Category Archives: Land-Use

Freiburg’s Way

17 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in Academia, Germany, Land-Use, Parking, Planning, Transportation, Urbanism

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Freiburg, a small city in Germany has become one of the role models for sustainable urban development in affluent regions. Freiburg is located in a prosperous region in Germany (the state of Baden-Wurrtemberg) a nation known for its automobile production and use. Even so, during the last 50 years Freiburg has taken a myriad of urban planning and policy steps resulting in a rather low car ownership and low car dependence.

Last year, I was on a tour in Germany where we also visited Freiburg and its celebrated new sustainable quarter called Vauban. This area was an abandoned French military camp, which was reused and turned into a very low car mixed-use residential quarter. The place was re-built using strong platform of cooperation between residents and the city government incorporating all kinds of sustainable solutions including integrated land-use and transportation planning. Freiburg’s light-rail was extended to the Vauban quarter, while parking was heavily restricted. Besides the overall urban plan, Vauban includes many unique sustainable experiments such as the solar settlement consisting of 59 units which produce more energy then they consume, employing solar panels (surprise!).

In Vauban’s main street
The Main Street of Vauban

A paper titled “Sustainable Transport in Freiburg: Lessons from Germany’s Environmental Capital” and published at the “International Journal of Sustainable Transportation” sheds light on Freiburg’s path to sustainability, including several anecdotes and recommendations on what can be learned from the Germans’ experience. For example, it describes the way in which Vauban planners managed to avoid the 1:1 mandatory parking minimum ratio for residential developments in Germany:

After long negotiations, Vauban was granted a waiver for minimum parking requirements provided that enough green space was preserved for potential future construction of parking lots. Building permits in Vauban are issued for residential units without parking spots. Residents who decide to own a car can purchase a parking spot in one of the parking garages at the edge of the development for the equivalent of $25,000. Residents who wish to live car-free simply pay a one-time fee of $5,000 to preserve open space at the edge of the development— in lieu of a parking spot.

The authors also describe Freiburg’s streetcar decline and car use rise in the 1950’s and 1960’s which is similar to many other cities in the western world. Besides giving a comprehensive timeline on Freiburg’s sustainable urban planning decisions, the authors point out to an early event, a proposed nuclear plant in the 1970’s that helped form a partnership among many civic groups:

Moreover, during the early 1970s, the planned construction of a nuclear power
plant just 30km from Freiburg’s old town made environmental protection a critical issue (Hopwood 2007). Protests against the state government’s plan to build the nuclear power plant lasted for years and forged an unlikely alliance of leftist students, Catholic and Protestant church leaders, the conservative party, and local farmers. Highly respected civic leaders were at the center of the local opposition to the state government’s plan. Their role in the protests legitimized environmental protection and alternative development ideas for the local population (Chaney 2008;Hopwood 2007).Over the last 40 years Freiburg has developed a strong tradition of cooperation, negotiation, and consensus among city administration, citizen groups, and local businesses (Bratzel 1999). Public discourse, citizen participation, and cooperation paved the way for a gradual change towards sustainability in Freiburg (Bratzel 1999).

In the conclusion of the paper, seven lessons for implementing sustainable transport policies are specified as follows:

  1. Implement controversial policies in stages.
  2. Plans should be flexible and adaptable over time to changing conditions.
  3. Policies must be multi-modal and include both incentives and disincentives.
  4. Fully integrate transport and land-use planning.
  5. Citizen involvement must be an integral part of policy development and implementation.
  6. Support From higher levels of government is crucial to making local policies work.
  7. Sustainable transport policies must be long term, with policies sustained over time, for lasting impact.

It should be noted that Freiburg does not have a transportation planning division, but an integrated urban planning department that combines transportation and land-use planning. This is probably the easiest recommendation to implement (number 4 above) – abolish municipal transportation departments and merge them inside land-use planning. The city keeps growing at a modest pace and is currently planning a new quarter for 10,000 people which will probably rise to new fame when its built.

You can read the full paper on Freiburg’s sustainable urban development here.

Pedestrian Movement and the Built Environment in One Simple Diagram

28 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Academia, Israel, Land-Use, Tel Aviv, Transportation

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Following the previous post which discussed actual observed pedestrian movement and commercial streets in Tel Aviv, we now turn to the major theoretical contribution we made in our last paper regarding the connection between the built environment and pedestrian movement.

In order to understand the connection between pedestrians and urban environment we have quantified a lot of built environment features. Those variables were divided into four different dimensions:

  1. A spatial dimension. This dimension is related to the structure of the road network, meaning the basic urban space mainly consisting of streets and squares. This dimension of the built environment is relatively stable and does not change. Various studies have already shown the importance of the street network configuration to pedestrian movement as well as other urban dynamics.
  2. A functional dimension. This dimension relates to land use and we included in it the distribution of retail fronts and proximity to public transit.
  3. A physical dimension. This dimension is related to actual street sections, meaning the width of the sidewalk and carriageway, which determines how easily a pedestrian can cross a street.
  4. A demographic dimension. This dimension is related to residential and employment densities.

While conducting this study I have spent numerous hours doing field surveys to map all kinds of missing data. Specifically, retail fronts locations as well as road and pavement widths are not easy to come by. As the age of Big and Open Data is fast approaching I hope that more types of data will be collected on a regular basis, leaving us with more time for analysis. After we have collected all the quantitative data we ran endless statistical correlations to better understand how the built environment and movement are tied together. The conclusions below are derived from the statistical connections we found.

Our study draws heavily on space syntax theory, which emphasizes the dominance of the street network structure on various urban dynamics. One of the best known papers in this field deals with the connection between urban space and pedesrtian movement. This paper from 1993, written by Bill Hillier and others describes the natural movement of people in urban space and connects movement, land use and street network structure.

Hillier offers the following diagram as a description of the interaction between movement and the spatial and functional dimensions. Hillier presents the argument that the spatial configuration is the basis of urban processes. He shows that the configuration can impact both movement and land use, but land use and movement cannot impact the spatial configuration. Movement and land use have a reciprocal connection, meaning that movement may induce retail development and that retail may in turn impact movement in its area. In the diagram below movement is marked with M, retail is marked with A (for attraction) and street network is marked with C (for configuration):

Hillier et al. (1993) pedestrian movement diagram

Original Hillier

Our findings are in line with Hillier’s diagram. Our theoretical contribution is an extension of Hillier’s diagram to include the physical dimension and add the urban area type (traditional vs.contemporary) as the basis of the generation of urban space itself.  The physical dimension was found to be impacted by the configuration and to have an impact on movement (similar to the functional dimension). Essentially, sidewalk width may change due to people movement and in turn change the movement pattern. In the diagram below you can see Hillier’s original triangle to the right and at the the top is the urban area type which impacts all the urban environment dimensions.

Lerman and Omer (2016) pedestrian movement diagram

DiagramForBlog

The next post will deal with specific finding and the struggle to find the best movement model for every city.

Where People Go and Commercial Streets Grow

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in Academia, Israel, Land-Use, Planning, Tel Aviv, Transportation

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The next few posts will be dedicated to my PhD dissertation dealing with pedestrian movement in different urban contexts. The paper containing my dissertation’s major findings has been accepted for publication in the journal – “Computers, Environment and Urban Systems” – and for a limited time is available for free. The paper was written together with my advisor, Itzhak Omer, under the title:

Urban Area Types and Spatial Distribution of Pedestrians: Lessons from Tel Aviv

Essentially, this study aims to examine what conditions lead to greater pedestrian movement in urban space. To achieve this goal we have quantified various attributes of the built environment and then checked their statistical association with the level of observed pedestrian movement. The research was carried in four different areas in the city of Tel Aviv. Each of those areas was split into a traditional urban area and a contemporary one, reflecting the major shift that occurred during the 20th century in urban planning from a humanistic discipline to a technocratic one. In this sense Tel Aviv is an ideal case for such an investigation containing both contemporary and traditional urban areas in close proximity.

This post will focus on the observed pedestrian movement volume and the retail fronts distribution. First, let’s have a look at the chosen research areas and their division to traditional and contemporary urban areas. The map below shows the research areas in the context of the city of Tel Aviv (click to enlarge):

ResearchZones

The close up aerial photos below show clearly the differences in the street network between the traditional connected areas to the contemporary less connected areas:

The first area (marked with the number) is centered on Ibn Gabirol Street, which is one of the major commercial streets in the city. The second area comprises of Florentine Neighborhood. In these areas both the traditional and contemporary parts were planned, yet they differ significantly in the connectivity levels and in land use composition. In both cases the contemporary area is a super-grid of the older traditional area next to it. In addition, Florentine’s contemporary area was planned as an industrial area and as a result have a rather low residential density.

The third area comprises of the neighborhoods of Hatikvah (traditional) and Yad Eliyahu (contemporary), while the fourth area is made of the neighborhoods of Shapira (traditional) and Kiriyat Shalom (contemporary). In both of these case the traditional neighborhoods were unplanned in some sense and had a bottom-up process of generation. In contrast, both of their contemporary counterparts were planned from the top in the fashion of early modernistic planning after the second world war.

The following map shows our findings regarding observed pedestrian movement volume and retail fronts distribution in all of the research areas. The pedestrian movement volume is distributed in a heavy-tailed way, meaning that there are only a few streets that carry a lot of movement while most of the streets carry low movement volumes. To visualize this we have emphasized the points where the top 10% of pedestrian movement was observed with red points and the next 20% are highlighted using orange points. In this context, heavy pedestrian movement means over 400 pedestrian per hour and medium movement rate means stands for over 200 pedestrians per hour. As for retail distribution – streets sections in which both sides have retail are marked with red lines, while streets with only one side of retails are marked with orange lines.

PedestrianCountAndRetail

Basically, the traditional areas have a more connected street network, with a higher presence of retail fronts and a higher volume of pedestrian movement. Moreover, even in the traditional sub-area where the lowest pedestrian movement volume was observed (which is Shapira Neighborhood in the top of area number 4), the average movement volume per road segment was higher still than that in the contemporary sub-area with the highest pedestrian movement volume (which is the eastern Ibn Gabirol area – to the right of area number 1). Pedestrian movement is higher in that traditional area even though the residential and employment densities are lower than that of the contemporary sub-area.

It can be clearly seen that in all traditional urban area commercial streets have successfully developed, while in the contemporary urban areas no commercial streets managed to grow. This happened regardless of municipal regulations that sometimes tries to prohibit commercial development and at other times tries to promote it. The commercial streets have all developed along the most central streets. Over the fine grid of Florentine (top-right in area number 2) an extensive grid of commercials street had sprouted from the top-right intersection, which is a rather central intersection in the city of Tel Aviv.

In conclusion, urban commerce does not happen based on an abstract will of a planner, but is the result of certain conditions, where the most important aspect is the road network, its intensity and the centrality it provides to certain streets. The next post will deal with the statistical associations themselves between commerce, street centrality and pedestrian movement. In addition, these findings are in line with other studies on the growth of urban commercial activity. Recommended reading on this subject include the following papers, which are free to access:

“The effects of block size and form in North American and Australian city centres” by Arnis Siskna. This paper examines 12 CBDs of North-American and Australian cities and reaches findings on land use formation based on the street network and morphological structure. Siskna points to the spontaneous development of urban commerce in the shape of a spiky potato.

Another and better known paper extends Siskna’s findings: “Centrality as a process: accounting for attraction inequalities in deformed grids” by Bill Hillier. In this paper Hillier suggests several insights regarding the development of intense urban centers and the needed conditions for them.

And as previously mentioned, you can find my new paper which further confirms and extends on Hillier’s work here.

Modernist Planning Results in Fewer and Less Predictable Pedestrians

20 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Academia, Israel, Land-Use, Planning, Transportation

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I am glad to share with you a paper that I have co-authored and which was published recently in the International Journal of Geographic Information Science. The paper was written by Prof. Itzhak Omer of Tel Aviv University, Dr. Yodan Rofè of Ben-Gurion University and myself. The full title of the paper is:

“The impact of planning on pedestrian movement: contrasting pedestrian movement models in pre-modern and modern neighborhoods in Israel”

As evident from the name of the paper, this publication deals with the impact of planning on pedestrian movement. We analysed pedestrian movement in 14 neighborhoods in four different cities in Israel – Kfar Saba, Bat Yam, Ashdod and Beer Sheva. These neighborhood where divided to two categories – modern and pre-modern. Essentially, modern neighborhood are those that were planned along modernistic urban planning approach, which adheres to separation of uses and hierarchical road structure. In contrast, pre-modern planning which tends to be denser with a lot more mix of uses and less hierarchical road structure. Basically, all the neighborhoods planned after the establishment of the state of Israel (1948) are modern, while most of the neighborhoods that were established prior to the Israeli state independence are pre-modern. Moreover, the cities of Bat Yam and Kfar Saba have many more pre-modern parts than the cities of Beer Sheva and Ashdod (this city was established in 1956 and consist only of modern planning).

Following are the maps of all the research neighborhoods in their respective cities. Dashed lines mark pre-modern neighborhoods while continuous lines mark modern neighborhoods.

All 14 research neighborhoods
NeighPicAll

We did pedestrian movement surveys in all the research neighborhoods and examined the statistical correlations of  the movement volume with relevant quantifiable variables that describe the built environment. For the analysis of the road structure we have relied heavily on space syntax. Other variables were derived from land use distribution – especially retail and demographic variables such as population densities.

Significant disparities in pedestrian movement volume were found among the cities and among the different neighborhoods. The pre-modern neighborhoods had about twice the pedestrian movement volume of the modern neighborhoods on average. Also, retail fronts were found to be much more prevalent in pre-modern neighborhoods than in modern neighborhoods. The chart below shows the average pedestrian movement volume (per hour) observed in the surveyed road section in all research neighborhoods. In red are the pre-modern neighborhoods, blue signifies the modern neighborhoods and green represents the average for each city. The city of Bat Yam, which is one of the denseset municipalities in Israel has remarkably higher movement volume than the other three cities.

Average pedestrian movement volume per hour in the surveyed road section in all research neighborhoods. Red is for pre-modern neighborhoods, blue for modern neighborhoods and green for entire city average.

Furthermore, our extensive statistical correlations showed that movement in pre-modern neighborhoods is far more predictable than in modern neighborhoods. At the last phase of this study we tried to produce a generic movement model for each type of neighborhood. To validate this model we analysed pedestrian movement in four more neighborhoods in Kfar Saba and in another city called Hod Hasharon (one neighborhood of each type in each city). The model had far more success in the pre-modern neighborhood than in the modern ones.

Besides addressing the issue of pedestrian movement in modern and pre-modern neighborhoods, the paper adds significant findings related to space syntax and the usability of its various attributes. For example, metrically derived attributes (based on metric distance and not on topological and angular distance) were found to be extremely inconsistent. The main conclusion I take from this work is quoted below:

Our study shows that traditional pre-modern urban neighborhoods, with a well-connected street structure, are likely to have not only more walking within them but also a more predictable spatial distribution of pedestrian volume than modern neighborhoods, that are characterized by hierarchical tree-like street layout associated with the idea of the neighborhood unit. We have identified that the correlation of pedestrian volume with the street network’s configuration attributes are significantly higher in pre-modern urban neighborhoods than in the modern neighborhoods. Furthermore, our study revealed that the distribution of pedestrian volume in these neighborhood types interacts differentially with the street network. In modern street layouts, the different types of configuration attributes (topological, angular, and metric) tend to be much more varied in their correlation with pedestrian volume across scale.

 

The full paper provides all the results and findings, expands on the use of space syntax in this research and describe in detail the statistical methods employed. You can find the full paper here, and if you cannot access the full paper and would like to read it you can contact me here and I’ll send you a copy.

Stuttgart 21 – A Delayed Discussion

17 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by in Germany, Land-Use, Planning, Transportation

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Comprehensive urban projects centering on central train stations transformations can be a boon to a city and its urban environment. They can also be the center of a slow struggle between the public and the authorities. Such is the case of the rather well known Stuttgart 21 project which is focused on Stuttgart central train station. The station is to be upgraded to improve the high speed rail connections in Germany and Europe and allow for new urban developments in the city of Stuttgart itself. Stuttgart is an industrial city with plenty of traffic jams made of Mercedes cars, which also provide the city best known tourist attraction.

The Stuttgart 21 project itself has been in the air since the mid-1990s but ran into major opposition and demonstrations throughout the years, much of it the result of ignoring public discussion. The jist of the project is transforming the Stuttgart central train station from an end station to a through station improving the time of the ICE express trains in Germany and the intrenational trains crossing Europe (from Paris to Budapest and everywhere in between). This change calls for a 90 degree rotation of the train station alignment and also involves moving large chunks of the train tracks underground. Furthermore, like other projects of this magnitude, this project involves extensive changes to its surroundings. Moving the tracks underground frees up inner-city land for new urban construction resulting in plans for two new quarters inside the city (the Europa District and the Rosenstein Quarter). These projects promise to offer top notch contemporary urban qualities based on mixed-use and high density and also return some of the project costs. The project itself is currently estimated at 7-9 billion Euros, much of it covered by the federal German government and portions of it also covered by the state of Baden-Wurrtemberg (similar to the USA, Germany is also divided to states) and by the European Union itself.

Stuttgart rail track to be buried in the future and allow for new urban developments
The view from Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof

While visiting the project grounds last summer and the extensive visitor center at the station it seemed like the project people are very proud of the engineering feats that are needed for the realisation of this project. While engineering capacity is extermely important, the main cause for the project two decades delay was the missing public dialogue. The Stuttgart 21 project is also the main reason that the Green Party is now in control in Baden-Wurrtemberg, a traditionally conservative area with a strong industrial inclination. The Greens, after initiating the public consultation have managed to somewhat improve the project and actually get it finally going.

Still controversial after all these years
Stuttgart 21 area in Stuttgart
In conclusion, the Germans could learn a lot from the Dutch way of engaging with the public and I certainly hope other public entities in Germany (and elsewhere) can learn from the lessons offered by this extensive and slow project.

For further information on this project (which is called now Stuttgart-Ulm rail project) you can visit its website here. The rather long clip below sums up the entire transformation (at least from the authorities point of view):

Do Comprehensive Land-Use Plans Have any Real Meaning?

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Academia, Criticism, Israel, Land-Use, Planning, Urbanism

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The Israeli planning system deserves a few posts on its problems and challenges. Today, we’ll deal with a study that attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of district master plans with regards to the actual implementation. This post is based on an academic paper written by Dr. Nurit Alfasi, Mr. Jonathan Almagor and Prof. Itzhak Benenson, and which can be found here. This paper was published in Land Use Policy Journal under the title: “The actual impact of comprehensive land-use plans: Insights from high resolution observations.” The researchers have made an attempt to estimate how much does actual construction conform to the actual plans by comparing aerial photographs to district master plans. The results of this study shed light on the ineffectiveness of the urban planning in Israel and should signal to the Minstry of Internal Affairs (that is responsible for most of the actual planning) that it is time to change the way in which the system operates.

First, we must clarify what is meant by district master plans. Israel is divided into six different administrative districts. This division was first created during the British Mandate period and was slightly changed after the establishment of the state of Israel, but is no longer relevant. For example, the Tel Aviv District includes the contiguous urban area that was already built in 1948 (Tel Aviv and its inner suburbs from Hertzliya in the north to Bat Yam in the south). The Central District includes what used to be the agricultural hinterland of Tel Aviv and is now part of the suburban sprawl from Natanya to Rishon Letziyon. Even the Southern District includes part of Tel Aviv Metropolitan area, especially the large suburb of Ashdod. So, after understanding this anachronistic districts division we need to deal with the actual district master plan. This is a comprehensive plan that describes the entire land-use specifications (built and planned) for the whole district. Each district has such a plan and this plan is supposed to set the expected development in the district and has to be updated once all of its planned development have been built. In theory, most of the construction should follow the district master plan, and the discussions in the district planning comittee should ensure that all roads, buildings and parks are built according to the approved plan.

The study dealt with the Central District for its area of reserach. This is the district with the most intense real estate activity in Israel and includes all the growing suburbs of Tel Aviv outside of the inner ring. The study focused on the district master plan also knows as DOP 3 (District Ouline Plan no. 3), which was approved back in 1982. In order to compare the actual construction to the plan aerial photographs from the years 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2006 were used – all in all 26 years of development. DOP 3 itself has undergone an update process in 2002 and became DOP 3/21. Twelve different areas inside the Central Districty were sampled, constituting about ten percent of the entire district area.

Several key findings are revealed when examining the plan compared to the actual development. During the years 1980-1990 more that 50% of the areas developed did not conform to the plan land use map. Yep, you got it – 50 perecnt of the development did not conform to the plan. During the years 1990-2000 the plan was getting even further from reality and more than 60 percent of the areas developed did not conform to the district master plan. It can be concluded that only a small part of land development actually occurs in accordance with the plan itself. It should be added that almost all of the non-conforming land developement was approved by the planning committees themselves, meaning that the planners themselves completely ignore the plan that they have approved to much fanfare. We need to remember that the district master plan is a public plan that costs a lot of time and effort. Additionally, this plan is used for countless comittee discussions wasting even more time. In light of the plan irrelavance it would actually be better to work without such a plan that only wastes resources and does not contribute to the actual planning and developement. The reserchers have also checked whether there was so much developement that the plan allotted areas for development were just insufficient. In a thorough examination it appears not to be the case. There remained enough approved land for development that was not devloped, while the actual construction took place on land that was not slated for development. In the words of the authors themselves:

It appears that despite the vast effort and time invested in preparing and authorizing district land-use maps, this is not an efficient planning tool in terms of restricting development in specific locations

Of all the anecdotes that come out from this study, the most ridiculous case is illustrated in the case of a newly established suburb in the 1980s titled Shoham. Shoham was founded entirely on and area defined as a future public park,  meant to be kept open for its unique environmental values (in sharp contrast to the area defined as farmland, which are easy to run over with urban development.) DOP 3 was approved in 1982 and just a few years down the line, the National Planning Council made the decision to build Shoham. But the problems do not relate just to the 1980s and 1990s. In 2002, a new DOP 3 was approved under the name DOP 3/21 which paractically approved almost all the deviations that occured in the preceding years. Over the four years that were checked after the new DOP was approved, non-conforming development has already started to be prevalent and reached 30 percent in a number of the sampled areas.

At the conclusion of the study, the reserachers elaborate on effective planning methods to replace the current system. These methods do not include rigid and meaningless land-use maps, but a defined set of planning principles by which to evaluate local plans before their approval and execution. Such an action can guarantee a faster and more flexible design that also gives better results. I hope that theserecommedations will not remain only on paper.

The complete paper can be found here.