Design for Change: Five Proxies for Resilience in the Urban Form

Abstract

The sheer complexity and unpredictability characterising cities challenges the adequacy of existing disciplinary knowledge and tools in urban design and highlights the necessity to incorporate explicitly the element of change and the dimension of time in the understanding of, and intervention on, the form of cities. To this regard the concept of resilience is a powerful lens through which to understand and engage with a changing world. However, resilience is currently only superficially addressed by urban designers, and an explicit effort to relate elements of urban form to resilience principles is still lacking. This represents a great limit for urban designers, as the physical dimension of cities is the matter they work with in the first place. In this paper, we combine established knowledge in urban morphology and resilience theory. We firstly look at resilience theory and consistently define five proxies of resilience in urban form, namely diversity, redundancy, modularity, connectivity and efficiency. Secondly, we discuss the configuration of, and interdependencies between, several constituent elements of the physical city, as defined in urban morphology and design, in light of the mentioned five proxies. Finally, we conduct this exploration at five scales that are relevant to urban morphology and design: plot, street edge, block, street and sanctuary area / district.

Street edge subdivision: Structuring ground floor interfaces to stimulate pedestrian visual engagement

“…There is a growing appreciation that street edges need to be considered across multiple scales, within which ground floors and further scales of subdivision are embedded (Feliciotti et al, 2016; Karssenberg et al, 2016). Spanning these scales, different groups of people, encompassing planners, developers and architects through to shop owners and managers, influence not only the spatial and material characteristics of street edges but also how they function socially (Thwaites et al, 2020).…”

“…Plinths are the ground floors of these buildings, resulting in a scale of street edge subdivision that is morphologically defined (see Figure 2.1; Karssenberg et al, 2016). The attributes of plinths often align with the building they are embedded within, with their proportions being defined by the size (depth and width) of individual buildings (Feliciotti et al, 2016). Due to the way that buildings along street edges can vary in size, age and architectural style (Ewing and Handy, 2009; Jacobs, 1993), plinths can often have differing spatial and material characteristics, as well as varying capacities for accommodating different functions and qualities along them (Karssenberg et al, 2016; Thwaites et al, 2020).…”

Urban Form Resilience: A Comparative Analysis of Traditional, Semi-Planned, and Planned Neighborhoods in Shiraz, Iran

“…The shape of lots is also argued to be important. Simpler lot geometries are more desirable as they improve flexibility of urban form, enable better connectivity and accessibility, and allow easier aggregation/disaggregation [36].…”

Knowledge challenges of the geoprospective approach applied to territorial resilience

“…In the end, as stressed by Blecic and Cecchini (2016) the urbanism of a resilient and antifragile city is an urbanism for complexity: the structural complexity is seen as a resource for the future of the urban space. Feliciotti et al (2016), paying considerable attention to the forms of the built environment, of plots and streets traditionally studied by urban morphology, propose an operational expression of these general principles of urban morphologic resilience. By using proxies, they show how the dimensions of connexity, diversity, modularity, efficiency, and redundancy can serve as a basis for assessing the resilience potential of real urban forms.…”