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Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level activities to their surrounding urban forms - A case study of the city of Weimar, Germany

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In this paper, we discuss a few methods for mapping the location of urban activities. We focus on establishing the geometrical relationship between the frontages of urban activities and their morphological context. Frontages act as the interface between the users of the public space and the activities within its surrounding buildings. Studying how this interface connects to the surrounding is not a trivial task. It could give different results if we use different units or other mapping methods due to a known error caused by two main effects of the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem; the zoning effect and the scale effect. The first is concerned with the choice of sizes for the analysis area, and the second is the mapping method applied to the analysis unit. We introduce in this paper a few methods to facilitate the ease of establishing relations between frontages data for spatial queries and statistical inferential. It provides a platform to connect between different urban activities and urban forms like retail activity to a street or accessibility value to a specific type of service. Using this method on the street-level activities data collected in Weimar, Germany, we demonstrate how to bring together more detailed information on the urban retail centres and their connection to the local built environment.
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Proceedings of the 13th Space Syntax Symposium
Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level activities to their surrounding urban forms - A
case study of the city of Weimar, Germany 1
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Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level
activities to their surrounding urban forms
A case study of the city of Weimar, Germany
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In this paper, we discuss a few methods for mapping the location of urban activities. We focus on
establishing the geometrical relationship between the frontages of urban activities and their
morphological context. Frontages act as the interface between the users of the public space and
the activities within its surrounding buildings. Studying how this interface connects to the
surrounding is not a trivial task. It could give different results if we use different units or other
mapping methods due to a known error caused by two main effects of the Modifiable Areal Unit
Problem; the zoning effect and the scale effect. The first is concerned with the choice of sizes for
the analysis area, and the second is the mapping method applied to the analysis unit. We
introduce in this paper a few methods to facilitate the ease of establishing relations between
frontages data for spatial queries and statistical inferential. It provides a platform to connect
between different urban activities and urban forms like retail activity to a street or accessibility
value to a specific type of service. Using this method on the street-level activities data collected
in Weimar, Germany, we demonstrate how to bring together more detailed information on the
urban retail centres and their connection to the local built environment.
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Active Urban Frontages, Spatial data query
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The interaction between the public and private space in the city is encapsulated in the spatial
organisation of active building frontages. Frontages are parts of the building façade that is visible
Proceedings of the 13th Space Syntax Symposium
Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level activities to their surrounding urban forms - A
case study of the city of Weimar, Germany 2
and accessible from the street level. And the active part refers to frontage status, either a solid
wall or a windowed one where people can see the activity inside.
Frontages interface between the human and the city spaces through their street-level floors. Due
to the horizontal nature of the human field of view, street-level frontages are more easily
noticeable than any other building part. In addition to a distance constraint of around 100 meters,
any object is less recognisable to the naked eye (Gehl 1987, Gehl & Svarre 2013). This renders
the building frontage's importance inarguable, as it is of the highest value to the livelihood of the
city streets (Alexander et al. 1977, Whyte 1988).
When a frontage has an active function visible from the street, it is called an active frontage.
When an active frontage exists in a location, it indicates that there is a probability that another
active frontage is nearby, and the opposite is true. Therefore, if more inactive frontages are
present, then the frontages will become less the further we move away. This is mainly due to the
geographical relationship between objects in nature, as similar things are found in closer
proximity (Tobler 1970). This means that any reduction in active frontages is evidence of
reaching the city's edge of the shopping zone (Jacobs 1961, 2016).
Kickert (2016) emphasises that we should categorise buildings according to their street frontages
status. It encourages either side to interact with the public space (from inside to outside or the
reverse). As ignoring the frontage attractiveness will reflect on the streets' privacy and
walkability as the interaction between the buildings and the direct street frontage is disconnected
(Karimi 2009, van Nes & Yamu 2021).
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When researching urban activities, the first category of information that should be collected is if
the mapped activity is allocated on the street level or not. A building with one activity will result
in one entrance and regular windows. And buildings with multiple activities will have a retail
space with separate entrances and an entrance for the upper part of the building.
This upper part can also have multiple functions, favouring a hierarchy of information. For
example, the building with multiple uses could host two retail spaces at the street level, one
office space on the 1st floor, and the rest of the floors as residential.
Other buildings could have a single-use for residential or offices. Single-use that are not Retail,
Food or Personal services does not usually try to attract the attention of the street visitors and,
therefore, will typically be without a valuable façade. A Street-Frontage-Line could be
accompanied by a percentage value to map the frontage ratio dedicated to a specific function.
The method of mapping visible functions to the street segment is previously presented by
Schneider et al. (2017). It was necessary to prove the correlation between local centrality and the
number of commercial activities. But since our objective here is to map the relationship between
Proceedings of the 13th Space Syntax Symposium
Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level activities to their surrounding urban forms - A
case study of the city of Weimar, Germany 3
different shops and other shops, it became more challenging since the shop's location is governed
by the access from a specific building façade to another shop on a particular building façade.
Therefore, mapping building frontages became more crucial to this analysis.
The location of urban activities requires the understanding of relational data; since the location is
directly connected to both the location it occupies and the context in which this activity exists
(hence, surrounding streets, buildings, and other activities they host). This relation starts from the
information available about the activity, then its location and ends with how this location is
situated within its surrounding. This relative location of the activities here is called Positioning or
Relative location, which includes distance or arrangement (Anselin 1988).
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Iacono et al. (2010) highlighted the need for easy access to higher resolution land use data. As
most of the information about land use is hard to obtain, due to this information being collected
by private investors. And since we have our own collected data, as well as the maps available
from the state, it was crucial that we set up a system to facilitate the ease of access to higher
detailed data. This presented multiple challenges regarding how the data should be formatted and
mapped to the geometry?
Moreover, How can this data be used in different contexts while still keeping the integrity of the
information?. Talen and Jeong (2019) pointed to a large gap in detailed information about the
relation between urban function and urban form. As most of the data urban planners have are
large scale zoning data. This is also a crucial of urban studies as it can support a better sustanible
life for the city inhabitants (Bobkova el al. 2019).
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Openshaw (1983) and Wong (2004) have pointed to a common problem in any spatial analysis
process in Physical Geography. Since different studies could be applied to the same area over
time, some problems in the analysis units would need to be addressed. Two main effects were
gathered under the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). First is the problem of defining the
study area boundary called the zoning effect. And second is the change of the analysis unit design
or type called the scaling effect. (Clark and Scott 2014, Brownson et al. 2009, Handy 2005).
Brownson et al. (2009) have found that different scales of the unit of analysis will lead to
different information about the study. We will evade this problem by connecting the data to all
the possible units of analysis available for the study. Therefore all the streets will be connected to
the Blocks, Plots, and buildings, including their related attributes.
A particular hierarchy should be considered to facilitate this transfer to transfer the information
about the location between the relevant geometries. The method used is inspired by the work of
Proceedings of the 13th Space Syntax Symposium
Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level activities to their surrounding urban forms - A
case study of the city of Weimar, Germany 4
Lee and Hardy (2005), in specific, the topological relationship among urban geometry features
like ensuring shared geometry and considering interfering features.
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Each research defines the area of research, which can differ between studies. In our study, we
simply connect all the geometries to each other. This facilitates the transfer of information
between different geometries, as well as documents the information inside each element. Which
facilitates easy information retrieval.
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We are starting with the location of the functions within buildings and passing through different
scales of the units, from the smaller to the larger ones. We consider a shop space as a starting
area within the building. Still, since any information about the internal configuration or occupied
area is challenging to obtain, we decided to use the frontage as the smallest unit of analysis.
Figure 1: Built environment units and their corresponding information
First, we define the frontage as a building edge that can be seen from the street directly in front
of the building.
Each frontage is then categorised into Activated and Deactivated frontages as the following:
A frontage could be activated or deactivated. A deactivated frontage is a rule-
governed by the street type (if a building has a deactivated frontage, it will deactivate
based on the information from the street).
A frontage that overlooks a neighbouring plot is considered deactivated.
Due to the nature of frontages and their relation to the street, other conditions should be
considered when selecting the functions of frontages:
A building could have a ground floor with either residential or functional activity.
Proceedings of the 13th Space Syntax Symposium
Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level activities to their surrounding urban forms - A
case study of the city of Weimar, Germany 5
A residential frontage could also host an office or a service function like a clinic, and
both do not require a frontage on the street and therefore are treated as residential.
A mixed-use building with residential has a frontage located on the address street
regardless of the deactivation condition,
It is observed that the building entrances are located far from the centre of the
frontage (closer to the building edge/corner).
Bielik (2020) highlights that by mapping the building function to the directly accessible street,
we lose some part of the information due to the type of the mapping method. This error is due to
the nature of spatial data and the method used for aggregation.
Figure 2: Aggregating building functions using front building edges a) Building address b) Frontage edge
centre c) Each Frontage edge to its nearest street d) Function-based edge separation e) each edge to its
street function-based (Adopted from Bielik, 2020)
For the case of aggregating frontages, we have found five scenarios in total. First in figure 2a is
the address aggregation; this is based on the city given location identifier for each building in the
city. This method locates the main entrance to the building, specifically the residential entrance.
Figure 2b highlights the closest street aggregation where all the frontage edges are accessed from
the average location. Third, figure 2c is the normalised frontages based on their access to their
closest entrance. Fourth in figure 2d where we detail the frontage edges by the functions behind
them, we normalise the aggregation by the total frontage length of each function. Finally, figure
Proceedings of the 13th Space Syntax Symposium
Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level activities to their surrounding urban forms - A
case study of the city of Weimar, Germany 6
2e shows another version of normalising the frontages by the function, but this also maps each
edge of each function to their corresponding closes street segment.
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In the following, we discuss some remarks that need to be considered when connecting the city
geometry to facilitate transferring information between them. To connect the function of the
building to other geometries, we consider the following conditions:
A function is a space on the ground floor of the building and has an entrance from the
street, not through shared access with the residential/upper functions.
Each function has a unique ID and street ID/s of the entrance/s.
A function could have a frontage on many streets.
Each street is considered secondary except the main entrance street, even if there are
multiple entrances.
A frontage could be mapped to the street in three methods: each frontage to its
corresponding street, each frontage with an entrance to the entrance street or all the
frontages to one main entrance street.
A function could exist in many buildings; we use the function ID to combine relative
function information.
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The data collected comes from two sources, the open Geodata of the Thuringian state in Germany
and empirical data from mapping the city geometry and the activities within them. We first
collect the basic geometrical data about the city using two sources of open Geodata, the street
network from the crowdfunded OpenStreetMap and the buildings and plots from the Open
Official Geodata of the state Thuringia, Germany. Then we merge both data as the difference in
quality does not affect any later analysis of them (Krenz 2017).
Validating the data after the organisation is crucial, even if the effort is minimal, either by a site
visit or by other online sources like google streetview (Law et al. 2017, Serra-Coch et al. 2018).
Since our access to the city location is more feasible, all our notes and edits were driven mainly
by the result of the site visits.
Proceedings of the 13th Space Syntax Symposium
Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level activities to their surrounding urban forms - A
case study of the city of Weimar, Germany 7
Figure 3: Information to note when selecting the unit of analysis (a1&2) shows a plots/block boundary
defining problem that prevents a path and a function on that path from being detected due to being under a
building. (b1&2) showing a street with no active frontages directly attached to a very active street.
Proceedings of the 13th Space Syntax Symposium
Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level activities to their surrounding urban forms - A
case study of the city of Weimar, Germany 8
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Figure 4 Frontage's length (Left) Retail frontages in Purple, and Cultural and service frontages in Green.
(Right) Boxplot of the length of frontage of both the retail and cultural/services.
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By selecting two types of frontages based on their street visibility, we can compare them using
maps visualisation or statistical plots, as shown in figure 4.
In figure 5, we can also access all the information regarding the frontages and compare all the
types of activities to their surrounding ones.
Figure 5 All frontage types Residential only (Red), Residential entrance (lite red), Service and Cultural
(Green), Service and Cultural entrances (lite green), retail (Gradient purple for the same buildings)
Proceedings of the 13th Space Syntax Symposium
Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level activities to their surrounding urban forms - A
case study of the city of Weimar, Germany 9
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What accessibility components (Attraction and impedance) can explain. Gravity measures
distance as impedance (activity/distance)(Bielik, 2020 and Bhat et al, 2002).
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Where Ai is the Gravity-based accessibility at the location I, Oj is the opportunity/attractivity of
the destination within a range of r, in our case, is the Active Frontage Length at destination
(AFLj), the distance decay function is the negative exponential function with the beta coefficient
for the city of Weimar is β = 0.00138 (Bielik, 2020). The dij is the metric or Euclidian distance
between the origin i, and the distention j.
Figure 6 Gravity of retail frontages (building edges) and local between betweenness centrality (Street
Segments)
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In this paper, we demonstrate how the frontage data could be used to bring together more detailed
information on the urban retail centres and their connection to the local built environment. Due to
Proceedings of the 13th Space Syntax Symposium
Mapping active frontages: a method for linking street-level activities to their surrounding urban forms - A
case study of the city of Weimar, Germany 10
also being in a parametric environment, this method provides direct access to many types of
information from both the result and the different parts of the process.
In addition, since the data is structured in a hierarchy that could be reversed, all the information
from the detailed to the larger scale of the model could be reversed and mapped from the larger
parts to the smaller ones. Considering the mapping method in the analysis, this could facilitate
the ease of accessing and relating the same information on many scales of the city geometry,
which can lead to more room for detailed research about the nature of urban retail spaces in the
city.
This method has some challenges and obstacles that will need further development. For example,
the data supplied by the state have a lot of missing information about the state of ground floor
activities in a building that does not have access to the streets. This is due to them being merged
in reality but still having separate geometry in the city database. This is manageable to overcome
in smaller cities like Weimar but might be difficult in larger ones. Another example is the private
streets and under paths of the street networks. Although some of this information was available in
the city, something like private paths could introduce some conflicts if the research question is
about the public accessibility of the spaces.
Finally, we are looking forward to using the connected data generated in more advanced spatial
statistics applications. This could add more significant information about the microeconomics
aspects of the retail frontages and their local relations. This could be done using the Spatial
Autocorrelation analysis using the available frontage parameters as features and their linkages as
weights.'
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Chapter
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In this chapter, we discuss the application of space syntax in consultancyforurbanplanningdesign and practice. First, we present the scientific challenges to tying general understandings and theoriesto urban planning and design practice. Some elementary principles for communicating results from research and theories to practitioners are demonstrated. We further explain the principles for successful master planning and the principles for designing vital and safe public realms related to the use of space syntax. This is followed by a discussion on how to avoid common errors when planning for vital neighbourhoods and cities. We present examples from practice where space syntax has played a major role. These include regenerating Trafalgar Square in London, evaluating various proposals for a new road link in the Dutch city of Leiden, developing strategies for the whole province of North Holland, and densification strategies in the Norwegian town of Bergen. In the conclusion, we discuss major pitfalls when applying space syntax to urban design and planning projects in practice. Exercises are provided at the end of the chapter.
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Conference Paper
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Thuringia -a federal state in Germany- is characterized by a low-density settlement structure with 65% of its urban population living in cities with less than 25,000 inhabitants. In order to develop plans for the future of this region of Germany, it is necessary to understand how such small cities work, and how their spatial structure influences the life of their inhabitants. One crucial aspect thereby is the movement of people that is on the one hand shaped by the urban form, and on the other shapes how spaces are used. For our study, we selected three small cities, having a population of approximately 10.000 inhabitants. In these cities, we collected empirical data describing different modes of movement and the uses of each building in each city. Finally, we investigate the relationship between the empirical data and the configuration of the spatial structure of these cities. The results of this study confirm a relationship between street network configuration, movement, as well as use of commercial space in small cities. Nevertheless, this relationship also has its specificities, in regards to the proximity of spaces on the local level, which needs to be considered in the process of spatial analysis.
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