Walkability and built environment

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Art - Architecture / History of Construction, Deakin University, language: English, abstract: Car-centric urban design practice, the principle with which most cities in the world are being built today or since mid-century of 20th century, is affecting the essence of human-scale design or pedestrian friendly/ walkable friendly design. With the rise of numerous problems already in the world with excessive use of non-renewable energy, the talks and discussions are being conducted for the ways of reduction of use of non-renewable energy on global basis, or for the formulation of alternative ways of high use of energy. Not only from problems-related-with-energy perspective, but from social, health, and economic viewpoint as well, just prioritising car-driven approach seems to no longer serve the built environment in a positive way. Several planners, designers and built environment professionals have put forwarded words to re-think about the way urban environments are being built today, and new approaches of prioritising from human-scale perspective i.e. pedestrian or walkable friendly built environment to be explored and given a thought. This research paper concentrates on investigating the deeper understanding about walkable friendly urban environment, the need of today's world.

In this paper, framework that shows the relationship of walking activity and behaviour with surrounding physical features, is derived from literature review for the systematic visual assessment. There is no clear and a comprehensive understanding about one particular way that depicts influencing factors of walkability, the corelates between the urban environment and walking behaviour not explained clearly, or if explained the method is somewhat complex and inflexible. Throughout existing knowledge in literature, there is lack of one consistent method of assessment. This research has attempted in finding simpler methods/solution, incorporating with existing knowledge and methods to investigate underlying factors possibly informing about the degree of walkability scale of an urban environment. The study of observation is done on the commercial streets in the central Geelong with the selection of variety of streets form and functions.