MODULE II

Behavioural issues in urban design:

Social ecological models state that there are a variety of contexts —individual,

interpersonal, organizational and community—that operate at multiple levels to

influence action; Environmental contexts (i.e., urban design characteristics such as

street design, mixing of land uses, public spaces, sidewalks, bike lanes)

Hillier et al (1987, p.233) find that “spatial layout in itself generates a field of

probabilistic encounter, with structural properties that vary with the syntax of the

layout.”

Ittelson et al (1974, p.358) suggest that “All buildings imply at least some form of

social activity stemming from both their intended function and the random

encounters they may generate. The arrangement of partitions, rooms, doors,

windows, and hallways serves to encourage or hinder communication and, to this

extent, affects social interaction. This can occur at any number of levels and the

designer is clearly in control to the degree that he plans the contact points and

lanes of access where people come together. He might also, although with perhaps

less assurance, decide on the desirability of such contact.”

Most architectural patterns for influencing behaviour involve, in one way or another,

the physical arrangement of building elements—inside or outside—or a change in

material properties.

Most patterns involve either the physical arrangement of building elements—

positioning, angling, splitting up, hiding, etc—or a change in material properties,

either to change people‟s perceptions of what behaviour is possible or appropriate,

perhaps by reinforcing or embodying social norms, or to force certain behaviour to

occur or not occur

▶ There are also patterns around aspects of surveillance—designing layouts which

facilitate or prevent visibility of activity between groups of people

Examples:

Osmond (1959) introduced the terms sociofugal and sociopetal to describe

spaces which drive people apart and together, respectively; Sommer (1969,

Title End Means

30 Activity nodes To “create concentrations

of people in a community”

“Facilities must be grouped densely

round very small public squares which

can function as nodes—with all

pedestrian movement in the community

organized to pass through these nodes”

53 Main gateways To influence inhabitants of a

part of a town to identify it

as a distinct entity

“Mark every boundary in the city which

has important human meaning—the

boundary of a building cluster, a

neighborhood, a precinct—by great

gateways where the major entering

paths cross the boundary”

68 Connected play To “support the formation of

spontaneous play groups”

for children

“Lay out common land, paths, gardens

and bridges so that groups of at least 64

households are connected by a swath of

land that does not cross traffic. Establish

this land as the connected play space for

the children in these households”

139 Farmhouse

kitchen

To help “all the members of

the family… to accept, fully,

the fact that taking care of

themselves bycooking is as

much a part of life as taking

care of themselves

by eating”

“Make the kitchen bigger than usual, big

enough to include the „family room‟

space, and place it near the center of

the commons, not so far back in the

house as an ordinary kitchen. Make it

large enough to hold a good table and

chairs, some soft and some hard, with

counters and stove and sink around the

edge of the room; and make it a bright

and comfortable room”

151 Small meeting

rooms

To encourage smaller group

meetings, which encourage

people to contribute and

make their point of view

heard

“Make at least 70 per cent of all meeting

rooms really small—for 12 people or less.

Locate them in the most public parts of

the building, evenly scattered among the

workplaces”

1974) notes that airports are often among the most sociofugal spaces, largely

because of the fixed, single-direction seating and “sterile” decor: “Many

other buildings… such as mental hospitals and jails, also discourage contact

between people, but none does this as effectively as the airport… In practice

the long corridors and the cold, bare waiting areas of the typical airport are

more sociofugal than the isolation wing of the state penitentiary.

One emergent behaviour-related concept arising from architecture and

planning which has also found application in human-computer interaction is

the idea of desire lines, desire paths or cowpaths. The usual current use of the

term (often attributed, although apparently in error, to Bachelard‟s The

Poetics of Space (1964)) is to describe paths worn by pedestrians across

spaces such as parks, between buildings or to avoid obstacles—“the foot-

worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time” (Mathes, 2004)

and which become self-reinforcing as subsequent generations of pedestrians

follow what becomes an obvious path.

As Myhill (2004) puts it, “[a]n optimal way to design pathways in accordance

with natural human behaviour, is to not design them at all. Simply plant grass

seed and let the erosion inform you about where the paths need to be.

Stories abound of university campuses being constructed without any

pathways to them.”

“I was aware that I could be watched from above…and that it was possible

to go much higher—to become one of the watchers—but I didn‟t see how it

could be done. The architecture embodied a political message: There are

people higher than you, and they can watch you, follow you—and,

theoretically, you can join them, become one of them. Unfortunately you

don‟t know how.”

Geoff Manaugh, The BLDG BLOG Book (2009, p.17

City layouts have been used strategically to try to prevent disorder and make

it easier to put down. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann‟s “militaristically

planned Paris” (Hatherley, 2008, p. 11), remodelled for Louis Napoléon (later

Napoléon III) after 1848, had “[t]he true goal of…secur[ing] the city against

civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades in Paris impossible for

all time… Widening the streets is designed to make the erection of barricades

impossible, and new streets are to furnish the shortest route between the

barracks and the workers‟ districts.” (Benjamin, 1935/1999, p. 12). The

Haussmann project also involved “the planning of straight avenues as a

method of crowd control (artillery could fire down them at barricaded

masses)” (Rykwert, 2000, p.91).

Disciplinary architecture:

“Where the homeless are ejected from business and retail areas by such

measures as curved bus benches, window-ledge spikes and doorway

sprinkler systems, so skaters encounter rough-textured surfaces, spikes and

bumps added to handrails, blocks of concrete placed at the foot of banks,

chains across ditches and steps, and new, unridable surfaces such as gravel

and sand.”

Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City (2001, p.254)

Changes in material properties can involve drawing attention to particular

behaviour (e.g. rumble strips on a road to encourage drivers to slow down:

Harvey, 1992), or making it more or less comfortable to do an activity (e.g., as

Katyal (2002, p.1043) notes, “fast food restaurants use hard chairs that quickly

grow uncomfortable so that customers rapidly turn over”)