SPACE International Journal of Conference Proceedings
The spatial structure of cities results from a space-making process that develops over long proce... more The spatial structure of cities results from a space-making process that develops over long processes of time. During this process, inner-urban waters as urban components have become a significant urban agenda in shaping the spatial configuration of cities and have diverse forms of interactions with the urban systems. Although there is a significant number of studies that examine the water-city relationship from social, economic, and ecological perspectives, the spatial configuration has not been identified as a determinant factor in the sustainability of waterfront settlements. In that sense, the study investigates the impact of Regent’s Canal, London, with socioeconomic properties embedded in the urban form. The case study area is located along a section of the Regent’s Canal between King’s Cross and Camden Town. It aims to analyse the possible spatial effect of the canal on the socioeconomic culture of its surrounding neighbourhoods. Hence, the research mainly takes Bill Hillier’...
Karachi, today, is essentially a city of migrants, the result of successive waves of in-migration... more Karachi, today, is essentially a city of migrants, the result of successive waves of in-migration triggered by past events and decisions that took place predominantly on the national and the international political stage. This chapter presents an overview of urban geopolitical and developmental histories of post-Partition Karachi in order to show how in-migration of multiple communities and the ethno-political affiliations of various state-backed actors have impacted the planning and development of the city. It discusses the connection between language, ethnicity and politics and how this contributes to ethno-spatial appropriation and contestation, ethnicity-based service monopolies and uneven planning and development of the city. By viewing the urban geopolitics of the city through the spatial-political trajectory of the Muhajir community in Karachi since Partition, the chapter examines the synergistic and often divisive relationship between ethnicity, politics and urban developmen...
Most global cities have a large volume of visitors every day. These visitors interact with locals... more Most global cities have a large volume of visitors every day. These visitors interact with locals and have noticeable impacts on the city. London is the type of city that actively attracts and interacts with tourists. Tourists are, almost by definition, a group of “spatial users” that do not live and work within the city in the long term. The way they move and navigate through the city relates to their plans and destinations, and it is not always easy to distinguish such a group from other spatial users. Therefore, it requires a special effort to study their movement patterns and to identify the relationship between the group and space. Instead of using traditional on-site observations, this research has explored a new method for collecting and converting social media platform data into movement patterns using the data from Flickr. // Comparing with traditional data-collecting methods, the proposed method can cover a wider territory (5-km radius) and period (5 years), and most impor...
This article presents an argument for the enhanced utilisation of urban morphology in urban desig... more This article presents an argument for the enhanced utilisation of urban morphology in urban design, drawing inspiration from space syntax theory and methodologies, advocating for the integration of social, economic, and cultural considerations alongside physical structures. This perspective shift entails transitioning from descriptive analysis to quantitative inquiries for the prediction and assessment of urban dynamics. By incorporating spatial analysis and socio-economic factors, urban morphology offers a competent understanding of the complexities inherent to urban environments. This comprehension supports the development of evidence-based designs and predictive models that enable such an approach in urban design. To operationalise this approach, the article introduces a methodology that interlinks urban morphology and design through a cyclic process encompassing analysis, design, evaluation, and further design development. This framework is illustrated through the case study of ...
With a shortage of affordable housing, social housing has become a priority on national agendas. ... more With a shortage of affordable housing, social housing has become a priority on national agendas. However, designing social housing has a poor record, as reflected in the current demolition of post-war housing ‘utopias’. This paper seeks to explore how the design of new social housing could increase the resilience of urban areas and its social and spatial integration in the contextual urban fabric. It examines the twenty-first century social housing area of Cité Manifeste, designed by renowned architects as an extension of Cité Ouvrière, a nineteenth-century mass industrial housing scheme in the city of Mulhouse, France. The spatial and social performance of these two cités are investigated, focusing on the urban interface between the streets and houses, and its patterns of evolution. Both schemes are well embedded in the wider street network, and Cité Manifeste has integrated better into the old quarter spatially than socially, yet not all parts of the design perform similarly. The ...
In this paper we take a step towards extending space syntax analysis into the countrywide scale, ... more In this paper we take a step towards extending space syntax analysis into the countrywide scale, through the study of three very-large spatial systems in the UK, namely the top-tier road network of the entire country (170,007 nodes), the complete road network (1,208,674 nodes) of three contiguous NUTS1 regions (the East of England, South East of England and Greater London) and the complete road network of UK's mainland (2,031,971 nodes). We compare the results of our analysis with several types of functional and socio-economic data, finding clear statistical associations at the scale of the entire country between network structure, vehicular movement flows and the spatial distribution of several socio-economic variables. We conclude by arguing that space syntax models and analysis hold their value at very-large territorial scales, being highly robust and producing coherent results between datasets of different sources, themes and dimensionalities.
Proceedings 24th ISUF 2017 - City and Territory in the Globalization Age, 2017
Cities face several challenges regarding public space and urban regeneration. Some of them are th... more Cities face several challenges regarding public space and urban regeneration. Some of them are the depersonalization and lack of interest of citizens in their own city, privatization, gentrification, technologization and gender-insecurity. Public spaces lose their character as articulator and generator of human relations, while neighborhoods lose their role as the basic unity of community and urban identity. Nowadays, many bottom-up strategies have arisen as expressions of neighborhood’s inhabitant’s will, producing cultural diversity and civic engagement, with a placemaking effect. Urban art is one of them. Social and economic products of urban art have been studied, but the spatial manifestation and impact have been largely absent from the discourse of urban morphology. Spatial conditions are representational of social practices like art, by structuring patterns of movement, encounter and separation in the city (Cartiere & Zebracki, 2016). This study aims to discover the spatial r...
The implementation of a new public transport system is considered to have a significant impact on... more The implementation of a new public transport system is considered to have a significant impact on the flow of people and economies in cities and towns. Though, spatial configuration that could stimulate urban growth has yet to be clearly identified in transport and urban studies. The new public transport services are believed to increase transport network accessibility and facilitate daily commute. In the transport system, stations could be the “nodes” that enhance the transport integration by providing connection for flows of people and goods, as well as be the “places” where they emerge within urban fabric to support the diversity of socio-economic activities. In this regard, the objective of this study was to verify the spatial impact of new public transport systems, with particular attention paid to the neighbourhoods surrounding stations, to identify whether stations are embedded in better locations to optimise urban regeneration. // This study focused on the latest implementat...
On 19 August 2016, Transport for London (TFL) launched their first Night Tube, which offers 24-ho... more On 19 August 2016, Transport for London (TFL) launched their first Night Tube, which offers 24-hour service on Fridays and Saturdays. With more lines coming in autumn 2016, London follows the lead of other cities such as New York, Berlin, and Tokyo to be deemed a 24-hour city. Aside from debates concerning the energy waste, pollution, and security caused by the policy, one question is evident: How does the city 'work' at night? Humans navigate through space using vision which involves cue or landmark recognition, turn angle estimation, network comprehension, and route plotting strategies (Golledge, 1995). The situation changes at night when the configuration of space is altered by the presence of artificial light. This applies predominantly to outdoor spaces where lighting designers or urban planners classify the type of luminaires according to the street hierarchy: white light is used for the 'core' areas and main roads, yellow light for secondary roads, and reddish...
This paper explores the use of weighted space syntax models to contribute to the process of integ... more This paper explores the use of weighted space syntax models to contribute to the process of integrated urban planning for Jeddah as part of a major planning project in the Saudi Arabia. The Municipality of Jeddah commissioned the production of an integrated suite of planning documents. These plans coordinate Strategic, Sub-Regional, Structural and Local plans across a citywide region and aim to provide a framework for sustainable urban growth and development over the next 20 years. This paper focuses on the space syntax methodologies used to aid urban planners to develop the Structure Plan and builds on the research used to develop the Sub-Regional Plan (Karimi et al, 2015). The Structure Plan studied how the urban structure of the city could accommodate the growth of population by about three million over the next 20 years. This included developing and testing a centres strategy to distribute population, employment and supporting facilities along with a public transport strategy fo...
In order to meet the pressures of a growing population and employment base, a developing city in ... more In order to meet the pressures of a growing population and employment base, a developing city in the Middle East is planning a new public transport system to allow its sustainable growth. Introducing a new mode of public transport to a city that has a complex urban structure and a dependency on car use necessitates specific design responses to inform the station design process. This paper focuses on a study at the micro scale level that addresses the impact of evidence-based design on contextualised architectural station prototypes. Furthermore, it addresses the processes of working with an architectural design office in creating dynamic design iterations. The research here is presented from a perspective of the process of iterative analytical study to real time projects, reflecting on the balance between academia and practice. In order to construct a set of design principles to station locations, three layers of potential movement patterns are analysed using agents based modelling:...
Tsunamis, despite occurring with low frequency, are permanent hazards for a large number of coast... more Tsunamis, despite occurring with low frequency, are permanent hazards for a large number of coastal cities and their consequences are highly devastating in terms of human losses, material damages and urban structure disruptions. It is argued in this paper that the urban structure not only has to be recovered after the tsunami event, but also has to provide an important basis for the continuing activities of the city, playing a fundamental role in the resilience of the whole urban system. By adopting a spatio-configurational approach based on space syntax theories and techniques, this research focuses on the dynamics of urban structures in relation to the different scenarios that tsunami-prone cities must face. The urban resilience process in both soon-after tsunami and post-tsunami scenarios is analysed using a Chilean coastal city located in a seismically active region as case study. The resilience capacity of the city in a soon-after tsunami situation is studied focusing on the in...
SPACE International Journal of Conference Proceedings
The spatial structure of cities results from a space-making process that develops over long proce... more The spatial structure of cities results from a space-making process that develops over long processes of time. During this process, inner-urban waters as urban components have become a significant urban agenda in shaping the spatial configuration of cities and have diverse forms of interactions with the urban systems. Although there is a significant number of studies that examine the water-city relationship from social, economic, and ecological perspectives, the spatial configuration has not been identified as a determinant factor in the sustainability of waterfront settlements. In that sense, the study investigates the impact of Regent’s Canal, London, with socioeconomic properties embedded in the urban form. The case study area is located along a section of the Regent’s Canal between King’s Cross and Camden Town. It aims to analyse the possible spatial effect of the canal on the socioeconomic culture of its surrounding neighbourhoods. Hence, the research mainly takes Bill Hillier’...
Karachi, today, is essentially a city of migrants, the result of successive waves of in-migration... more Karachi, today, is essentially a city of migrants, the result of successive waves of in-migration triggered by past events and decisions that took place predominantly on the national and the international political stage. This chapter presents an overview of urban geopolitical and developmental histories of post-Partition Karachi in order to show how in-migration of multiple communities and the ethno-political affiliations of various state-backed actors have impacted the planning and development of the city. It discusses the connection between language, ethnicity and politics and how this contributes to ethno-spatial appropriation and contestation, ethnicity-based service monopolies and uneven planning and development of the city. By viewing the urban geopolitics of the city through the spatial-political trajectory of the Muhajir community in Karachi since Partition, the chapter examines the synergistic and often divisive relationship between ethnicity, politics and urban developmen...
Most global cities have a large volume of visitors every day. These visitors interact with locals... more Most global cities have a large volume of visitors every day. These visitors interact with locals and have noticeable impacts on the city. London is the type of city that actively attracts and interacts with tourists. Tourists are, almost by definition, a group of “spatial users” that do not live and work within the city in the long term. The way they move and navigate through the city relates to their plans and destinations, and it is not always easy to distinguish such a group from other spatial users. Therefore, it requires a special effort to study their movement patterns and to identify the relationship between the group and space. Instead of using traditional on-site observations, this research has explored a new method for collecting and converting social media platform data into movement patterns using the data from Flickr. // Comparing with traditional data-collecting methods, the proposed method can cover a wider territory (5-km radius) and period (5 years), and most impor...
This article presents an argument for the enhanced utilisation of urban morphology in urban desig... more This article presents an argument for the enhanced utilisation of urban morphology in urban design, drawing inspiration from space syntax theory and methodologies, advocating for the integration of social, economic, and cultural considerations alongside physical structures. This perspective shift entails transitioning from descriptive analysis to quantitative inquiries for the prediction and assessment of urban dynamics. By incorporating spatial analysis and socio-economic factors, urban morphology offers a competent understanding of the complexities inherent to urban environments. This comprehension supports the development of evidence-based designs and predictive models that enable such an approach in urban design. To operationalise this approach, the article introduces a methodology that interlinks urban morphology and design through a cyclic process encompassing analysis, design, evaluation, and further design development. This framework is illustrated through the case study of ...
With a shortage of affordable housing, social housing has become a priority on national agendas. ... more With a shortage of affordable housing, social housing has become a priority on national agendas. However, designing social housing has a poor record, as reflected in the current demolition of post-war housing ‘utopias’. This paper seeks to explore how the design of new social housing could increase the resilience of urban areas and its social and spatial integration in the contextual urban fabric. It examines the twenty-first century social housing area of Cité Manifeste, designed by renowned architects as an extension of Cité Ouvrière, a nineteenth-century mass industrial housing scheme in the city of Mulhouse, France. The spatial and social performance of these two cités are investigated, focusing on the urban interface between the streets and houses, and its patterns of evolution. Both schemes are well embedded in the wider street network, and Cité Manifeste has integrated better into the old quarter spatially than socially, yet not all parts of the design perform similarly. The ...
In this paper we take a step towards extending space syntax analysis into the countrywide scale, ... more In this paper we take a step towards extending space syntax analysis into the countrywide scale, through the study of three very-large spatial systems in the UK, namely the top-tier road network of the entire country (170,007 nodes), the complete road network (1,208,674 nodes) of three contiguous NUTS1 regions (the East of England, South East of England and Greater London) and the complete road network of UK's mainland (2,031,971 nodes). We compare the results of our analysis with several types of functional and socio-economic data, finding clear statistical associations at the scale of the entire country between network structure, vehicular movement flows and the spatial distribution of several socio-economic variables. We conclude by arguing that space syntax models and analysis hold their value at very-large territorial scales, being highly robust and producing coherent results between datasets of different sources, themes and dimensionalities.
Proceedings 24th ISUF 2017 - City and Territory in the Globalization Age, 2017
Cities face several challenges regarding public space and urban regeneration. Some of them are th... more Cities face several challenges regarding public space and urban regeneration. Some of them are the depersonalization and lack of interest of citizens in their own city, privatization, gentrification, technologization and gender-insecurity. Public spaces lose their character as articulator and generator of human relations, while neighborhoods lose their role as the basic unity of community and urban identity. Nowadays, many bottom-up strategies have arisen as expressions of neighborhood’s inhabitant’s will, producing cultural diversity and civic engagement, with a placemaking effect. Urban art is one of them. Social and economic products of urban art have been studied, but the spatial manifestation and impact have been largely absent from the discourse of urban morphology. Spatial conditions are representational of social practices like art, by structuring patterns of movement, encounter and separation in the city (Cartiere & Zebracki, 2016). This study aims to discover the spatial r...
The implementation of a new public transport system is considered to have a significant impact on... more The implementation of a new public transport system is considered to have a significant impact on the flow of people and economies in cities and towns. Though, spatial configuration that could stimulate urban growth has yet to be clearly identified in transport and urban studies. The new public transport services are believed to increase transport network accessibility and facilitate daily commute. In the transport system, stations could be the “nodes” that enhance the transport integration by providing connection for flows of people and goods, as well as be the “places” where they emerge within urban fabric to support the diversity of socio-economic activities. In this regard, the objective of this study was to verify the spatial impact of new public transport systems, with particular attention paid to the neighbourhoods surrounding stations, to identify whether stations are embedded in better locations to optimise urban regeneration. // This study focused on the latest implementat...
On 19 August 2016, Transport for London (TFL) launched their first Night Tube, which offers 24-ho... more On 19 August 2016, Transport for London (TFL) launched their first Night Tube, which offers 24-hour service on Fridays and Saturdays. With more lines coming in autumn 2016, London follows the lead of other cities such as New York, Berlin, and Tokyo to be deemed a 24-hour city. Aside from debates concerning the energy waste, pollution, and security caused by the policy, one question is evident: How does the city 'work' at night? Humans navigate through space using vision which involves cue or landmark recognition, turn angle estimation, network comprehension, and route plotting strategies (Golledge, 1995). The situation changes at night when the configuration of space is altered by the presence of artificial light. This applies predominantly to outdoor spaces where lighting designers or urban planners classify the type of luminaires according to the street hierarchy: white light is used for the 'core' areas and main roads, yellow light for secondary roads, and reddish...
This paper explores the use of weighted space syntax models to contribute to the process of integ... more This paper explores the use of weighted space syntax models to contribute to the process of integrated urban planning for Jeddah as part of a major planning project in the Saudi Arabia. The Municipality of Jeddah commissioned the production of an integrated suite of planning documents. These plans coordinate Strategic, Sub-Regional, Structural and Local plans across a citywide region and aim to provide a framework for sustainable urban growth and development over the next 20 years. This paper focuses on the space syntax methodologies used to aid urban planners to develop the Structure Plan and builds on the research used to develop the Sub-Regional Plan (Karimi et al, 2015). The Structure Plan studied how the urban structure of the city could accommodate the growth of population by about three million over the next 20 years. This included developing and testing a centres strategy to distribute population, employment and supporting facilities along with a public transport strategy fo...
In order to meet the pressures of a growing population and employment base, a developing city in ... more In order to meet the pressures of a growing population and employment base, a developing city in the Middle East is planning a new public transport system to allow its sustainable growth. Introducing a new mode of public transport to a city that has a complex urban structure and a dependency on car use necessitates specific design responses to inform the station design process. This paper focuses on a study at the micro scale level that addresses the impact of evidence-based design on contextualised architectural station prototypes. Furthermore, it addresses the processes of working with an architectural design office in creating dynamic design iterations. The research here is presented from a perspective of the process of iterative analytical study to real time projects, reflecting on the balance between academia and practice. In order to construct a set of design principles to station locations, three layers of potential movement patterns are analysed using agents based modelling:...
Tsunamis, despite occurring with low frequency, are permanent hazards for a large number of coast... more Tsunamis, despite occurring with low frequency, are permanent hazards for a large number of coastal cities and their consequences are highly devastating in terms of human losses, material damages and urban structure disruptions. It is argued in this paper that the urban structure not only has to be recovered after the tsunami event, but also has to provide an important basis for the continuing activities of the city, playing a fundamental role in the resilience of the whole urban system. By adopting a spatio-configurational approach based on space syntax theories and techniques, this research focuses on the dynamics of urban structures in relation to the different scenarios that tsunami-prone cities must face. The urban resilience process in both soon-after tsunami and post-tsunami scenarios is analysed using a Chilean coastal city located in a seismically active region as case study. The resilience capacity of the city in a soon-after tsunami situation is studied focusing on the in...
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Papers by Kayvan Karimi