Kevin Thwaites

Restorative urban open space: Exploring the spatial configuration of human emotional fulfilment in urban open space

Abstract The capacity of outdoor settings to benefit human well being is well established by research. Examples of restorative settings can be found throughout history and are still applied today in health-care facilities, as healing or restorative gardens for the sick, but their wider significance in the urban public realm remains insufficiently explored. A conceptual framework for restorative urban open space based on mosaics of linked and nested spaces woven into the urban fabric is presented. The concept synthesizes the theory of centres, pioneered in the 1970s and refined in recent work by architectural theorist Christopher Alexander, with material relating to social and ecological dimensions of outdoor spatial configuration. The concept argues for fundamental properties of order, as integrations of locational, directional and transitional spatial experience, which are present in the natural and cultural world and associated with human psychological benefit. This spatial arrangement may offer potential to resurrect peoples connection with intuitively preferred forms and strengthen beneficial relations between human functioning and the spatial environment.

Experiential Landscape Place: An exploration of space and experience in neighbourhood landscape architecture

Research suggests that the experience of open spaces routinely encountered is important to human quality of life. However, in their design decision making, landscape architects may not give this the level of attention it deserves. A potential response is explored by drawing from elements of environmental psychology research, socially responsive approaches to urban planning and design, and spatial concepts developed by Christian Norberg-Schulz. A range of experience, related to how people attach significance to certain locations, orientate themselves, and develop awareness of their home ground, is conceptualized spatially to propose a conceptual framework which has the potential to augment landscape architectural approaches to the neighbourhood environment.

Revealing the Hidden Spatial Dimensions of Place Experience in Primary School-age Children

Abstract The everyday local environment of incidental spaces routinely encountered by children is an important contributor to their social development and general health and well-being. There remains, however, a significant loss of connection between children and outdoor settings and this is increasingly raised as an issue that may have long-term implications. It is now recognised as important that the voices of children should play a pivotal role in the arrangement and content of their spatial realm and that achieving this will require new ways to understand childrens perceptions of place and how this contributes to individual and social development. This paper outlines UK-based doctoral research to develop a range of participatory tools to facilitate exploration and analysis of the spatial experiences of primary school-age children with particular reference to their perceptions of the outdoor places they encounter in their daily life patterns.

Urban Design and Quality of Life

This chapter deals with those aspects of the design of cities that have been shown to affect quality of life. Whilst direct causal relationships between physical space and well-being are often difficult to establish, physical space certainly does play a significant part in shaping the way we engage with it, informing the individual and collective sense of attachment to our own environment. This will become increasingly important, with the urbanization process predicted to grow, a significant part of which in conditions of informality. The aim of this chapter is to gather relevant and recent research that highlights advances in the study of the reciprocal effect between urban form and urban life and use this to compile an agenda for future thinking, research and practice in the field of socially sustainable urban design.

The role of the ideological dimension in developing an anatomical approach to urban morphology: exploration of a new analytical method of open spaces network

Examination of the spatial organization of some historic city centres appears to show a more integrated relationship between the ideological dimensions of city life and the physicality of city fabric. When city planning and design development separates ideological and physical dimensions there is evidence to suggest that this can lead to detrimental impacts on the well-being and the physicality of the city fabric. This paper explores an analytical method that helps to understand urban spatial morphology and its relation to the ideologies of city life. Therefore, it analyses how the ideological model, as a collective of religious, political and cultural values lying beneath the physicality of the city, develop through three phases into aesthetical conventions. In this regard, the paper documents the agreements and disputes between people as an advanced step towards the refinement of these conventions. In this context, the authors explain the aspects of the conventions: the valuable, the tactical and the aesthetical aspects. In addition, they discuss how the tactical aspect, together with aesthetical aspect, plays the key role in maintaining social sustainability and characterize urban spatial morphology within this social sustainability. As a result, this approach contributes the planning education process by providing essential knowledge and the analytical base for the site analyses, design process of urban spaces and the conservation of urban fabrics in contexts that have multi layers of historic development. This exploration, ongoing at the time of writing, contributes to PhD research that will ultimately develop and describe a fuller anatomical approach for the analysis and design of such urban settings.

Defining Local Identity

Abstract This study aims at providing a formal definition on local identity to clarify the confusion in the field of landscape study. The study first introduces different levels of identities in landscape research. Then the second part reviews relevant definitions to identify their relations and common factors to clear confusions on local identity. The third extracts, formalizes and reorganizes the common factors into a new framework to represent elements that contribute to local identity and form a formal definition of local identity. The paper also concludes their important meanings to both landscape research and practice.

Open Space People Space

In their book, With People in Mind, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan and Robert Ryan (1998) observed that although their own research and that of others provided empirical evidence of the benefits people could gain from contact with outdoor settings, especially natural ones, the research findings had yet to penetrate sufficiently into practice. They said: “Although disappointing, this is hardly surprising. There has not been an easy way to access the research literature and translate it into usable recommendations” (p. ix). Since then their own work and that of organizations such as the International Association of Peopleenvironment Studies (IAPS) have, through conferences, specialist networks and publications, helped bring the outputs of scientific research in humanenvironment relations and the practice fraternity into closer proximity. However, it remains fair to say that bridging the gap between research and practice in this crucial area remains one of the most important challenges of the early 21st century where professional practice is increasingly called upon to deliver solutions capable of supporting and sustaining the health and wellbeing of people. Against this background the major success of Open Space People Space is that it presents rigorous research, theoretical insight and practice guidance in a way directly relevant and accessible to practitioner audiences. It is wide-ranging, authoritative and well informed throughout and manages to achieve what few other publications in this field to date have: to concisely and forcefully reveal, for policy, planning and design contexts, what research suggests ought to be done. The underlying message is simple: socially inclusive and beneficial solutions begin by understanding what people need and not by what a place should look like. The book’s main aim is to bring into one place a diversity of perspectives that can contribute to developing a better understanding of what constitutes good design for socially inclusive open space. It reflects the ongoing work of the OPENspace research centre based at Edinburgh College of Art and Heriot-Watt University, which provides a forum for debate and research into the theory and practice of planning, designing and managing the outdoors. The Centre’s ethos, represented with authority in this volume, is that a good measure of the quality of people’s lives, including issues of health and well-being and opportunities for social and political participation, depends on routine and inclusive access to high-quality public places. It recognizes an increasing awareness and acknowledgement of the value of this in government initiatives that aim to improve people’s quality of life and sets out to provide evidence based and creative solutions that can better inform decision-making processes. Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 15. No. 2, 285–291, May 2010