Built environment

About: Built environment is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11288 publications have been published within this topic receiving 206939 citations. The topic is also known as: architectural environment & artificial environment.

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

Abstract: You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

Travel and the Built Environment

Abstract: Problem: Localities and states are turning to land planning and urban design for help in reducing automobile use and related social and environmental costs. The effects of such strategies on travel demand have not been generalized in recent years from the multitude of available studies. Purpose: We conducted a meta-analysis of the built environment-travel literature existing at the end of 2009 in order to draw generalizable conclusions for practice. We aimed to quantify effect sizes, update earlier work, include additional outcome measures, and address the methodological issue of self-selection. Methods: We computed elasticities for individual studies and pooled them to produce weighted averages. Results and conclusions: Travel variables are generally inelastic with respect to change in measures of the built environment. Of the environmental variables considered here, none has a weighted average travel elasticity of absolute magnitude greater than 0.39, and most are much less. Still, the combined effect o...

Travel demand and the 3ds: density, diversity, and design

Abstract: The built environment is thought to influence travel demand along three principal dimensions —density, diversity, and design. This paper tests this proposition by examining how the ‘3Ds’ affect trip rates and mode choice of residents in the San Francisco Bay Area. Using 1990 travel diary data and land-use records obtained from the U.S. census, regional inventories, and field surveys, models are estimated that relate features of the built environment to variations in vehicle miles traveled per household and mode choice, mainly for non-work trips. Factor analysis is used to linearly combine variables into the density and design dimensions of the built environment. The research finds that density, land-use diversity, and pedestrian-oriented designs generally reduce trip rates and encourage non-auto travel in statistically significant ways, though their influences appear to be fairly marginal. Elasticities between variables and factors that capture the 3Ds and various measures of travel demand are generally in the 0.06 to 0.18 range, expressed in absolute terms. Compact development was found to exert the strongest influence on personal business trips. Within-neighborhood retail shops, on the other hand, were most strongly associated with mode choice for work trips. And while a factor capturing ‘walking quality’ was only moderately related to mode choice for non-work trips, those living in neighborhoods with grid-iron street designs and restricted commercial parking were nonetheless found to average significantly less vehicle miles of travel and rely less on single-occupant vehicles for non-work trips. Overall, this research shows that the elasticities between each dimension of the built environment and travel demand are modest to moderate, though certainly not inconsequential. Thus it supports the contention of new urbanists and others that creating more compact, diverse, and pedestrian-orientated neighborhoods, in combination, can meaningfully influence how Americans travel.

Built environment correlates of walking: a review.

Abstract: Introduction:The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in empirical investigation into the relations between built environment and physical activity. To create places that facilitate and encourage walking, practitioners need an understanding of the specific characteristics of the built en