Tony Chester

This paper studies the city of Canterbury and its urban fabric centered within the footprint of the old walls, This paper seeks to test the relatively new ideas of new urbanism and its principles on the city. New urbanism is a relatively new movement that bases its design theory and practice on cities and urban fabrics that date prior to the first half of the twentieth century as historic precedents to inform the design of human scale pedestrian friendly urban layouts. This paper is divided into three distinct parts that contribute to the study. The first half will establish the underlying theories and principles of new urbanism which will be the fundamental driving force of the dissertation. This section will also cover the geographical and historical context of Canterbury and establish the parameters and methodology of the study. The second part will involve the testing of principles which relate to the walkability, inteligibility and urban layout of the city which can be mapped and analysed using the isovists software developed by Sam McElhinney and Michael Benedikt to identify and discuss spatial configurations and layouts within the city. Thirdly, the remaining principles which are relevant to the study will be tested through a methodology of first-hand spatial exploration, photography and data mapping to experience the city at a pedestrian scale. The conclusion will summarise the results collected and establish an answer to the main question of this stufy. This paper hopes to contribute to the contemporary debates of urban planning and design by looking to the past for answers to present and future urban challenges, promoting transit oriented design, mixed use spaces and traditional neighbourhood structures.

The following dissertation is interested in the analysis of the spatial typologies of architecture schools using a combined methodology of Justified permeability graphs (B Hillier and J Hanson 1984) and Visual graph analysis (B Hillier 1996), in order to understand and visualise similarities and differences in the configurations and social hierarchies of particular spaces within schools of architecture, therefore interpreting their perceived necessity or desirability. Such data could then be utilised to determine the success of future designs incorporating the foundations of space syntax.

One of the key methodologies utilised in this paper for the analysis of visual graphs is the Isovist_App_version_2.4, developed jointly by Sam McElhinney and Michael Benedikt (S McElhinney 2020) The software computes the properties of an isovist within a given spatial configuration and its relation to other isovists to render fields across Imported DWG drawings to provide a graphical representation of a selected metric via heatmap spectrum mapping (Anthony Chester 2019). The software gives us the ability to analyse and compare what would otherwise seem like visually uninteresting building plans such that it would be able to simulate a user’s experience of being within the spatial configuration via the comparison of isovist generated heatmaps, allowing for the opportunity to extract sociological themes in support of the results.

This dissertation first delves into core texts listed in the literature review to describe and explain key ideas, underlining recurring characteristics, and subsequently creating and submitting the chosen samples through the highlighted methodologies. Definitions for relevant VGA metric scans will be provided and discussed to demonstrate the suitability of each metric for potentially supporting the subconscious social behaviour of a user. The results of the scans and JPG exercise will then be examined in order to determine social and spatial hierarchies of functions within the chosen samples. The findings in this paper hope to contribute to contemporary discussions of space syntax, its application to the spatial typologies of architecture schools and the development of suitable core practicalities for designing spatial configurations via interior spatial analysis.