Our vision: from speculative towards evidence-based urban design and planning

We deem it crucial to change the way cities are planned and designed and advocate for the shift from speculative towards evidence-based urban design. 

An evidence-based approach is currently not a natural part of the design process when new neighbourhoods are planned. What is quite common instead, is to isolate a project from its context and evaluate planned neighbourhoods when the design is already completed, and it is already too late to make any changes. This can potentially have negative consequences for both the future residents and those who invest in these neighbourhoods.

Further, urban design projects often aim to create neighbourhoods that are lively and pedestrian-friendly,  – but how can we ensure that these ambitions translate into reality?

How do we know if people will actually walk on those streets? How can we identify the optimal locations for busy commercial streets or vibrant urban squares?

Empirical support: the importance of centrality and density for pedestrian movement in cities

The Urban Calculator provides analyses based on solid academic research. Extensive empirical studies have proven the significance of street centrality and urban density for pedestrian movement and various socio-economic processes in cities,– things, that planners most often advocate for when designing new neighbourhoods.

From 2017 to 2019, the Spatial Morphology Group conducted a comprehensive empirical study, collecting pedestrian movement data in 53 areas across London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm. We chose areas with different morphologies:  city centers, suburban, villa areas, and modernistic areas. Over a three-week period in October 2017, approximately 2 million observations were recorded from 846 observation points.

With this data we were able to prove that street centrality explains up to 65% of variation in pedestrian movement, and 55% of pedestrian volume is explained by the combination of building density and street centrality. When it comes to social sciences, those correlations are considered very strong. 

Possibility to modelling pedestrian flows is central when it comes to designing successful  urban environments, and this is where Urban Calculator provides invaluable support to urban designers and planners.

Read more about the study>>>