Meta Berghauser Pont

Street Interaction and Social Inclusion

Suburban space has traditionally been understood as a formless remnant of physical city expansion, without a dynamic or logic of its own. Suburban Urbanities challenges this view by defining the su ...

Surveying density, urban characteristics, and development capacity of station areas in the Delta Metropolis

The combination of growing mobility needs and dwindling transportation budgets in the Dutch Delta Metropolis has raised the need for smarter use of existing public transport infrastructure. A significant portion of this smarter use may come from strengthening the ties between infrastructure improvements and transit-oriented development. To further this goal, the Delta Metropolis Association has developed SprintCity (SprintStad in Dutch), a serious game and planning support tool that engages stakeholders in transit-oriented development to explore interaction between transport and land use, as described in Bertolinis node–place model. However, its underlying database has proven insufficient to draw conclusions regarding urban character and development capacity around stations. This paper focuses on morphological research that aims to improve this database by exploring the density and urban morphology of station areas in the Delta Metropolis beyond readily available statistics, and discusses the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of this survey. The surveying of station areas in 2010 was conducted by a team of six researchers, based on the Spacemate© methodology developed by Berghauser Pont and Haupt. The methodology allows detailed quantitative measurement of the density and spatial characteristics of clearly demarcated urban districts, defining their so-called ‘spatial fingerprint’. The resulting database of 850 districts in 55 station areas has served descriptive goals, strengthening the realism in the SprintCity game, and serves as the database for further establishing the development potential of station areas.

An Analytical Approach to Urban Form

The focus of space-morphology, a specific branch in urban morphology, is to ‘uncover the fundamental characteristics of urban geometries’ (Moudon in Ordering space: types in architecture and design. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, p. 289–311, 1992) and ‘enrich the description of built form in ways that express aspects of performance and function’ (Peponis in Investigative modeling and spatial analysis: a commentary of directions. p. 2, 2014). Two research directions are important when discussing space-morphology, both developed in the UK during the 1970s. First, the work at the Centre of Land Use and Built Form at Cambridge University directed by Leslie Martin and Lionel March and their seminal work ‘the grid as generator’ (Martin and March in Urban space and structures. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972). Recently, this direction received renewed attention with publications such as ‘Streets & Patterns’ by Marshall (Urban Des Int 17:257–271, 2005) and ‘Space, density and urban form’ by Berghauser Pont and Haupt (Spacematrix: space, density and urban form. NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2010). Second, the Unit for Architectural Studies at University College London, directed by Bill Hillier, that developed in what we today know as the Space Syntax laboratory. Besides the description of these two directions in what we call space-morphology, this chapter will discuss how these two directions can be combined and how this can benefit the other schools of urban morphology, not least when it comes to identifying typologies. Typologies, being specific combinations of spatial properties, perform and function in specific ways and can be an effective way to inform urban design and planning practice when they intervene in cities and change these types or add new ones. Such an evidence-based approach puts new demands on the education of architects, urban planners and designers.