Elizabeth Brabec

Defining The Pattern Of The Sustainable Urban Region

To date, the debate on the sustainability of human settlements has focused on the urban portion of the land use pattern. Since urban areas rely on suburban, rural, and other less densely settled areas for their existence, these areas must be included in any sustainability assessment. This need for a regional view has resulted in a typology of regional form, which allows comparisons of relative sustainability between various regional land use patterns. Based on resource efficiency, this regional analysis includes measurements related to water, agricultural land, habitat, energy use, and transportation and identifies primary indicators for each category. Existing methods employed to assess urban sustainability are reviewed and compared with two new methods, introduced here, that take a more holistic regional view: population density zones and regional characteristic curves. Future work to fully evaluate the properties of these new methods by applying them to a variety of regional form types is described.

Linear infiltration systems along urban streets: evaluating aesthetic values

The last decade has seen the design of numerous infiltration systems along urban streets. With the goal of reducing the impact of runoff on urban watersheds, they have largely been functionally designed with little regard to design aesthetics even though aesthetic value is important to public acceptance and increased use. This paper compares three case studies of linear infiltration systems along urban residential streets: one in Hannover-Kronsberg (Germany) and two in High Point, Seattle (USA). The cases develop and apply an expert-based evaluative method for assessing the visual quality of these designed landscapes. The methodology applies qualitative and quantitative measures for four design principles—coherence, variety, legibility, and spaciousness—common to all types of spatial design and some 2-D disciplines. The findings demonstrate that the designed systems have unrealized potential to engage aesthetic values, including the legibility of infiltrations enhanced visibility.