the city, the community, and the environment in general, with special elements level of small scales or so-called small architectures by considering the distribution, characteristics, quality, and location of the elements of street furniture (seats, lights, telephone booths, trees, posters, billboards, etc.).The Research Problem: increased visual distortion and urban chaos in Iraqi cities. The importance of studying small architectures: improve the urban environment by improving urban design. Scope of Study: The selection of the spaces surrounding the holy shrine in the city of Al-Kadhimiya is considered as a model.Research Hypothesis: the development process must determine how to deal with street furniture, which is deemed to be one of elements adopted towards solving the urban problem as well as an important element in promoting the city frontispiece.It has become very important to infer the imbalances in the streets, as well as propose scientific solutions for development. The conclusion of the research is that the realization process of the urban scene abstractly is conducted by means of symbols, heritage meanings, and signs of urban street spaces, which in turn increases the population’s interaction with the urban environment, as well as the need to conduct studies providing the design of the streets using the small architectures.

Excasafezone synthesizing expert based ‘on-the-fly’ safety risk heat maps

Excavation work takes place almost continually in most cities around the Western hemisphere. Many cities are already full of infrastructures, buried networks, and street furniture, so excavation work is not without any thread to the operator and surrounding environment. Small construction sites, for example, are often constrained by operating infrastructure on surface level and underground. Although different agencies and network owners have information about the location of the objects that put excavation work at risk, this information is not centralized. Different organizations manage location information of buried cables, unexploded ordnance, and pollution, for example. This significantly complicates the early-stage planning and last minute risk assessment processes because professionals need to manually collect, assess, and integrate data about subsurface objects into a comprehensive risk assessment. To smoothen this process, ExcaSafeZone project, therefore, develops a system that collects location data, defines expert-based rules for safety risk assessment, and that synthesizes this into an open source prototype that visualized safety risks on a heat map.

Effect of the Parking Lane Configuration on Vehicle Speeds in Home Zones in Poland

Nowadays, traffic calming measures that are designed to influence the drivers’ behaviour in the first place and thus make them slow down (and increase the safety of traffic as a result) are used increasingly often in traffic engineering. As a rule of thumb, carefully planned street geometry and street furniture should advise the drivers of the traffic calmed area ahead of them, which makes them reduce the vehicle speed by influencing their perception. One of the most common treatments are road narrowings and horizontal deflections of the route of travel. The reduction of the vehicle speed increases the driver’s central visual area, which results in earlier and easier spotting of pedestrians that are about to cross the roadway. A reduction of noise and exhaust emissions is an additional benefit. However, the current sustainable design guidelines are not specific regarding how often the route should be deflected by alternate parking lanes and how frequently they should be placed in the home zones (woonerven in Dutch) in order to achieve the desired reduction of vehicle speed, noise, pollution, and exhaust emissions. This being so, the authors carried out a speed survey research on a chosen street that includes woonerf design features, as typically used in Poland, with carriageway narrowings being created by parking lanes differently sited along its length. Several speed measuring devices were deployed to automatically and simultaneously measure and record the vehicle speeds and volume of traffic at different test locations. The measurement data were subjected to statistical analyses, including conventional statistical tests. The alternative hypothesis, proposing that the vehicle speeds depend on the configuration of parking lanes and carriageway narrowings was confirmed in almost all cases. The results have confirmed that the siting of parking lanes is a relevant factor as far as speed reduction is concerned, with the degree of this reduction depending on the remaining travel lane width.

Antimony in paints and enamels of everyday items

Concentrations of antimony have been determined for paints and enamels that are available to the consumer or accessible to the public by x-ray fluorescence spectrometry. The metalloid was only present in consumer paints of a speciality (e.g. artistic) nature, but was common in old household paints as an anti-chalking agent and in brightly-coloured contemporary exterior paints (on roads, street furniture and playground equipment, for example) as a colour fastener with concentrations ranging from a few hundred to about 25,000 μg g−1. Antimony was also found in contemporary container glass and ceramic products as an additive or opacifier and as a colour fastener in enamels at concentrations up to a few thousand μg g−1. Overall, the yellow pigment, lead antimonate, was only evident in two ceramic products analysed, with Sb concentrations exceeding 62,800 μg g−1. Available data in the literature suggests that, while Sb concentrations up to 30 μg g−1 are bioaccessible in exterior paints and that concentrations of up to 20 mg L−1 are migratable in some ceramicware, no relevant regulations are currently in place. Given our lack of understanding of the health impacts of Sb, more studies on its toxicity and mobility from commonly encountered products are called for.

Storm water management in public areas

Problems of drought and maximum use of rainwater in public areas, street furniture and convenient search for users of walking routes. Address small natural elements and areas in the city that have both technical and other environmental features. They help mild manifestations of climate change and benefit the city’s.

ПРИНЦИП КЛАССИФИКАЦИИ ОБЪЕКТОВ ГОРОДСКОЙ НАВИГАЦИИ

Questions concerning the study of the phenomenon of urban wayfinding are particularly relevant nowadays, since there is a number of problems related to orientation in the city. As bearers of light and colour, urban wayfinding objects help pedestrians and drivers to quickly navigate in a complex city environment. Urban wayfinding refers to special constructions that are installed in certain places and contain visual information in the form of text and signs. There are complex wayfinding systems consisting of several types of structures, as well as individual navigation elements with different visual designs. In addition to special guiding structures, many objects in the city space affect the path finding: architectural structures, monuments, street furniture, advertising objects (large banner structures), etc. At night, objects with a good level of illumination serve as a means of orientation. The article analyzes the objects of the city environment in terms of their navigational potential and provides a classification of urban wayfinding objects by their degree of dynamism.

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

COVID-19: The Questions Ahead for Future Pedestrian Ways in Transit Area

Managing epidemics will be more complicated for cities that have high levels of urbanization. This is exacerbated by the use of public transportation modes, which can be one of the places where there is a high risk of spreading the virus. Prevention of spreading through clean living patterns, and maintaining distance in open areas such as public vehicles, public places, and pedestrian routes is important to reduce the spread of COVID-19. This research aims to find out the condition of pedestrian ways in the Jakarta transit area to be able to plan the design of pedestrian ways following health protocols that can prevent the spread of the virus in the future-using descriptive methods. Data is obtained from secondary data and health regulations/protocols issued by data provider institutions related to COVID-19. Data were analyzed using the descriptive analysis to get the results of the discussion juxtaposed with related theories. The results showed that city planning needs innovation to prepare the city to be more resilient when facing a pandemic. Innovation planning in the pedestrian route widens the lane and circulation, using automatic doors in-transit area and new street furniture that can reduce the risk of spreading the virus.

Beam Steering Using Active Artificial Magnetic Conductors: A 10-Degree Step Controlled Steering

An Active Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AAMC) is presented to steer the radiation pattern of a printed dipole working at 2 GHz. The elements that generates the phase shift are a set of Varactor Diodes, which are characterized using its spice model in order to obtain a phase shift - capacitance mapping. Overall beam steering of +/40° with a step size of 10° is achieved. A circuit model that describes any multilayer substrate AAMC unit cell, which uses fist form of Foster's theorem along with transmission line theory, is proposed. Our work is suitable to be used as low profile antenna; for example, street furniture antennas, which are located on the facades of houses or buildings, so that they can be visually mixed up with signs or advertisements. Simulations have been validated using a prototype consisting of an array of 22 × 14 AAMC elements; the overall structure measures 1.9λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> × 1.21λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> . This reflector will generate a phase gradient in its columns, which will modify the reflection angle of an incident electromagnetic wave in the H-Plane. Beam switching control has been achieved using suitably amplified LPF PWM signals generated by two Arduino modules. A printed dipole with a Fractional Bandwidth of 17% is designed and manufactured to illuminate the structure at a distance λ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> /4 above the surface. Far-field radiation patterns and reflection coefficients have been measured in an anechoic chamber using a spherical system. These compare favorably with simulations performed using the Time Domain solver in CST Microwave Studio.

Effects of installing street furniture on the interaction of the people in public space

Effects of installing street furniture on the interaction of the people in public space

Urban Furniture in a New Setting of Public Spaces Within the Kurdistan Region: Educational Targets and Course Design Process

This research is an attempt to analyze the existing urban form of outdoor public space of Duhok city and to give proposals for their improvements in terms of urban seating. The aim of this research is to identify the main urban furniture elements and behavior of users of three central parks of Duhok city, recognizing their functionality and the most common errors. Citizens needs, directly related to the physical characteristics of the environment, are categorized in terms of contact with nature. Parks as significant urban environments express their aesthetic preferences, as well as the need for recreation and play. Citizens around the world desire to contact with nature and places where they can socialize, play and practice different activities, but also participate in building their community and feeling the identity of their cities. The aim of this research is also to reintegrate these spaces in the wider urban context of the city of Duhok, to develop new functions by designing new seating patterns, more improved urban furniture, and necessary supporting facilities and equipment. Urban furniture is a product that uses an enormous number of people in public space. It has a high level of wear and damage due to intense use, exposure to sunlight and weather conditions. Iraq has a hot and dry climate characterized by long, warm, dry summers and short, cold winters. The climate is determined by the Iraq location at the crossroads of Arab desert areas and the subtropical humid climate of the Persian Gulf. The second part of this analysis will describe the possibilities of traditional and contemporary materials as well as their advantages in urban furniture production, providing users protection from extreme local climate conditions, but also taking into account solidities and unwelcome consequences, such as vandalism. In addition, this research represents a preliminary stage in the development of IND307 furniture design course for needs of the Department of Interior design, at the American University in Duhok. Based on results obtained in this research, the course would present a symbiosis between people and technology, promotion of new street furniture design that perceives pedestrian activities in an urban setting, and practical use of anthropometric measurements as a tool for technical innovations.

Deep-Learning and Depth-Map Based Approach for Detection and 3-D Localization of Small Traffic Signs

The three-dimensional (3-D) geographic locations of street furniture, such as traffic signs, comprise the basic content of 3-D city construction, and such information is indispensable for periodic statistics for road management and maintenance. This article presents a novel solution for acquiring 3-D information on small traffic signs based on mobile mapping system (MMS) data. First, a lightweight backbone network called VGG-L under an optimized faster region-based convolutional neural network detection framework is proposed for the detection of small traffic signs. An urban traffic sign detection (UTSD) dataset is created based on panoramic images obtained from test areas. Detection results from the UTSD dataset show that VGG-L outperforms other popular networks and achieves a mean average precision of 75.4%, which is 4.2%–14.8% higher than those of VGG16, MobileNet, ResNet, and YOLOv3. Second, a novel depth-map-based 3-D spatial geolocation method is proposed for obtaining the 3-D geographic locations of the objects. Then, a center-based method is proposed to automatically extract the final 3-D vector of the target. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method performs 3-D positioning and vectorization of the milestones and circular and triangular traffic signs, accurately and effectively, achieving greater than 86% recall and precision for the three types of targets in the test areas. The experiments demonstrate that the overall 3-D information acquisition scheme is feasible and has great application potential.

Pole-Like Street Furniture Segmentation and Classification in Mobile LiDAR Data by Integrating Multiple Shape-Descriptor Constraints

Nowadays, mobile laser scanning is widely used for understanding urban scenes, especially for extraction and recognition of pole-like street furniture, such as lampposts, traffic lights and traffic signs. However, the start-of-art methods may generate low segmentation accuracy in the overlapping scenes, and the object classification accuracy can be highly influenced by the large discrepancy in instance number of different objects in the same scene. To address these issues, we present a complete paradigm for pole-like street furniture segmentation and classification using mobile LiDAR (light detection and ranging) point cloud. First, we propose a 3D density-based segmentation algorithm which considers two different conditions including isolated furniture and connected furniture in overlapping scenes. After that, a vertical region grow algorithm is employed for component splitting and a new shape distribution estimation method is proposed to obtain more accurate global shape descriptors. For object classification, an integrated shape constraint based on the splitting result of pole-like street furniture (SplitISC) is introduced and integrated into a retrieval procedure. Two test datasets are used to verify the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better classification results from both sites than the existing shape distribution method.

Barriers and facilitators for blind and visually impaired users of shared space

To what extent do blind or partially sighted pedestrians perceive barriers or facilitators when moving through a shared space (SS)? The aim of this study was to understand in real-time, the perceptions, thoughts and emotions about their interaction with the SS, to enable the facilitators and barriers users encountered to be identified. This paper involves five case studies of blind/visually impaired adult pedestrians, using a verbal protocol analysis (VPA) method to explore their reactions to a SS in Poynton, North West England. The findings show that participants’ independent mobility was compromised. When crossing the SS, participants felt unsafe and experienced barriers finding the edge of the carriageway and while encountering street furniture. The authors conclude with a recommendation about the future use of the VPA method for application across a range of physical layouts and design details, and to more schemes (e.g. cycling) and diverse users.