Livability reflects the quality of the person–environment relationship, namely how well the built environment or the available services in a city fulfill the residents’ needs and expectations. We argue that livability assessment can aid the implementation of certain New Urban Agenda (NUA) goals by providing a flexible way to assess urban environments and their quality. However, a reliable and transferable assessment framework requires the key elements of livability to be defined in such a way that measurable factors adequately represent the person–environment relationship. As an innovative approach, we determined key livability elements accordingly and asked over 400 residents worldwide to evaluate their urban environments using these parameters. Thereby, we could calibrate the livability assessment workflow by including personal aspects and identifying the most relevant livability factors through an ordinal regression analysis. Next, we performed relational-statistical learning in order to define the individual and combined contribution of these statistically significant factors to the overall livability of a place. We found that urban form and mobility-related factors tend to have the highest influence on residential satisfaction. Finally, we tested the robustness of the assessment by using geospatial analysis to model the livability for the city of Vienna, Austria. We concluded that the workflow allows for a reliable livability assessment and for further utilization in urban planning, improving urban quality by going beyond simple city rankings.
The year 2007 marked the 20-year anniversary of A New Theory of Urban Design (1987), a slender volume by Christopher Alexander and colleagues that serves as a notable milepost within the half-century old ''design methods movement'' in which Alexander himself played a seminal role. The ''generative'' design method of A New Theory focused less upon the specification of a final form through schematic planning, and more on the stepwise process by which a form might emerge from the evolutionary actions of a group of collaborators. In so doing, it challenged the notion of ''design'' as a progressive expression of schematic intentions, and argued for a conception of design as a stepwise, non-linear evolution in response to a series of contextual urban factors. In the 20 years since, significant progress has been made to develop the insights of generativity in urban design, as in other fields. Some of Alexander's ideas have been incorporated -notably by practitioners of The New Urbanism -and some have been challenged and dismissed, including, notably, by Alexander himself. The author assesses progress since this milepost volume -substantial, he argues -as well as setbacks and shortcomings, and significant opportunities still remaining.
Architecture has an ancient relationship to mathematics, and symmetry—in the broad sense of the term—is a core topic of both. Yet the contemporary application of theories of symmetry to architecture and built environments is a surprisingly immature area of research. At the same time, research is showing a divergence between the benefits of and preferences for natural environments on the one hand, and built environments on the other, demonstrating relatively deleterious effects of many contemporary built environments. Yet the research cannot yet pinpoint the actual geometric factors of architecture and urbanism that could produce such an important divergence. This paper explores this research gap, surveying the literature across a range of fields, and assessing current evidence for the impacts of symmetry in the built environment upon human perception and well-being. As an emerging case study, it considers the recent work by Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros, two trained mathematicians who have made notable contributions to architecture and urbanism. The conclusion proposes a new research agenda toward further development of this immature subject area.
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