1. SPACE AND SOCIETY
The Role of Configurational Analyses for Planning and Design of
Public Spaces
Maria Rosália Guerreiro
Department of Architecture and Urbanism & CIES-IUL
ISCTE – IUL
rosalia.guerreiro@iscte.pt
2. “It is difficult to design
a space that will not
attract people. What
is remarkable is how
often this has been
accomplished”WILLIAM WHYTE
• My question is: Why?
3. • There has always been a tension between those who study the city and those
who practice its planning and design. This has led to a divorce between theory
and practice. But, each time the complexity of the urban problems are bigger.
And they cannot be solved by intuitive methods.
• The difficulty of understanding the urban space is because the city encompasses
the interaction of spatial, economic, social, cultural and cognitive. And in the
past, no planning model existed to integrate these complex interactions.
• Cities are complex systems and consequently they cannot be entirely
predictable: “A complex system is one in which elements interact and affect
each other so that it is difficult to separate the behaviour of individual
elements.” (Gershenson, 2008).
• However cities are not completely preditable, they are not totally unpredictable
too. They are as much about rational top-down design (IMPOSED ORDER) as
about self-organization (EMERGENT ORDER).
• In history, planning has been much more interested in rational design. I believe
that the study of self-organization can help to design good urban spaces.
4. “It is difficult to design
a space that will not
attract people. What
is remarkable is how
often this has been
accomplished”WILLIAM WHYTE
• My question is: Why?
5. What is order?
The image represents two kinds of order:
planned or imposed by a mental process
and emergent or self-organized in a
spontaneous process.
At the top, the order imposed by a
spectacle where people and chairs are
organized according to the repetition of
regular parts with the same intervals – the
whole is the sum of its parts - it is a top-
down, imposed and simple order.
At the bottom, we see a new kind of order
created by the relation between people –
the whole is more than the sum of its
parts – It is a bottom-up, emergent, and
complex order.
C. Doxiadis, Ekistics, 1968
6. • The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: The way that parts are put together
to form the whole is more important than any other parts taken in isolation
• The unique characteristics of the individual are irrelevant to the character of the
whole
Wholeness – relationships vs objects
C. Alexander, The nature of the order, 2003
7. C. Doxiadis, Ekistics, 1968
Ubiquity
If people think and plants don´t, why social flows and natural flows have the same
pattern?
9. • In the last decades a serie of theories as emerged to study this kind of order. It
has been called a new science paradigm because it doesn´t separate to
understand
• Complexity theory approaches the problem from many different points of
view. It is an umbrella over many disciplines which make them dialogue (in
special the social and the natural sciences)
• CTC – Complexity Theories of Cities: Space syntax, Cellular automata,
Network theories, Fractal cities, Synergetics, Biomimecry, etc.
complexity theory
10. SPATIAL
PATTERNS
SOCIAL
LIFE
SPATIAL
LIVE
SPACE SYNTAX is about the relationship beetwen space and society. It is “the social
content of spatial patterns and the spatial content of social patterns”
Advocated by Bill Hillier and Julliene Hanson from the 70s, is now a consistent theory
that provides clear evidence of how humans perceive and use the urban environment.
Consequently, it allows us to qualify and quantify how architecture affects people's lives.
The method consists on identifying patterns of spatial relationships which drive the co-
presence and movement of persons. These patterns are then translated by a quantitative
and mathematical manner which represents a virtual community.
12. • Praça Paiva Couceiro, Lisbon
• An hub in the city network
13. • SHARED SPACE - pedestrian and car are not incompatible
• Plaza Paiva Couceiro is an island between four lanes, but the pedestrian and the
car are very well synchronized through the crosswalks (despite it could be better)
15. • Visual graphic analyses – it established the relationship of visibility between
each point, to every other points in the system
• Colors show quantities, from the highest (red) to the lowest (blue)
16. • The amount of visibility (isovist) matters for the use of public spaces
• “the street corners are great public spaces” (William Whyte, 1980). They have
bigger isovists
• On the contray, “a space that cannot be seen is not used”
• Good visibility is also important for the use and acess to the plaza
17. • Step depth– the shortest path
before 2010 after 2010
26. “Seeing – a matter of distance”
GEHL (1987)
The social field of vision –
0 a 100 metros
30 meters –physical perception
< 25 metros – spiritual perception
Plaza = 20 x 50 meters
