Street Plan Research Articles

Conflicts over streets: The eviction of Bangkok street vendors

In 2014, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) introduced the ‘Reclaiming pavements for pedestrians’ plan. This plan, appealing to the Act on Maintaining Public Cleanliness and Public Order, promised to bring ‘safety and orderliness’ to the city, and its implementation led to the removal of street vendors. This article investigates the goals, practices, and effects of the street clean-up plan in Bangkok's old town and shows the ironic consequences of the plan: the streets became less safe. By analysing the vendors' rights, interests, and strategies for coping with the eviction that affected their livelihood, this article focuses on street vendors' survival strategies and analyses various forms of conflicts over streets: the vendors versus city authorities, among the vendors, and the vendors versus powerful gangsters, and discusses the mediation of these conflicts by a senior Buddhist monk who spoke on behalf of street vendors in negotiations with city authorities.

대학캠퍼스 주변 환경개선을 위한 가로환경디자인 제안 (2015.09 대구 계명대학교 동문앞 <레드블록 다누리 에비뉴 조성사업> 실시설계 완료)

Background : The university campus has evolved into a community facility for all citizens through its special functions and roles: thus the boundaries of the campus are broken down. However, there is an increasing number of problems due to the various environmental problems arising from the active relationship between the university campus and the surrounding cities. This study, cognizant of the university campus’ active expansion into neighboring cities, tries to improve the surrounding environment of the university campus by proposing a detailed street environment plan. Methods : Firstly, the problems of the current site are analyzed. Secondly, the direction of design will be determined based on the context of the environment around the university campus and the results of the questionnaire survey. Finally, this study presents the main concept and detailed plan of the street environmental design. Results : The relocation and maintenance of the buffer green space resulted in the removal of a blind spot and improved the walkable environment, the activation of the commercial areas, etc. In the detailed plan, the north street was designed to be local community garden. Meanwhile, the south street was planned to be a park due to its being a cultural street based on the residents and students opinions. Conclusions : This study is meaningful in that a customized street environment design is presented through analysis of the opinions of local residents, merchants, and students. In addition, the results of this study will be applied to future street design strategies and will be used as basic data for urban revitalization and regeneration from a macro perspective.

Urban streets: Epitomes of planning challenges and opportunities at the interface of public space and mobility

Today's urban streets are usually planned for purposes of mobility: pedestrians, as well as a variety of vehicles such as cars, trucks, and sometimes bicycles, are usually factored into an urban street plan. However, urban streets are also increasingly recognized as public spaces, accommodating street vending, food trucks, markets, artistic interventions, political expressions, comfortable benches, green spaces. Although these are mostly not new activities to appear on streets, they are now given particular attention in public discourses, urban planning, media and academia, as public space in cities has become a more contested resource among different uses and ownership-constellations. Growing and diversifying urban populations are generating a particular strain on urban streets worldwide. In short, urban streets epitomize the challenges and opportunities that accompany the negotiations of space and uses attributed to mobility and public space in cities. They necessarily unite stationary and mobile functions – though this is not usually given room for in planning. Moreover, these functions are rarely studied from more than one perspective at once, which limits the analytical and creative thinking that inspiration is drawn from. In order to address these limitations, in this article we rely on insights from three theoretical fields - namely planning regulation, transitions and governance - and illustrations from concrete examples, to explore what urban planning might have to focus on to address the tensions in linking stationary and mobile functions in urban streets.

Transforming small towns by remedial street design

Abstract The basic principle for a proper road design is a balanced consideration of the factors capacity and safety adapted in an environment-friendly context. This approach, generally adopted in the case of interurban road projects is also applicable to small urban localities. In a remedial street design plan the factor “environment” needs to be examined in close relation with road safety and traffic capacity at the design stage. The aim of the new tendency in urban road network re-design is to find solutions that meet the need of society to move easily and safely, all by providing a pleasant natural background. In this paper, basic principles for the re-design of street networks combining safe mobility with friendly environment and aesthetics are presented. This model for street re-design was applied to three small towns of the Prefecture of Phthia, to face serious traffic and environment problems. Accordingly, the formulated proposal moved towards a holistic consideration of the urban road space and the related activities, operations and peculiarities. The accent was given to concrete but applicable measures to accommodate and assist the varying needs of citizens for mobility providing a street network that is driven calmly enhancing the surrounding environment.

Jean-Baptiste Say's First Visit to England (1785/6)

SummaryThe French classical economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) gained fame as a political economist in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1785, aged eighteen, he visited Britain for the first time to prepare himself for a commercial career and to learn English. Other visits followed; but, in contrast to his visits in subsequent years, during 1814/15 and 1825, little is known about his first visit and those writing about Say tend to ignore it or consider it irrelevant. By drawing on his draft autobiography and on his street plan of Croydon, the article adds more information to supplement the meagre published accounts of this visit: where and with whom he lived, for whom he worked, whom he met and what his itinerary was during the time he was in England. The key places Say mentions are London, Croydon and Fulham. While not a definitive account of the visit, it does correct factual errors, clear up confusion and clarify ambiguities. The article questions speculations about Say witnessing the Industrial Revolution and proposes that, during his visit, his interests may have lain elsewhere than only in matters of commerce and taxation.

Distributed Attraction: The Effects of Street Network Connectivity upon the Distribution of Retail Frontage in the City of Buenos Aires

The City of Buenos Aires has a radial street plan, regular blocks, and a clear central place. On the basis of an analysis of the city's GIS database, we show that measures describing the syntax of its street network have a significant relationship with commercial frontage density, over and above the impact of central business district attraction. These results are obtained while controlling for the effects of population and employment density, distance from public transportation stations, and zoning. Our findings support a hypothesis that emerges from recent literature, namely, that commercial uses are subject to the distributed attraction exercised by the street network, and according to the syntax of street network connectivity. Among the variables describing the street network, those that measure how direct the connection of a street segment is to the rest of the street network, have the greatest explanatory power on the distribution of commercial frontage density. Street width and the extent to which a street segment lies on the shortest routes between all pairs of potential origins and destinations (whether by metric distance or by direction changes), have less influence. Interactions between variables indicate that the effects of spatial syntax in determining the distribution of commercial frontage density by street segment are stronger when variables accounting for other attractors (population and employment density, proximity to metrostations or proximity to other shops in the surrounding area) assume higher values.

Gradiometer and Ground‐penetrating Radar Survey of Two Reducción Settlements in the Zaña Valley, Peru

AbstractIn this study, we utilize ground‐penetrating radar and gradiometer survey to map buried architecture and investigate the political dimensions of the built environment at two Spanish colonial period archaeological sites in Peru's north coast region, Carrizales (C123) and Mocupe Viejo (74). Based on historical sources, we argue that both sites were founded during the Toledan reducción movement – a large‐scale attempt by Peru's viceregal government to forcibly resettle indigenous populations into planned towns in the 1570s ce. Coupled with excavations, geophysical survey has revealed diversity in how these planned towns were constructed. At Carrizales, domestic architectural features revealed through gradiometer survey and confirmed through excavations suggest that the town's layout broadly conformed to the prescriptions of reducción plans, centring on a large plaza and following a rectilinear layout. Ground‐penetrating radar results at the site were limited by high soil salinity. In contrast, at Mocupe Viejo, ground‐penetrating radar, gradiometer survey, and excavations have recovered no evidence of a gridded street plan, and demonstrate that the church was located in an idiosyncratic position. Together, these results suggest that the resettlement process was contested and that plans were modified to serve more proximate political, ecclesiastical, and practical concerns, illustrating the limited reach of colonial state power in the sixteenth century. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

국가상징거리의 구성요소 특징과 만족도에 관한 연구: 광화문 광장을 중심으로

국가상징거리는 도시 및 국가의 환경개선과 다양한 기능을 수행하는 대표적인 공공 오픈 스페이스 중의 하나이다. 상징거리는 한나라의 수도 및 도시의 중심부에 있으며, 프랑스, 영국, 미국 등은 복합적 역할을 하는 광장과 연결되어 문화와 역사를 포함한 공간적 특성을 나타내고 있다. 본 연구에서는 국가상징거리의 장소 정체성 도출을 위해 광화문광장을 대상으로 상징거리의 구성요소 및 특성에 대한 만족도를 분석하고, 구성요소 특징과 만족도의 관계성을 파악하였다. 수집한 설문조사 결과는 빈도분석, 일원배치분산분석, 상관관계분석 등을 하였다. 국가상징거리 구성요소 및 특성에 대한 만족도를 분석한 결과, i) 교통 접근성 대한 만족도가 다른 요소에 비해 높은 것으로 나타났으며, ii) 공간특성 요소는 구성요소보다 상징거리 이용만족도에 높은 영향을 주며, iii) 연구대상지가 국가상징거리로 인식하고 있는 것으로 나타났다. 본 연구 결과인 구성요소 특징과 만족도 조사를 바탕으로 향후 국가상징거리의 장소 정체성 확보와 주변 상업지구와의 연계성을 고려한 관리 계획 및 개선방안 제시가 필요하다. National street has become one of open space for enhancing environmental qualities of city and country. In the developed countries such as France, U.K. U.S.A are designed symbolic malls, squares and street which are represented the historicity, culture and symbolic place. For place identity, we analyzed the relationship between element and user satisfaction in Sejong Avenue, Gwangwhamun Square. Data were analyzed using statistical methods such as descriptive statistics, ANOVA and correlation. Results of this study are as follows, i) factor analysis is carried out to extract spatial components and satisfaction. The satisfaction concerning transportation access was the higher than other factors, ii) user satisfaction was strongly correlated on the spatial elements, iii) user showed high user perception to study site. Results of this study can identify representative street management plan based on landscape elements and user satisfaction.

Achieving Residential Connectivity and Density Goals with Computer-Generated Plans in a Greenfield Area

An algorithm has been developed to generate, without external intervention, a road and land-use plan for a regular or irregular site. It starts from an ‘embryo’ and grows a plan rather than trying to modify an initial solution. The basic modules are universal building blocks which change and adapt in a guided search with random selection of branching points followed by operations to add links or make connections. Deletion operators guide development by removing branches which do not improve the outcome. A hypothetical application, maximizing combined everyone-to-everyone connectivity and dwelling density, has evolved a highly interconnected street plan. However, no step is specific to the example; the operators will grow a road and land-use network under various specifications and constraints guided by an objective function. Making the process applicable to an actual development might require more constraints and certainly an enlarged objective function. Cost and other goals can be included so long as each goal is functionally related in some way to every change in the plan made by the search procedure.

POSSIBILITIES OF URBAN ARCHAEOLOGY IN INTERPRETING AN EARLY TOWN PLAN OF HAAPSALU

The article focuses on the issues of interpreting an early town plan reconstructed on the basis of archaeological studies. What is the ‘weight’ of a single research result? Is it possible to make hypotheses on the basis of the built urban environment about the constructional or legal standards of the developing town community, the composition of the social groups engaged in the construction of the town or their possible trading areas? How far should we go in drawing such conclusions? The example of Haapsalu allows a wider circle of researchers to get involved in interpreting a possible hypothesis concerning urban environment. Analyzing data on Haapsalu’s urban structures presents one possible hypothesis about an early street plan, considering also the possible contact regions that may have served as examples for the town pattern, especially the historic Lower Saxony and Westphalia – both regions were active in establishing trading with Old Livonia and the consequent crusades and missions. Considering the distribution of towns with three parallel streets in the German speaking territories, the opinion today is that urban settlement in Haapsalu started approximately in the mid-13th century or in the beginning of the century. Haapsalu may be considered as a success story of developing a systematic town model that formed the basis for constructing new centres in the Oesel-Wiek bishopric.

VISSIM-based Simulation Analysis on Road Network of CBD in Beijing, China

Beijing CBD area project involves the evaluation of roadway network. Due to the importance of this project and its special geographical location, it is necessary to analyze the traffic influence in future years. VISSIM is a traffic microscopic simulation software which has been widely used assessing traffic conditions. It is especially useful to evaluate different traffic management scenarios to choose the best alternative and optimization measures before implementation. This paper builds a road network model in VISSIM. Four different traffic organization plans are compared. Since the driving behaviors in Beijing are significantly different from USA or Europe, behavioral studies are conducted to calibrate parameters before model build-up in order to get more accurate results. This paper uses travel time, travel speed, queue length and delay as evaluation indicators to conduct the comparison. The results show that the one-way street organization plan inside CBD area performs the best.

뉴욕시 공립학교에 나타난 배치 특성에 관한 연구 - 맨하튼 가로체계와 외부공간의 관계를 중심으로 -

The purpose of this study is to analyze patterns of public school building layout types, open space and relationship with communities in the Manhattan grid plan. The study illustrates how building layout patterns of school facilities are influenced by societal demands in the urban grid environment. During the nineteenth century, the Island of Manhattan was transformed into a physical representation of the Cartesian coordinate system via the development of the grid street plan. In order to take advantage of streets as urban space, it is quite important to understand characteristics of communities and open space relationships between buildings and streets. Moreover, the strategic planning of schools' outdoor space vitalizes public streets as a critical community anchor. This research reviews 118 Manhattan public schools and categorizes them by (1) building layout type, (2) site type, (3) circulation and public open space, which are the biggest factors that determine the layout patterns of the public schools in Manhattan. As a result of analysis, the layout patterns are classified into seven types : "ㅡ", "L", "ㄷ", "ㅁ", "H", "T" and "other" type. Of these, "ㅡ" type and "L" type occur most frequently, because these configurations most flexibly fit into the limited grid-locked blocks, the various types of site & topography, and adapt most dynamically to the open spaces created by using avenues and streets. The ultimate objective of this study is to provide a case study for future efforts to plan open spaces for campuses that effectively utilize the streets in proximity.

Random Roads Less Travelled

A uniform city street plan may produce heavy traffic everywhere, whereas a random network of road connections leaves some roads open, according to a mathematical model.

Mythologies of the Grid in the Empire City, 1811–2011*

In this article, I examine the performative dimensions of historical narration as a form of modern mythmaking by reconsidering conventional narratives on the “origins” of Manhattan's grid street plan of 1811. The historical mythology of the grid espoused in canonical readings of the Plan of 1811 relies extensively on a rearticulation of the official explanation that the grid's designers provided in a foundational text known as the “Commissioners’ Remarks”. I argue that such accounts result in an extraordinarily narrow and formulaic interpretation of the utilitarian motives and intentions behind the city's grid plan, one that reinforces a form of “morphological essentialism”. To support this argument, I shift the focus of attention beyond the “Commissioners’ Remarks” in order to complicate readings of the intentionality that gave rise to the 1811 street plan. I conclude by suggesting that the mythic search for the “origins” of the grid in the realm of founding intentions can most effectively be challenged by drawing attention to the proliferation of countermyths of gridded space.

A Study on the Attitude of Residents toward the Street Plan in Tourist Spot

A Study on the Attitude of Residents toward the Street Plan in Tourist Spot

Inventing Autopia: Dreams and Visions of the Modern Metropolis in Jazz Age Los Angeles. By Jeremiah B. C. Axelrod. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. xii, 401 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-520-25284-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-520-25285-1.)

Inventing Autopia sets out to illuminate how Los Angeles residents experienced and interpreted their city's transition from a traditional downtown-centered city to a sprawling multicentered metropolis. Jeremiah B. C. Axelrod focuses on the manifold visions that Los Angeles urban planners and business leaders developed for the city's transformation as it grew voraciously during the 1920s. In that single decade the city's population leapt from some 500,000 residents to nearly 1.25 million, moving from being the tenth largest city in the country to the fifth largest. Committed to not re-creating the kind of congested vertical city that New York and Chicago had made famous, Angelenos struggled to understand the newfangled shape of their city and convert their hopeful visions of its future into reality. Their struggle over what Axelrod deems a “crisis in urban legibility” lies at the heart of his study (p. 11). Much of Axelrod's interest rests on the plans that the city's business and planning leaders developed amid the crisis. Chapters are devoted to a 1924 Major Traffic Street Plan, a set of 1926 referenda to allow elevated transit tracks and new commercial zoning, and a 1930 plan (developed by the sons of Frederick Olmsted) for a network of scenic parks and parkways. Axelrod dissects the proposals, scrutinizing the language and style of each, and plots the degree to which they either expressed business leaders' lingering hopes for an East Coast-style city organized around a central business district or reflected local planners' aspirations for a “garden city” made up of multiple, interdependent, but relatively freestanding communities.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF STREET PLAN OF THE CASTLE SITE IN IIDA CITY

This study aims at showing how local smaller castle towns tried to transform their urban space into modernized one early in the Meiji era. In the castle town, the castle holds large part of town area, and the land use after Meiji restoration had profound effects on its urban structure. In this case, the reclamation activity of local former samurai class people (shizoku) determined the street plan and the lot size of some part of the castle, which grew as the central business district in modern time. They also played an important role in the construction of the stone bridge as an part of the prefectural road development.

Urban Mobility Plans and Accessibility

In France, as in other European countries, towns and cities have committed to reducing the negative effects of automobile traffic---accidents and air pollution---either by regulation or voluntarily in order to improve their inhabitants' quality of life. Creating urban transport plans (PDUs) involves favoring non-automotive travel modes---walking and cycling---as well as public transport. Investment choices and planning of corresponding facilities are an excellent opportunity for improving accessibility to the town and public transport for disabled people and those with reduced mobility. The French law of February 11, 2005 “for equality of rights and chances, participation and citizenship of disabled people” included an obligation for PDUs to include an accessibility appendix whenever they are created, changed or revised. After a short review of the new regulatory obligations for authorities responsible for public transport and cities, this paper examines how PDUs approved since 1997 have dealt with the issue of accessibility for pedestrians and users of public transport. Two examples are analyzed. The first is the PDU for the town of Mulhouse, the actual decisions made concerning highways and public transports and the lessons learned by following indications and the difficulties encountered in involving local authorities responsible for accessibility modifications. The second example is the experience of Valenciennes in creating a street accessibility plan that will form part of the revision of the PDU. These examples highlight the institutional difficulties encountered and suggest methodological elements to facilitate cooperation between the various partners concerned and agreements with disabled people’s associations.

El barrio de Arriasa y tres elementos de la aljama judía de Toledo en el siglo XV: la carnicería, la «sinagoga vieja» y el «castillo viejo»

Already mentioned in 13th century written sources, the Arriasa neighborhood was an area within the Toledan Jewish quarter that still remained to be identified and demarcated. Documentary evidence –tenancy agreement charters dated back from the 13th until the 18th centuries–, as well as information on the vicissitudes experienced by the Jewish common properties from the late 15th century on, have been used to locate the butcher’s stalls, the “old synagogue” and the “old castle” on a street plan. Thus, the Arriasa neighborhood has been clearly delimited.

Signal power distribution in time delay in Tokyo City experimental sites

This paper presents experiments carried out in the city of Tokyo in two types of built‐up environments. One environment is characterized by a straight‐crossing street plan with buildings randomly lining the streets and the terminal antennas located at the line of sight (LOS) and quasi‐LOS conditions along the streets. The second built‐up area is characterized by straight‐crossing streets with non‐LOS (NLOS) conditions caused by the railway station and administrative buildings surrounding the terminal antennas. The time delay signal strength distributions obtained experimentally are presented for both multipath urban channels These test experiments are used to study whether any propagation modeling can predict the time delay distribution of signal power. Our theoretical framework is based on the corresponding crossing‐street waveguide model taking into account the Poisson statistics for buildings randomly lining each street. The proposed analytical formulas are analyzed for different parameters of the built‐up terrain, such as the street width, the average height of buildings, the terminal antenna heights with respect to the rooftops of buildings lining a street, and the gaps (slits) between the buildings. Then a comparison between the proposed theoretical model and experimental data is presented, which indicates a satisfactory agreement between the theoretical and experimental prediction of signal power distribution in the time delay domain. So, our modeling can be used as a promising predictor for the time delay distribution in the microcellular propagation environment.