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behavioral issues
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MODULE II
Behavioural issues in urban design:
Social ecological models state that there are a variety of contexts —individual,
interpersonal, organizational and community—that operate at multiple levels to
influence action; Environmental contexts (i.e., urban design characteristics such as
street design, mixing of land uses, public spaces, sidewalks, bike lanes)
Hillier et al (1987, p.233) find that “spatial layout in itself generates a field of
probabilistic encounter, with structural properties that vary with the syntax of the
layout.”
Ittelson et al (1974, p.358) suggest that “All buildings imply at least some form of
social activity stemming from both their intended function and the random
encounters they may generate. The arrangement of partitions, rooms, doors,
windows, and hallways serves to encourage or hinder communication and, to this
extent, affects social interaction. This can occur at any number of levels and the
designer is clearly in control to the degree that he plans the contact points and
lanes of access where people come together. He might also, although with perhaps
less assurance, decide on the desirability of such contact.”
Most architectural patterns for influencing behaviour involve, in one way or another,
the physical arrangement of building elements—inside or outside—or a change in
material properties.
Most patterns involve either the physical arrangement of building elements—
positioning, angling, splitting up, hiding, etc—or a change in material properties,
either to change people‟s perceptions of what behaviour is possible or appropriate,
perhaps by reinforcing or embodying social norms, or to force certain behaviour to
occur or not occur
▶ There are also patterns around aspects of surveillance—designing layouts which
facilitate or prevent visibility of activity between groups of people
Examples:
Osmond (1959) introduced the terms sociofugal and sociopetal to describe
spaces which drive people apart and together, respectively; Sommer (1969,
Title End Means
30 Activity nodes To “create concentrations
of people in a community”
“Facilities must be grouped densely
round very small public squares which
can function as nodes—with all
pedestrian movement in the community
organized to pass through these nodes”
53 Main gateways To influence inhabitants of a
part of a town to identify it
as a distinct entity
“Mark every boundary in the city which
has important human meaning—the
boundary of a building cluster, a
neighborhood, a precinct—by great
gateways where the major entering
paths cross the boundary”
68 Connected play To “support the formation of
spontaneous play groups”
for children
“Lay out common land, paths, gardens
and bridges so that groups of at least 64
households are connected by a swath of
land that does not cross traffic. Establish
this land as the connected play space for
the children in these households”
139 Farmhouse
kitchen
To help “all the members of
the family… to accept, fully,
the fact that taking care of
themselves bycooking is as
much a part of life as taking
care of themselves
by eating”
“Make the kitchen bigger than usual, big
enough to include the „family room‟
space, and place it near the center of
the commons, not so far back in the
house as an ordinary kitchen. Make it
large enough to hold a good table and
chairs, some soft and some hard, with
counters and stove and sink around the
edge of the room; and make it a bright
and comfortable room”
151 Small meeting
rooms
To encourage smaller group
meetings, which encourage
people to contribute and
make their point of view
heard
“Make at least 70 per cent of all meeting
rooms really small—for 12 people or less.
Locate them in the most public parts of
the building, evenly scattered among the
workplaces”
1974) notes that airports are often among the most sociofugal spaces, largely
because of the fixed, single-direction seating and “sterile” decor: “Many
other buildings… such as mental hospitals and jails, also discourage contact
between people, but none does this as effectively as the airport… In practice
the long corridors and the cold, bare waiting areas of the typical airport are
more sociofugal than the isolation wing of the state penitentiary.
One emergent behaviour-related concept arising from architecture and
planning which has also found application in human-computer interaction is
the idea of desire lines, desire paths or cowpaths. The usual current use of the
term (often attributed, although apparently in error, to Bachelard‟s The
Poetics of Space (1964)) is to describe paths worn by pedestrians across
spaces such as parks, between buildings or to avoid obstacles—“the foot-
worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time” (Mathes, 2004)
and which become self-reinforcing as subsequent generations of pedestrians
follow what becomes an obvious path.
As Myhill (2004) puts it, “[a]n optimal way to design pathways in accordance
with natural human behaviour, is to not design them at all. Simply plant grass
seed and let the erosion inform you about where the paths need to be.
Stories abound of university campuses being constructed without any
pathways to them.”
“I was aware that I could be watched from above…and that it was possible
to go much higher—to become one of the watchers—but I didn‟t see how it
could be done. The architecture embodied a political message: There are
people higher than you, and they can watch you, follow you—and,
theoretically, you can join them, become one of them. Unfortunately you
don‟t know how.”
Geoff Manaugh, The BLDG BLOG Book (2009, p.17
City layouts have been used strategically to try to prevent disorder and make
it easier to put down. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann‟s “militaristically
planned Paris” (Hatherley, 2008, p. 11), remodelled for Louis Napoléon (later
Napoléon III) after 1848, had “[t]he true goal of…secur[ing] the city against
civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades in Paris impossible for
all time… Widening the streets is designed to make the erection of barricades
impossible, and new streets are to furnish the shortest route between the
barracks and the workers‟ districts.” (Benjamin, 1935/1999, p. 12). The
Haussmann project also involved “the planning of straight avenues as a
method of crowd control (artillery could fire down them at barricaded
masses)” (Rykwert, 2000, p.91).
Disciplinary architecture:
“Where the homeless are ejected from business and retail areas by such
measures as curved bus benches, window-ledge spikes and doorway
sprinkler systems, so skaters encounter rough-textured surfaces, spikes and
bumps added to handrails, blocks of concrete placed at the foot of banks,
chains across ditches and steps, and new, unridable surfaces such as gravel
and sand.”
Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City (2001, p.254)
Changes in material properties can involve drawing attention to particular
behaviour (e.g. rumble strips on a road to encourage drivers to slow down:
Harvey, 1992), or making it more or less comfortable to do an activity (e.g., as
Katyal (2002, p.1043) notes, “fast food restaurants use hard chairs that quickly
grow uncomfortable so that customers rapidly turn over”)
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