Walkability: Perspective From A Local Neighborhood in Bandar Lampung, Indonesia

Abstract

Walking is inherently a human activity, and has been related to many benefits including health, social, economy, and transportation, but there are still gaps from the western dominated literature to the local context of Indonesia. This research aims to understand the parameters of walkability from a short walk by people preferences from its origin focusing in a selected neighborhood of Kemiling Sub District in Bandar Lampung city. Data collection consists of building a basis of walkability parameters from literature of walking and walkability and identifying the local walkability parameters by synchronizing the data based on in depth adult interviews. Comparing the literature analysis resulted to five possible categories of barriers in the neighborhood: feasibility, destination, safety, comfort, and design quality. In the case of Bandar Lampung, locals probably perceived walking as more casual affairs with no expectation to the quality of their environment while accepting comfort as the most important barriers rather than safety.

Explorations of Young People’s Sense of Place Using Urban Design Qualities in Surabaya, Indonesia

“…As mentioned in a previous study, streets or alleys with windows provided a perception of human activity [65]. Here, transparency is seen to be related to human activity [60]. Transparency is crucial at the street level [22,23].…”

“…In this study, the walking experience was the main activity to assess the sense of place. As suggested by a previous study, the urban design qualities were considered as the most comprehensive measurement for walkability [23,54,55,60,68]. Urban design qualities describe the perceptual qualities while experiencing the built environment in term of five operational definitions (imageability, enclosure, human scale, transparency, and complexity).…”

“…For example, it was found that in Indonesia, street qualities, activity and meaning contributed more to the urban image than imageability [59]. In local neighbourhoods, people perceived the built environment from its transparency related to the degree of perception to human activity, [60]. Looking at kampungs in Surabaya, it was shown that the social life or activity observation was more dominant than the imageability [61].…”

“…Urban design qualities have been used as a framework in both quantitative studies [23,54,68,69] and qualitative studies [55,60]. Meanwhile, other researchers have also evaluated the street using personal observations [54,55].…”

“…As mentioned in the previous study, people's engagement in activities can strengthen the sense of place [30]. In addition, activity and social life observation were the most prominent in the kampungs and Indonesian streets [59][60][61]. waste heap should be covered by vertical elements to manipulate or hide the view.…”