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Urban vitality in Madureira: Field observation and recording
Published in Pedro António Janeiro, Drawing (…) City (…) Body, Dwelling on Earth, 2019
When analyzing the Death and Life of Great Cities, Jane Jacobs (2000) demonstrates that urban vitality is related to the diversity of uses and the vibrancy of places in consonance with social interaction. According to Jacobs, the promotion of the diversity of uses of the city is the best and most effective way to fight the monotony produced by the rigid, sectorized and mono-functional modernist urban planning. This diversity would also promote security, attractiveness and interaction among city inhabitants. Jacobs observes a serious crisis in urban social life, whose impacts have reverberated in the urban spaces of the great metropolises: physical barriers, urban voids and insecurity. The immediate consequence of this urban picture is the death of spaces of sociability, or places of urban vitality, which are characterized by the natural promotion of human encounters.
Recognizing mixed urban functions from human activities using representation learning methods
Published in International Journal of Digital Earth, 2023
Junjie Hu, Yong Gao, Xuechen Wang, Yu Liu
A city is a complex system composed of various forms of functional areas (Zhong et al. 2014). Urban function is defined as the type of occurring activities and the recognized human uses of urban space (Crooks et al. 2015; Tu et al. 2017; Zhong et al. 2014), which is a key attribute within a city. Its heterogeneous distribution in a city underlies location semantics and interactions. A reliable identification of urban functions is essential to developing an understanding of locations (Hu et al. 2020, 2021; Tu et al. 2017; Yao et al. 2017). With rapid urbanization increasing in recent decades, various urban functions are integrated in a land parcel, enhancing the diversity and sophistication of urban structures (Grant 2002). This situation entails the challenge of recognizing mixed urban functions (Huang et al. 2022; Wu et al. 2018; Ye et al. 2021; Zhang et al. 2021). Previous research found that moderately mixed urban functions can promote urban compactness by providing more services in shorter distances, reducing traffic stress, and strengthening intra-community connections (Burton, Jenks, and Williams 1996; Cervero 1996). Hence, recognizing and understanding mixed urban functions is advantageous to urban planning and management. This contributes to solving urban development problems such as urban traffic jams and urban sprawl (Du et al. 2020; Hashim, Mohd Noor, and Marghany 2011), satisfying residents’ living needs, improving urban vitality, and promoting sustainable development.
Exploring the relationship between the built environment and block vitality based on multi-source big data: an analysis in Shenzhen, China
Published in Geomatics, Natural Hazards and Risk, 2022
Since Jane Jacobs put forward the concept of urban vitality, people’s understanding of this concept has been deepening, and creating a vibrant city has become the basic goal of urban planning and development, especially in the center of the city (Jacobs 1961; Montgomery 1998). However, since this concept is mainly prevalent in western countries before, and early urbanization in China was mainly rapid and low-quality expansion, improving the vitality of cities have received little attention in China’s urban planning before the twenty-first century (Ye et al. 2018). Large-scale demolition, reconstruction, and expansion not only destroy the diversity of some urban fabric but also cause problems such as residential vacancy and social segregation, which threaten the sustainability of the current urban system (Batty 2016). In recent years, with the increase of income level and housing demand, the public began to pay more attention to the quality of urban space, and the government also started a new urbanization plan aimed at improving the quality of urbanization (Wang et al. 2015). This transformation requires planners and designers to play a more active role in stimulating urban vitality and improving the quality of the built environment (Lang et al. 2016). Therefore, further study on the distribution of urban vitality and understanding of the complex relationship between urban vitality and the built environment is of great significance for urban development.