Brasilia, Brazil, 29 March - 3 April 1999
Modelling Urban Environments with Open Spaces
Bin Jiang
Central for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA)
The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies
(Torrington Place Site)
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
England
tel (44) (0)171 391 1255
fax (44) (0)171 813 2843
email b.jiang@ucl.ac.uk
www http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/
Urban environment is a special kind of geographic space, which is beyond
human perception and cannot been seen from a single viewpoint, and it
is also full of human activities compared to other types of geographic
space. For the long history, urban environments have been studied in a
variety of disciplines, e.g. urban science for urban planning and design,
geography for it representation and spatial cognition, psychology for
human spatial behaviour. This paper attempts to provide two contrast views
on modelling urban environments with closed spaces and open spaces respectively.
Space syntax used for modelling urban environments with open spaces is
mainly discussed both as a computational and cognitive model. It represents
an urban environment from what can been seen from a single viewpoint,
which is a vista space. It is also addressed importance of open spaces
modelling in studying human behaviour, therefore, it is explained why
space syntax works from the point of view of spatial cognition. An agent
based pedestrian simulation is described in exploring the impact of urban
morphology on human movement in a virtual urban environment. Based on
the previous discussion, some points are made in order to enhance space
syntax capability in modelling and analysing urban environments in the
future.
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