Abstract
In dense urban environments like Singapore, with limited land resources, integrated mixed use buildings are increasingly taking the form of vertical extensions of urban spaces on the ground, where circulation, land uses, open spaces, ecological networks, and human activities are distributed both laterally and vertically in different spatial arrangements, and their relationships continuously evolve. The interactions between spaces and their users in these complex and vertically integrated urban built environments are numerous and varied. Therefore, there is a need to understand how people move and use these spaces to enable effective planning and design for such spaces in future dense vertical cities. While the potential of such integrated mixed-use developments towards planning a liveable and ecologically balanced city, where density and sustainability become mutually beneficial, is widely acknowledged, there is a lack of systematic scientific studies addressing the social and spatial performance of such vertically integrated urban developments. The Thesis addresses this gap and establishes a new scientific methodology that systematically maps, analyses, and evaluates the socio-spatial performance of vertically integrated public and common green open spaces in today’s evolving dense and three dimensionally organised cities. The research initially outlines the evolving concepts of ecological approaches to planning dense, sustainable and liveable cities and the need to establish the evolving vertically integrated urban green open spaces as an integral part of the larger system of urban networks. It establishes the context of Singapore as a case for the study of a paradigm shift to science-based predictive methods for the planning and design of vertically integrated public and common green open spaces for future dense cities. The thesis then surveys the various tools and methodology used in urban network studies and their applications in understanding the user–space interactions in vertically integrated urban environments, focusing on public and common green open spaces. It establishes the limitations in existing methodology to systematically evaluate the quantitative socio-spatial performance of vertically integrated urban landscape spaces. The study further highlights the need to develop a science-based assessment framework for mapping and analysing the effective use of vertically integrated public and common green open spaces and its potential to enable sustainable and predictive planning and design of such spaces for the future. This Thesis proposes a Network Science-based spatial analysis that assesses the network connectivity of vertically integrated open spaces and their topological relationships. The proposed use of sensors, mobile devices, observations and surveys helps track the vertical movement patterns to understand impacts on actual space use. The overlay of real-world data 5 on static spatial networks reveals patterns of users’ spatio-temporal interactions. It provides a framework to validate the performance of predicted with actual space use. In the context of this Thesis, the methodology was successfully tested at the building scale in Kampung Admiralty, a recently completed building prototype in Singapore that integrates various programmes vertically: the project co-locates housing for the elderly with a wide range of social, healthcare, communal, commercial, and retail facilities along with common green open spaces like parks and garden spaces integrated into a vertically stacked multi-layered arrangement. The subsequent spatial network analysis provided conclusive outcomes on the performance of the building’s vertical network connectivity, its influence on pedestrian flows, and correlations between its spatial configurations, movement patterns, occupancy times and social space use. More broadly, this Thesis contributes to developing a new approach to urban planning and design, which harnesses the methods and tools of Complexity Science to the study of vertically organised cities. It provides a scientific basis for the predictive planning and design of future vertically integrated developments that can support higher population densities, higher environmental sustainability standards and enhanced liveability in Singapore and beyond