A systematic review of the scientific literature on the theme of multi-functional streets

Abstract

Cities consist of 20-30% streets, a gigantic infrastructure that must be maintained and developed. As such, they have the potential to contribute to tackling contemporary challenges as the increasing urbanization and climate change which place higher demands on urban environments, from quality of life, health and safety to environmental sustainability. Multifunctional streets are introduced as an answer to these challenges, as they can fulfil this multitude of functions. This paper presents a state-of-the-art, quantitative systematic review of scientific literature on the theme of multifunctional streets. Scientific papers were filtered from Web of Science and Scopus. Only scientific papers of the last 10 years were included. We will first present a survey of the field and then focus on the empirical papers that help us identify the physical factors which have been proven to support and improve the different functions of streets, from the social and ecologic to the economic and technical. The empirical studies represent 24% of the scientific papers selected, where the social function is the one most frequently studied, followed by the ecologic and the economic function. Within the social function the empirical papers in relation to health (39%) and safety (21%) dominate, followed by the ones studying liveability (9%). We will focus on empirical studies on the themes of Liveability and Safety, two important variables of the Social function, interrelating yet often conflicting.

Systematic review and comparison of densification effects and planning motivations

“…However, two other papers report the opposite and show that an increase in population density yields an increase in traffic accidents (Gladhill & Monsere 2012;Iwata & Managi 2016). In a systematic review on multifunctional streets, a similar discrepancy was highlighted by Stavroulaki & Berghauser Pont (2020) who argued that the number of crashes indeed increased, but their severity and the number of fatalities decreased in more central locations because of the lower vehicular speeds.…”

“…Preliminary results of both reviews were presented at the Beyond 2020 conference (Berghauser Pont et al 2020;Haupt et al 2020), where mainly the quantitative syntheses of the reviews were presented. Furthermore, at the time of the conference, only parts of the review were finalised, while the current paper presents the complete results.…”

“…Furthermore, at the time of the conference, only parts of the review were finalised, while the current paper presents the complete results. More precisely, 179 full articles were included in Berghauser Pont et al (2020). The present paper includes the additional 151 articles.…”

Spacematrix: Space, Density and Urban Form

“…The work of Hoenig is particularly interesting as he introduced the concept of spaciousness (Weitraumigkeit) in an attempt to measure 'urban quality'. 60 This concept stemmed from the Berlin Building Ordinance, passed in 1925.…”

“…Here it is important to note, however, that we do not aspire in this book to provide any exhaustive description of the form and / or function of the urban network, but to focus on its primary measurements and its relation to built density. Neither will we focus on its configurative properties as discussed extensively in Space Syntax research, 60 but instead highlight the local properties that affect the potential for these kinds of movements within reasonable ranges of walking distance, 61 but also the sizes of the islands and thus potential uses of them.…”