Abstract
A controversy remains among planners and urban designers about the proper location of the non-residential core (nucleus) of a neighborhood in relation to thoroughfares. One school of thought suggests that the nucleus should be located along the busiest thoroughfares; a second school holds that it must be some distance away from them – which, because of their disruptiveness, should form the edge of the neighborhood; and a third school proposes that it should be somewhere between the two as an ‘eccentric nucleus’. The three schools may be overlooking the underlying variables that govern this problem under different conditions, and so we propose a model for establishing the best location and distribution of urban nuclei as these conditions vary. This requires firstly, a redefinition of the ‘neighborhood’ as distinguished from a ‘pedestrian shed’. We argue that a ‘neighborhood’ can either emerge within a ‘sanctuary area’ between thoroughfares, or span across both ‘sanctuary areas’ and thoroughfares, if the latter are properly designed; a ‘pedestrian shed’, by contrast, can overlap with neighborhoods and with other pedestrian sheds. We propose a ‘400 meter rule’, a surprisingly small maximum spacing of main thoroughfares that empirical observation shows that traditional, pedestrian-governed urban fabric has always tended to obey, for reasons that are likely to have to do with the self-organizing logic of pedestrian movement and social activity. In so doing, we advance a more fine-grained, permeable, potentially lower-carbon model and illustrate its advantages with several historic and modern examples.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
A notable example is in our colleague Paul Murrain's design for Harlow New Town, an urban extension of one of the UK's struggling modernist towns built north of London after the war. The extension is connected over a wildlife corridor by only a single bridge flanked by retail, in a configuration not unlike the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Yet, as Murrain has argued, the connectivity remains strong (Council Report III, CNU).
References
Alexander, C. (1965) A city is not a tree. Architectural Forum 122 (1): 58–62, (Part I); and 122 (2): 58–62, (Part II).
Alexander, C. (2001–2005) The Nature of Order, Books 1–4 Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure, Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life, 2001; Book 2: The Process of Creating Life, 2002; Book 3: A Vision of a Living World, 2005 and Book 4: The Luminous Ground, 2004..
Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., Jacobson, M., Fiksdahl-King, I. and Angel, S. (1977) A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Appleyard, D. (1981) Livable Streets. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Badland, H. and Schofield, G. (2005) Transport, urban design, and physical activity: An evidence-based update. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment 10 (3) (5): 177–196.
Banerjee, T. and Baer, W.C. (1984) Beyond the Neighborhood Unit: Residential Environments and Public Policy. New York: Plenum Press.
Ben-Joseph, E. (2005) The Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bernick, M.S. and Cervero, R. (1997) Transit Villages in the 21st Century. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Biddulph, M. (2000) Villages don’t make a city. Journal of URBAN DESIGN 5 (1): 65–82.
Boarnet, M.G., Greenwald, M. and McMillan, T.E. (2008) Walking, urban design, and health: Toward a cost-benefit analysis framework. Journal of Planning Education and Research 27 (3): 341–358.
Brindley, T. (2003) The social dimension of the urban village: A comparison of models for sustainable urban development. URBAN DESIGN International 8 (1–2): 53–65.
Brower, S. (2000) Good Neighborhoods: A Study of In-Town and Suburban Residential Environments. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated.
Calthorpe, P. (1993) The Next American Metropolis. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Caniggia, G. and Maffei, G.L. (2001) Architectural Composition and Building Typology: Interpreting Basic Building. Firenze, Italy: Alinea Editrice, First published in Italian in 1979.
Castells, M. (2000) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Cervero, R. and Duncan, M. (2003) Walking, bicycling and the urban landscape: Evidence from the San Francisco Bay Area. American Journal of Public Health 93 (9): 1478–1483.
Conroy-Dalton, R. (2003) The secret is to follow your nose: Route path selection and angularity. Environment and Behavior 35 (1): 107–131.
de Nazelle, A. and Rodríguez, D.A. (2009) Tradeoffs in incremental changes towards pedestrian-friendly environments: Physical activity and pollution exposure. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment 14 (4) (6): 255–263.
Duany, A. and Plater-Zyberk, E. (2002) Lexicon of the New Urbanism (version 3.2). Miami: Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, http://www.dpz.com/research.aspx.
Duany, A., Plater-Zyberk, E. and Speck, J. (2000) Suburban Nation. New York: North Point Press.
Ernst, M. and McCann, B. (2002) Mean streets 2002, surface transportation policy project report. http://www.transact.org.
Ewing, R. and Kreutzer, R. (2006) Understanding the relationship between public health and the built environment. Report prepared for the LEED-ND Core Committee. U.S. Green Building Council.
Farr, D. (2008) Sustainable Urbanism, URBAN DESIGN with Nature. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
Forsyth, A.J., Oakes, M., Lee, B. and Schmitz, K.H. (2009) The built environment, walking, and physical activity: Is the environment more important to some people than others? Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment 14 (1) (1): 42–49.
Frank, L.D., Sallis, J.F., Conway, T.L., Chapman, J.E., Saelens, B.E. and Bachman, W. (2006) Many pathways from land use to health: Associations between neighborhood walkability and active transportation, body mass index, and air quality. Journal of the American Planning Association 72 (1): 75.
Franklin, B. (2002) Constructing an image: The urban village concept in the UK. Planning Theory 1 (3): 250–272.
Gehl, J. (2002) Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space. Copenhagen, Denmark: Danish Architectural Press.
Hebbert, M. (2005) Engineering, urbanism and the struggle for street design. Journal of URBAN DESIGN 10 (1): 39–59.
Hillier, B. (1996) Cities as movement economy. URBAN DESIGN International 1 (1): 41–60.
Hillier, B. and Hanson, J. (1984) The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Jacobs, A. (1993) Great Streets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jacobs, A.B., Macdonald, E. and Rofè, Y. (2002) The Boulevard Book. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jacobs, J. (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books.
Jones, E. and Kauffman, C. (2009) Integrated urban structuring in Australia. Paper presented at Optimizing Urban Structure session, CNU 17; June, Denver, CO.
Kargon, R.H. and Molella, A.P. (2008) Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Krier, L. (1998) Architecture: Choice or Fate. Windsor: Andreas Papadakis.
Kulash, W. (1990) Will the traffic work? 11th Annual Pedestrian Conference; October, Bellevue WA.
Leinberger, C. (2008) Study from the metropolitan program of the Brookings Institution. http://blog.islandpress.org/author/Christopher.
Loukaitou-Sideris, A., Liggett, R. and Sung, H. (2007) Death on the crosswalk: A study of pedestrian-automobile collisions in Los Angeles. Journal of Planning Education and Research 26: 338–351.
Lynch, K. (1981) A Theory of Good City Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marshall, S. (2005) Streets and Patterns. London: Spon Press.
Murrain, P. (2002) Understand urbanism and get off its back. URBAN DESIGN International 7: 131–142.
Murrain, P. (2009) Beyond Perry: Learning from several thousand years of the social logic of the structure of settlements. Paper presented at Optimizing Urban Structure session, CNU 17; June, Denver, CO.
Newman, P. and Kenworthy, J. (1999) Sustainability and Cities. Washington DC: Island Press.
Perry, C. (1929) The Neighborhood Unit. Regional New York and its Environs. New York: Regional Plan Association.
Philibert-Petit, E. (2006) Connectivity-oriented urban projects. PhD Thesis available from Delft University of Technology, to be published as a monograph by Techne Press, Amsterdam, 2010.
Porta, S., Crucitti, P. and Latora, V. (2006) The network analysis of urban streets: A primal approach. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 33: 705–725.
Porta, S. et al (2009) Street centrality and densities of retail and services in Bologna, Italy. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 56: 450–465.
Porta, S. and Renne, J. (2005) Linking urban design to sustainability: Formal indicators of social urban sustainability field research in Perth. URBAN DESIGN International 10: 51–64.
Rofè, Y. (1995) Space and community: The spatial foundations of urban neighborhoods. Berkeley Planning Journal 10: 107–125.
Rofè, Y. (2008) The white city of Tel-Aviv. Urbanistica – Journal of the Italian Institute of Planning 136: 95–102.
Rofè, Y. and Schwartz, H. (2007) Vision, implementation and evolution of Patrick Geddes’ urban block in Tel-Aviv. Proceedings of the Conference on Regional Architecture in the Euro-Mediterranean Area: IIIrd International Conference on Architecture and Building Technologies. Second University of Naples, Ischia, Italy.
Salingaros, N.A. (2005) Principles of Urban Structure. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Techne Press.
Steil, L., Salingaros, N. and Mehaffy, M. (2008) Growing sustainable suburbs: An incremental strategy for reconstructing sprawl. In: T. Haas (ed.) New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future. New York: Rizzoli International, pp. 262–274.
Sucher, D. (2003) City Comforts. Seattle, WA: City Comforts.
Talen, E. (2000) The problem with community in planning. Journal of Planning Literature 15 (2): 171–183.
Townshend, T. and Lake, A.A. (2009) Obesogenic urban form: Theory, policy and practice. Health & Place 15 (4): 909–916.
US Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA). (2004) Characteristics and performance of regional transportation systems. Washington DC. http://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
†All authors are members of the Environmental Structure Research Group.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Mehaffy, M., Porta, S., Rofè, Y. et al. Urban nuclei and the geometry of streets: The ‘emergent neighborhoods’ model. Urban Des Int 15, 22–46 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2009.26
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2009.26