Marcus White

Swinburne University of Technology · School of Design

By identifying a unified aim of Federal, State, and Local government authorities to deliver healthier, more liveable urban spaces and enable walkable neighbourhoods in Melbourne, Australia, questions emerge regarding noise data collection methods and the policies that aim to protect pedestrian areas from potential increases in urban traffic noise....

Background: The hospital's physical environment can impact health and well-being. Patients spend most of their time in their hospital rooms. However, little experimental evidence supports specific physical design variables in these rooms, particularly for people poststroke. The study aimed to explore the influence of patient room design variables...

Changing the physical environment of healthcare facilities can positively impact patient outcomes. Virtual reality (VR) offers the potential to understand how healthcare environment design impacts users’ perception, particularly among those with brain injuries like stroke, an area with limited research. In this study, our objective was to forge a n...

This article explores practical aspects of the compact city agenda as it applies to the ongoing densification of car-dependent suburbs, focusing on Melbourne, Australia. While the idea of compact cities has widespread policy support globally, debate continues regarding the negotiation of compact urban form and its implications for issues like overc...

Background Stroke inpatient rehabilitation is a complex process involving stroke survivors, staff, and family utilizing a common space for a shared purpose: to optimize recovery. This complex pathway is rarely fully described. Stroke care is ideally guided by clinical practice guidelines, and the rehabilitation built environment should serve to opt...

Urban fringe areas, characterized by relatively larger community sizes and lower population densities compared to central areas, may lead to variations in walkability as well as gender differences, such as safety perception. While objective measurements have received considerable attention, further research is needed to comprehensively assess subje...

As our cities grow, it is important to develop policies and streetscape designs that provide pedestrians with safe comfortable walking conditions and acknowledge the challenges involved in making urban places feel liveable and safe while understanding the critical role of streets around busy destinations. To understand these challenges at a nuanced...

Despite the many research studies on active school travel (AST), the number of children walking/cycling to school is decreasing as there is a lack of implementable research evidence. This review through database searches from 2000 to 2020 aims to identify research gaps and explore new perspectives. The articles are selected and screened methodicall...

Urban densification is affecting our quality of life – from vitamin D defi ciency due to not enough sunlight reaching us in the tall urban canyons that are created by high buildings, to urban heat islands disrupting our sleep, and many other causes of human irritation. Exploring the Radiant City famously proposed by Le Corbusier in 1930, Guest‐Edit...

The global pandemic and consequent lockdowns have provoked an evacuation of workplaces and urban centres. For society to continue to function, there has been a massive movement towards home working enabled by Teams and Zoom. This has ramifications on not just our lives but also digital infrastructure, commerce and entertainment, as well as a myriad...

Guest‐Editors Jane Burry and Marcus White team up with Andong Lu, Lead Professor in Urban Design and Vice‐Dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Nanjing University, to explore the ups and downs of our contemporary condition relative to the exponential rise in the seamlessness of technology – particularly digital technology. This i...

Public open spaces are fundamentally important for the health and well-being of citizens in densely populated cities. If not carefully planned, high-density urban development can overshadow adjacent open spaces, resulting in poor quality, dark and oppressive winter conditions. Current planning control approaches for protecting light amenity in citi...

Research on historic preservation zones (HPZs) has recently attracted increasing attention from academia and industry. With eight Beijing typical HPZs selected, this study evaluates critical vitality characteristics and identifies the key influencing factors via multi-source data and machine learning technology. The vitality characteristics were id...

Urban design has been valuable in bringing the principles of transit-oriented development (TOD) into reality. However, a majority of recommendations summarized by scholars for promoting TODs through urban design have failed to promote the progress of the urban design. The main reason for this issue is the long-standing tradition of design decision-...

With population ageing being a notable demographic phenomenon, aging in place is an efficient model to accommodate the mounting aging needs. Based on the community scale, this study takes the 15-min community-life circle as the basic research unit to investigate the imbalanced distribution of pension resources and its influencing factors in downtow...

Walking is essential for the health and well-being of communities as well as meeting environmental challenges of the 21st Century. There have been significant research contributions in recent decades to understanding factors that can influence the likelihood of citizens choosing active travel modes, with great advances in understanding the built en...

As people’s levels of stress increase with the complexity of contemporary urban life, the stress healing agenda in built environments has become more critical than ever. Previous research has demonstrated that linear and nonlinear shapes in the environment have an impact on human stress recovery. However, to date, most studies have focused on indoo...

Half the world’s population now lives in cities, and this figure is expected to reach 70% by 2050. To ensure future cities offer equity for multiple age groups, it is important to plan for spatially inclusive features such as pedestrian accessibility. This feature is strongly related to many emerging global challenges regarding health, an ageing po...

The design of green infrastructure in urban renewal sites is complex, requiring engagement with existing communities and future sustainable development goals, consideration of existing and future urban forms, changing climatic conditions, and the sites often being in low-lying and flood-prone areas. Traditional street tree decision-making approache...

With the growing challenge of aging populations around the world, the study of the care services for older adults is an essential initiative to accommodate the particular needs of the disadvantaged communities and promote social equity. Based on open-source data and the geographic information system (GIS), this paper quantifies and visualizes the i...

The COVID-19 pandemic imposes huge challenges on urban development with its impacts on reshaping cities. Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam is a typical mega-city with high population density coping with urban infrastructural issues. As social distancing and restrictions on the use of public space have been the key measures to deal with the pa...

Cycling is a sustainable transportation mode that provides many health, economic and environmental benefits to society. Cities with high rates of cycling are better placed to address modern challenges of densification, carbon-neutral and connected 20-min neighbourhood goals. Despite the known benefits of cycling, participation rates in Australian c...

The escalating intensity and duration of heat and flood events in cities increase the importance of green infrastructure design that responds to climate change challenges. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the potential of a rapid precinct scaled design approach for street tree planting choices that enables simultaneous assessment of visual...

Healthcare facilities are among the most expensive buildings to construct, maintain, and operate. How building design can best support healthcare services, staff, and patients is important to consider. In this narrative review we outline why the healthcare environment matters and describe areas of research focus and current built environment eviden...

Objectives To identify, appraise and synthesise existing design evidence for inpatient stroke rehabilitation facilities; to identify impacts of these built environments on the outcomes and experiences of people recovering from stroke, their family/caregivers and staff. Design A convergent segregated review design was used to conduct a systematic r...

What sorts of educational methodologies and pedagogic theories are we to teach young, student architects and other environmental design professionals? How can we prepare students just starting to develop appropriate skills in the third decade of the 21st century? Jane Burry and Marcus White, respectively Dean of the School of Design and Professor o...

Koolhaas pronounced urbanism dead in 1995. Since then, urban design has struggled to come to terms with this and other losses including environmental stability, affordable housing, design control, and urban amenity. This book explores urban design paradigms transitioning through a misappropriation of Kübler-Ross’ “five stages of grief” – from pro-s...

This paper introduces an online spatial data portal with advanced data access, analytical and visualisation capabilities which can be used for evidence based city planning and supporting data driven research. Through a case study approach, focused in the city of Melbourne, the authors show how the Australian Urban Infrastructure Network (AURIN) por...

Australia tops the world’s charts in occurrence of skin cancer and intensity of heat waves, while concurrently achieving high childhood obesity levels, due in part to low rates of physical activity. These issues converge in the challenge of protecting school children from heat and ultra-violet light exposure whilst simultaneously encouraging them t...

This article describes how tree species and spacing is an integral part of street design. 3D modelled trees have traditionally been computationally prohibitive to use within precinct scaled urban design models, thus, tree choices in street design are typically limited to database or 2D representations limiting engagement with spatio-temporal issues...

This article describes how tree species and spacing is an integral part of street design. 3D modelled trees have traditionally been computationally prohibitive to use within precinct scaled urban design models, thus, tree choices in street design are typically limited to database or 2D representations limiting engagement with spatio-temporal issues...

The last three decades have witnessed the explosion of technology and its impact on the architecture discipline which has drastically changed the methods of design. New techniques such as Agent-based modeling (ABM) and Virtual Reality (VR) have been widely implemented in architectural and urban design domains, yet the potential integration between...

Australia has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world and school children are amongst the most vulnerable to harmful UV exposure. Australia also has one of the world's highest levels of childhood obesity and much research has focused on encouraging active modes of transport to and from schools.

Introduction. In Australia all school children in metro areas must have access to a public school. The norms regulating their accessibility are vague. Given current issues on school zone allocation and expected population growth, new and more performing methods to draw catchments are needed. It is necessary to better understand and plan these zones...

Over last two decades, walkability has been increasingly recognised as a pivotal component for urban liveability and sustainability. As a result, facilitating pedestrian-friendly environments is now becoming an urgent need for many urban design and planning projects. This research investigates a computer-aided design strategy to optimise urban form...

The growing availability of spatial data heralds extensive opportunities for urban planning and design . Planning for resilience and enabling positive design outcomes requires transliterate methods of working with data and instigation of systems which can be quickly and iteratively adapted to complex multiple criteria and across multiple geographie...

This paper introduces an online spatial data portal with advanced data access, analytical and visualisation capabilities which can be used for evidence based city planning and supporting data driven research. Through a case study approach, focused in the city of Melbourne, the authors show how the Australian Urban Infrastructure Network (AURIN) por...

Urban heat island (UHI) effect is one of the most critical environmental issues for contemporary high-density cities. Previous studies show there is a strong co-relation between UHI and Sky View Factor (SVF), which constructs a potential linkage between UHI and urban forms. As cities grow denser and hotter, urban form manipulation strategies for mi...

70 years ago, Dr Ernest Fooks pointed out that urban vitality is essentially derived from human activity. He came up with a critical recognition that population is the foremost aspect of urban planning, and therefore focused his urban research on population density and its distribution --- in a more demographic perspective. In the book “X-ray the C...

Many cities are undergoing rapid urbanisation and intensification with the unintended consequence of creating dense urban fabric with deep ‘urban canyons’. Urban densification can trap longwave radiation impacting on local atmospheric conditions, contributing to the phenomena known as the Urban Heat Island (UHI). As global temperatures are predicte...

Increased urbanisation and densification is producing urban fabric with increasingly deep ‘urban canyons’, trapping longwave radiation and contributing to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon. With global temperatures along with heat related mortality predicted to increase, there is a critical need to understand urban canyons and heat retention i...

This paper discusses the challenges that designers face when modelling the anticipated behaviours of people: their movement and transactions around and within precinct scale development. Building Information Modelling (BIM) software philosophy contrasts with that of City Information Modelling (CIM)—the route by which we consider how precinct scale...

This paper details a series of collaborative, immersive Travelling Studios held in Nanjing China focused on designers working in an international context of rapid urbanisation, hyper density, cultural and industrial heritage preservation and urban renewal. The design studios were both cross disciplinary, involving masters of urban design, planning...

The role of the architect and urban designer has changed arguably becoming more significant (Madanipour, 2006). The role is multifaceted and is becoming more complex (Inam, 2011), engaging with multiple scales; a diverse range of stakeholders and policy makers; an increasing number of disciplines and areas of concern (Krieger and Saunders, 2009). A...

Major urban renewal programs including higher density and infill developments are being planned in brownfield and greyfield areas of the cities. These have increased the challenges in urban planning and management tasks. To address the challenges multi-dimensional and multi-spatial data is required to support city planners and policy-makers. There...

The time of a singular urban design vision, at least in the western world, is behind us. The mode of professional operation has changed – there is no longer a lone ‘renaissance genius’ architect setting out a clear, singular and fixed visionary ‘masterplan’ for cities1, urban design is a collaborative, messy discipline, subject to compromise. Th...

As Australia experiences record heat waves there is a critical need to better understand the potential of Urban Forestry in mitigating heat retention in cities. Melbourne's street trees continue to feel the impact of the 'millennium-drought' (1998-2007) with many irreversibly damaged and several historic boulevard plantings requiring removal over t...

Cities throughout the world are currently experiencing increased levels of urbanisation resulting in pressure for densification. Questions about the impact on mental health and general liveability are being raised in response to very dense developments proposed in many cities including Melbourne, Australia. In some cases, high density towers in clo...

Many Australian cities are currently experiencing rapid urbanisation and densification with the unintended consequence of creating dense city fabric with deep urban canyons. Dense urban areas have a profound impact on the local atmospheric conditions in particular, the urban heat island (UHI) which can increase temperatures within urban centres con...

Cities throughout the world are currently experiencing increased levels of urbanisation resulting in pressure for densification. Questions about the impact on mental health and general liveability are being raised in response to very dense developments proposed in many cities including Melbourne, Australia. In some cases, high density towers in clo...

Pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods with proximal destinations and services encourage walking and decrease car dependence, thereby contributing to more active and healthier communities. Proximity to key destinations and services is an important aspect of the urban design decision making process, particularly in areas adopting a transit-oriented devel...

1 Abstract: The term town planning implies a planar – two dimensional – method of analysis and design. For most of the 20th Century, two dimensional analysis was seen as adequate as it could deal with the planning issues of the time. With increasing density and populations; more complex land uses, a desire to improve public spaces as well as growin...

The term town planning implies a planar - two dimensional - method of analysis and design. For most of the 20th Century, two dimensional analysis was seen as adequate as it could deal with the planning issues of the time. With increasing density and populations; more complex land uses, a desire to improve public spaces as well as growing environmen...

Smart Growth planning strategies designate growth boundaries and encourage the increase of residential developments within walking distance from public transport – ‘walk-ability catchment areas’ in an attempt to contain urban sprawl and achieve more sustainable cities. These catchments are often illustrated using 400m and 800m radius circles (repre...