State of the art mass transit systems, such as bus rapid transit (BRT), have appeared to be an innovative solution to meet the mobility needs of many world cities. However, their ability to transform surrounding urban fabric remains less explored in the developing world. This paper examines the impacts of BRT Lahore on land development patterns, considering the phenomena of land use revitalization, densification, and property reconfiguration. We have used quantitative approaches to gauge the changes in the urban fabric, with respect to the local neighborhood conditions and parcel level attributes, using multilevel logit models. The results of the logit models reveal heterogeneous impacts on conversions to commercial plazas, apartment buildings, and mixed-use buildings. The distance to the BRT station and size of the property is significantly associated with these conversions. Overall, one can notice a lack of a sense of place making and an absence of transit-oriented zoning around BRT stations. The desire of sustainable transit-oriented development to intensify land uses according to local conditions requires local urban designers and planners to think ahead of the curve by working on the regulatory and zoning restrictions governing the designs of built environment and also address the issues of gentrification and social inequity.
The incompatibility between the microscale-built environment designs around mass transit stations and stakeholders’ preferences causes dissatisfaction and inconvenience. The lack of a pedestrian-friendly environment, uncontrolled development patterns, traffic and parking issues make the street life vulnerable and unattractive for users, and affect the mass transit usage. How to design the streetscapes around mass transit stations to provide a user-friendly street environment is a crucial question to achieve sustainable transit-oriented development goals. To recognize the specific attributes of streetscape environment relevant in local context of BRT Lahore, this paper presents the results of a visual preference experiment in which nine attributes of built environment were systematically varied across choice sets. Multinomial logit models were set up to identify the preferences of three target groups: BRT users, commercial building users and residents at different locations. The research indicates that not only the road-related factors (bike lane and sidewalk widths, crossings facilities, street greenery) have a significant influence on people’s preference but also that building heights, and the typology of buildings and housing projects around BRT corridor have shaped these preferences. When planning and designing urban design projects around mass transit projects, these significant attributes should be considered.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate ways of practicing political power in public space in the interaction between central and marginal users in Glòries, an area under transformation in Barcelona. Originally conceived as the core of its extension, Glòries is now a battle field where conflictive spatial-social manifestations are strongly linked to pending conditions and partially implemented infrastructural projects. The key actors are in large majority illegal migrants, which activities and spatial strategies are particularly uncomfortable for city administrators; challenging the traditional focus on actors that are stable and institutionalized, included and previewed by the tools for urban projects implementation. Design/methodology/approach To achieve insights on urban spatial articulations of appropriations by marginal actors around infrastructures, the method deployed is to look closely at the interplays between persecuted and persecutors and their ways of practicing power in space in the frame of the illegal street markets in Glòries. This is part of an ongoing PhD research on the complexity of involved processes. The research is executed in diverse work packages: mapping of material transformations (morphology, domain, accessibility and permeability), in diverse timeframes; surrounding functions and temporal fixities, appropriations catalysts; media presences and discussions; crossed references with immersive field work and exchange with locals. Findings A broad variety of illegal street markets have been monitored in Glòries, revealing an increase in scale, frequency and levels of tension. Around them, their dynamic properties can be extracted and measured: spatial configurations, sizes, timeframes, number of traders/visitors, the relation to other elements, the strategies of displaying, displacing and dispersing used by the police. In all, the relationship with the infrastructural elements shows crucial and a better understanding of their relations constitutes a path to understand how both infrastructures and collective behavior contribute to dynamic productive and power logics in space. Originality/value This research and case study are an outstanding framework to explore the concrete spatial interactions and interplays of different power or territorialization processes, i.e. the strategies to denote presence and agency – in novel ways. Focusing on their spatial outcomes in contemporary transformation processes where infrastructures are dominant components is a way to inform the design, practice and implementation of city project and management.
Over the recent decades, both the requirements for and the affordances of public spaces have been an unavoidable and growing discussion in the spatial sciences literature. This growing discussion and research have been articulated through the argument that public spaces have been eroding under the neoliberal conditions and the capitalist mode of production. However, from the insights of social sciences, as the physical setting to be included in socio-political life, public spaces appear exclusionary for some as a timeless fact. Although historical public spaces have been idealized and envied, they appear as ideal places for a privileged spectrum of the societies to learn how to rule and to teach the rest how to obey rather than to allow them to be included in the public sphere. Considering the meaning of to be public, this study claims that this is the paradox of public space, which becomes evident in contemporary rising social struggles for public spaces in the form of occupy movements. In this context, this study aims to anatomise the paradox of public space from also the insights of social sciences in the conditions of representative democracy. As the main contribution of this study, we introduce a re-interpretation of Lefebvre's multi-triads and operationalize his concept of heterotopia to offer a deeper understanding in revealing the paradoxical production of public spaces. We conclude that the social production of a heterotopia is the manifestational realization of an ideal public space and the dissolution its paradox for only a temporary period of time.
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