Thesis

Resilience and urban design : a systems approach to the study of resilience in urban form : learning from the case of the Gorbals

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Awarding institution
  • University of Strathclyde
Date of award
  • 2018
Thesis identifier
  • T15083
Person Identifier (Local)
  • 201379162
Qualification Level
Qualification Name
Department, School or Faculty
Abstract
  • As cities grow in scale and complexity, their social, economic and institutional organisation, as well as their physical structure will be increasingly exposed to pressures for change. Contextually, the form of cities will also be called to fulfil new emerging needs, which might be considerably - when not completely - different from those it was originally designed to respond to. Indeed, the extent to which the form of cities can resist to, adapt to or co-evolve with context will affect the ability of urban systems to survive. The design, management and transformation of urban forms is a central theme in Urban Design both as an academic discipline and as a professional practice. However, if urban design is to be part of the solution, it must reconsider several fundamentals of its conventional way of seeing the world and identify new theoretical and operational tools to create places that are adaptable, durable and desirable in the long term for generations to come. The current thesis suggests that the notion of “evolutionary resilience”, here intended as the capacity of the interacting social, economic, environmental and physical sub-systems in cities to endure and even thrive in the face of external challenges and internal transformations “can provide some theoretical perspectives for addressing design challenges for built environments” (Anderies, 2014: 130) and offer “a new vocabulary for thinking about place-making based on evolutionary change” (Scott, 2013: 430). However, at present, in the vocabulary of urban designers, resilience is a very immature concept and is far from reaching a solid and operational status. Part of the reason for this is that whilst urban design, both as a discipline and as a profession, relies on the medium of urban form to act in the urban system, the resilience of cities is rarely discussed as a matter of urban form and resilience scholarship pays little attention to the role of the micro-scale morphological structure of cities in building resilience. Consequently, the concept of resilience in urban design lacks both a clear understanding of what are the spatial qualities contributing to the resilience of places and specific assessment tools to address properties of urban form in relation to resilience. This represents a remarkable impediment for urban designers and a wide gap in current resilience scholarship. To address this gap, the present research aims at: a) building a common ground between urban resilience and urban form; b) formalising new evidence-based principles for urban design resilience and c) provide new analytical tools to assess urban form resilience. To meet these aims, the current research sets to a) review, consolidate and combine existing knowledge on urban form and resilience theory; b) formulate an original theoretical framework that stresses the role of urban form in building resilience; and c) operationalise the proposed theoretical framework through a series of practical assessment tools aimed at measuring the resilience capacity of the urban form in real-world case studies. In this work, the selected case study is the district of Gorbals, in Glasgow, an example of twice-cleared community with a long and intense development history, which will offer a pretext to test the proposed framework and to generate some new, albeit preliminary, knowledge on the resilience potential of different types [sic] urban forms. According to the proposed assessment framework, the case study will be assessed over time through a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics. In trying to address these three fundamental gap areas, throughout the chapters of this thesis, the research makes several theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to existing knowledge in urban design. More specifically, the current work a) provides theoretical evidence to the hypothesis that urban form, can be understood as a complex adaptive system, and analysed using a resilience theoretical framework by identifying points of contact between some fundamental ecological principles addressing dynamics of change in ecosystems and analogous theories independently developed in urban morphology; b) develops the first example of a composite theoretical framework that, albeit being applicable to different kinds of systems, stresses the specific contribution of urban form in building resilience and in the long-term evolution of the urban system and c) formalises a new, integrated, theory-grounded assessment framework evaluating the structure [sic] urban form from a resilience perspective at the scale of small-scale morphological components, which is also generalizable to empirical research and applicable to multiple case studies, regardless their location in space or time. To this regard, a further finding of this work emerged from the analysis of the case study, which provided preliminary insights on how structural differences in the configuration of urban forms reflect in the capacities of a place to respond to change. Indeed, the performed analysis highlighted that, in terms of urban form resilience, traditional forms tend to score a more positive performance and compared to both post-war modernist urban forms and to neo-traditional designs. It is expected that findings from the current work made some important steps in helping urban designers rediscover resilience as a design principle, which, according to Hassler and Kohler(2014) “was an implicit part of traditional construction knowledge” (p:119), creating a new arena for urban design scholars and practitioners to engage with the wider debate on change, uncertainty and complexity, and supporting the design and management of the built environment and the evaluation of urban design proposals. Crucially, on a broader theoretical ground, the current work shows that, beyond simple aesthetic appreciation of one architectural style over another, at a structural level urban form is in itself a complex system, and should no longer be simply treated as repository of ad-hoc static architectural/infrastructural devices but as a dynamic system in itself, whose very structure, by virtue of the interactions between morphological components at different scales, has the power to influence possible evolutionary trajectory, and, contextually, its resilience capacity.
Advisor / supervisor
  • Porta, Sergio, 1964-
  • Romice, Ombretta Rossella Linda
Resource Type
DOI
Embargo Note
  • The print and electronic versions of this thesis are currently under moratorium due to copyright restrictions. If you are the author of this thesis, please contact the Library to resolve this issue.

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