Art and Design Faculty Publications

In this paper we report an analysis of 118 urban areas sampled from the 12 largest metropolitan regions in the US. We deal with familiar measures of block size, street density, intersection density and distance between intersections. We also introduce two new variables, Reach and Directional Distance. Reach is the aggregate street length that can be accessed from the midpoint of each road segment subject to a limitation of distance. Directional distance is the average number of direction changes needed in order to access all the spaces within reach. We provide parametric definitions of these variables and implement their computation using new software which runs on standard GIS representations of street center lines.

A particular kind of street network is examined, where strong differentiation between scales of syntactic structure is evident: supergrids of primary roads, with inserted local streets. Computational formulae are provided to describe simple regular systems and clarify the nature of the syntactic differentiation of scales. The focus is on the linear extension of streets and also on distances measured according to direction changes. A small sample of examples from Chicago, Los Angeles, Beijing and Seoul as well as the Doxiadis plan for sector G7 of Islamabad and the Perry-Whitten neighborhood plan for New York are also analyzed, leading to estimates of a number of remarkably consistent parameters that can function as benchmarks for design exploration or theoretical experimentation. An experiment whereby the fabric of the historic centers of small French towns is inserted into a supergrid at 0.5 mile intervals is also described to explore the scale and character of inserted systems in comparison to historic urban fabrics. The work leads to a methodological proposition. Supergrids can best be conceptualized by decomposing the analysis of closeness centrality (integration) into two components: the mean directional distances associated with the supergrid as an independent system, and the mean directional distances from inserted streets to the nearest supergrid element (step depth in DepthMap). Decomposition responds to a theoretical idea: cognitive maps comprise a skeleton system relative to which other parts can be ‘placed’ and related. Decomposition also responds to a practical purpose: in order to design one must work with intuitively accessible parameters that can be controlled within the site and scope of the design.

Three children play at the center of the Amsterdam Holy Kinship, which is attributed to Geertgen tot Sint Jans or his workshop. This seemingly quotidian subject is remarkable because it shows future martyrs engaged in a game of make-believe using the implements of their torments. In this paper, I argue that the activity occupying the boys offers an invitation to spiritual play that addressed viewers and asked them to find joy in the promise of God's divine mercy and justice despite life's hardships. Given the subject matter and the identity of the artist's primary employer, it is probable that the audience included the Knights of St. John Hospitaller, an order of crusading monks, also known as the Johanniters, in Haarlem. The invitation offered in the panel not only addressed the daily work of being a monk but also offered encouragement to the Haarlem knights during a controversial period.

Review of Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance by Siona Wilson. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Cities, planning departments, and design firms are becoming more interested in promoting measures to increase the connectivity of street networks. As a result, new design guidelines have been recommended, regulations have been adopted, and yet, a clear, comprehensive understanding is still lacking for the existing environments we seek to change. This research documents the measures of 584,561 road segments and 173,511 blocks from 4,321 local areas across 24 of the most populated American cities. It also provides a means for assessing the measures of existing conditions in the American city – their central tendency and variability, relative to the suggested guidelines proposed in for practice. It provides a fundamental sense of the scale, density and directness of the road segments and blocks, as configured to form the texture of the urban fabric encountered across these American cities. Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, this work illustrates that the scales of road segment length and block area measured substantially less than the suggested maximum allowable given in the regulatory policies, and yet their density was still remarkably low. In conclusion, it calls for a review of the measures used to describe connectivity, and suggests the use of a measure of density that is contingent on both scale and configuration to policy makers to more accurately predict their desired outcome.

This work expands much of the preceding research on the measures of existing street networks and provides a foundation for continued study of urban morphology in the American city. It provides a definition for categorizing street networks based on their morphological characteristics, and it uses the categories to demonstrate inconsistencies in the interdependencies of the measures of street connectivity. In summary, it argues that the simple measures of the elements in a street network, those of road segment length and block area, are not as powerful a descriptor of street connectivity as some of the more complex or composite measures. It charges that if our intent is to increase connectivity and the directness of routes within a street network (Handy, Paterson, & Butler, 2003), then we need to use a measure, such as composite connectivity, to describe configuration.

Given trends in practice that lean towards an interdisciplinary approach, structuring a studio course, which allows for communication and exploration, is critical to ensuring our student’s success.

the spatial structure of the city of Atlanta has shifted significantly as the city grew. It emerged from a pattern of colliding grids, which bridged the railroads, and an analysis of these early maps illustrated a centrally located area of dense street connectivity distinct from the spaces that are more easily accessible in terms of direction changes – where direction changes describe cognitive rather than metric accessibility. As the city grew and additional clusters of higher local density emerged, each isolated from the other, a multi-centered city was established with ever increasing fragmentation of the Directional Reach structure.Eventually, then, the city is forced to negotiate the dispersed pattern of cognitive integration and metric density through a symbolically, culturally supported patchwork of dispersed areas of interest.

In this paper, the evolution of the Atlanta Streetcar, significant as the first major means of local public transportation for the city, is tracked and compared to those original maps of Haynie & Peponis. To track the development of the Atlanta Streetcar, a series of historic maps are selected – a summary of 1871 to 1881, a summary of 1882 to 1892, 1895, 1900, 1912, 1924, and 1933. These maps outline the various routes for the different companies managing the streetcar systems at particular points in time. Similarly, the area of focus is contained within a four-mile radius centered on downtown. The intent of the study is to reveal where and when the routes of the streetcar intersected the areas of highest metric and directional reach. The aim is to better understand the underlying influences of one upon the other and to explore whether public transportation routes reflect the cognitive, syntactic structure of the city.

The findings reveal that the early growth of the streetcar followed the shifting core cognitive structure of the city more often than the emerging metric densities. Thus, it can be argued that perhaps one becomes a “lagging indicator” of sorts for the other, particularly when the adaptation of the structure was left to its natural economic tendencies and not directed by outside political influences. This dependency is further verified by the shared location of the most profitable streetcar line in the system and the most consistently identified street within the core cognitive structure. Ironically, as the city began to noticeably and significantly fragment, the measured success of the streetcar began to collapse as well.

Carson has argued in his 1981 book, The Trolley Titans, that the demise of the streetcar resulted from a multitude of factors – the cost of the infrastructure and associated maintenance, the lack of flexibility in setting routes, fixed fares, labor disputes, and the introduction of the jitney bus and motor coach as competition. Preston has argued in his 1979 book, Automobile Age Atlanta: The making of a southern metropolis, that the collapse of the streetcar can be attributed to the accessibility and affordability of the individual automobile. The results here suggest that perhaps the true demise lies in the streetcars’ ineffectiveness to align with the core cognitive structure of the city coupled with the decentralized, fragmented, and ever-shifting structure of the city.

terms of their structural street properties, measures of scale or density, and proximity to the metropolitan center (Cervero and Gorham, 1995, Crane and Crepeau, 1998, French and Scoppa, 2007, Handy et al., 2003, Jacobs, 1993, Peponis et al., 2007, Southworth and Owens, 1993); yet beyond the established and distinctive structures of these neighborhoods, few have analyzed, in depth, the variability in their measures. This study randomly samples 4,321 localities from the 24 largest American metropolitan areas and describes a method using the measures of length and area to evaluate the variability both between and within these localities. Calculated as the standard deviation of mean scale, Inter Buffer Variability is introduced to describe the variation between these localities while Intra Buffer Variability describes the variation, or consistency, within these localities. How varied then are the measures of scale, and are the measures for some MSAs more varied than others? As will be shown, the MSA Inter Buffer Variability for both length and area are broad, which is expected given both the urban and suburban localities captured across each MSA; and yet, the MSA Intra Buffer Variability is also broad suggesting more variation within these localities than originally suggested by the samples illustrated within the literature. Comparatively for each measure of length and area, both Inter and Intra Buffer Variability are graphed one in relation to the other with their associated means used to delineate those trending higher or lower than average. Interestingly, four quadrants emerge distinctively delineating the measures of scale for these MSAs.

In this paper we report an analysis of 118 urban areas sampled from the 12 largest metropolitan regions in the US. We deal with familiar measures of block size, street density, intersection density and distance between intersections. We also introduce two new variables, Reach and Directional Distance. Reach is the aggregate street length that can be accessed from the midpoint of each road segment subject to a limitation of distance. Directional distance is the average number of direction changes needed in order to access all the spaces within reach. We provide parametric definitions of these variables and implement their computation using new software which runs on standard GIS representations of street center lines.