Living on the edge: Occupying the facade to enrich urban density

<p>Living on the edge critiques oppressive aspects of urban living. It advocates façade occupation to enhance the experience of density and enrich the street edge to achieve a vibrant and metropolitan New Zealand. Sited in Te Aro, Wellington Central, the project proposes a citywide inversion of the typical high-rise building layout, relocating primary circulation to the street edge to dramatically reform the spatial relationships between dwelling, building and street. The project is an inhabitable facade system comprised of various combinations of the colannade, the gallery and the annexe. This can be applied to existing or integrated with new buildings and varied in response to specific street conditions. By creating multifunctional outdoor living integrated with circulation spaces, the design offers a vision for vertical communities with enhanced dwelling amenity to encourage more New Zealanders to embrace high density living.</p>

Living on the edge: Occupying the facade to enrich urban density

<p>Living on the edge critiques oppressive aspects of urban living. It advocates façade occupation to enhance the experience of density and enrich the street edge to achieve a vibrant and metropolitan New Zealand. Sited in Te Aro, Wellington Central, the project proposes a citywide inversion of the typical high-rise building layout, relocating primary circulation to the street edge to dramatically reform the spatial relationships between dwelling, building and street. The project is an inhabitable facade system comprised of various combinations of the colannade, the gallery and the annexe. This can be applied to existing or integrated with new buildings and varied in response to specific street conditions. By creating multifunctional outdoor living integrated with circulation spaces, the design offers a vision for vertical communities with enhanced dwelling amenity to encourage more New Zealanders to embrace high density living.</p>

Context-Specific, User-Centred: Designing Urban Green Infrastructure to Effectively Mitigate Urban Density and Heat Stress

<p>Green infrastructure plays a vital role for cities facing the challenges of urbanisation and climate change. It has the potential to mitigate the adverse effects of urban density and the heat island effect, enhancing the ecological and social resilience of cities and their inhabitants. This study identifies contextual, psychological, and social factors which influence people’s subjective evaluation of urban green infrastructure (UGI), density, and heat stress. Planning recommendations for effective, context-specific, user-centred design are developed to increase the social and health benefits of UGI in limited space. To do so, a mixed-methods approach that combines social surveys, GIS-analysis, and microclimate modelling was employed. The field studies were undertaken in two contrasting neighbourhoods in Munich, Germany: a densely built and scarcely vegetated inner-city neighbourhood and a declaimed “green and compact” neighbourhood at the outskirts. Both sites are assessed in terms of their supply of green infrastructure, building and population density, and outdoor summer heat loads drawing on geostatistical data and mean radiant temperature modelling. This assessment is compared to the inhabitants’ subjective evaluation thereof retrieved from face-to-face questionnaires, and semi-standardised interviews. The results indicate that the existence and the amount of UGI per se are not decisive for people’s perception of urban heat, density, and neighbourhood attractiveness. It is rather the perceived accessibility of green spaces, their design, quality, and contextual factors like traffic or the presence of other people that define its value for urban dwellers.</p>

The Relationship between Urban Density and Building Energy Consumption

Neighborhood characteristics influence natural urban energy fluxes and the choices made by urban actors. This article focuses on the impact of urban density as a neighborhood physical parameter on building energy consumption profiles for seven different metropolitan areas in the United States. Primarily, 30 × 30 m2 cells were classified into five categories of settlement density using the US Geological Survey’s National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD), the US Census, and Census Block data. In the next step, linear hierarchical spatial and non-spatial models were developed and applied to building energy data in those seven metropolitan areas to explore the links between urban density (and other urban form parameters) and energy performance, using both frequentist and Bayesian statistics. Our results indicate that urban density is correlated with energy-use intensity (EUI), but its impact is not similar across different metropolitan areas. The outcomes of our analysis further show that the distance from buildings within which the influence of urban form parameters on EUI is most significant varies by city and negatively changes with urban density. Although the relationship between urban density parameters and EUI varies across cities, tree-cover area, impervious area, and neighborhood building-covered area have a more consistent impact compared to building and housing density.

Population Density and Covid Spatial Dynamics: A Critical Assessment of Indian Districts

In this article, a critical assessment of urban density and Covid-19 incidences in Indian cities is explored. The top hundred Covid-19 reported districts are analysed. The ArcGIS 10.1 statistical tool Getis-Ord Gi* is used in the identification of statistically significant Covid-19 clusters across India. Attempts are made to empirically establish the correlation between the urban density, the number of reported cases, and their possible impact on health infrastructure in general and planning in specific. Based on the results from 164 out of 693 district datasets, analyses have shown high positive spatial autocorrelation, which is more than 24% of the districts analysed. Further, the results show that southern districts are more affected than the Central and northern districts of India. Although a positive association between reported cases and the urban density was found, in high-density urban areas, the relationship with infection rate varied, which should be looked at together with other variables such as people’s activities and behaviours.