What is Compact City?
- The compact city “city of short distance”is an currently emergrd urban planning concept.
- promotes relatively high residential density with mixing of various activities.
- It provide require infrastructure facilities within walkable distance.
The compact city concept
aims at a high-density mixed-use, and intensified urban form.
• The idea emphasizes that urban activities should be located closer together to ensure better access to services and facilities via public transport, walking, and cycling, and more efficient utility and infrastructure provision.
• The basic provision of the compact city is the local community or neighborhood, though conventional urban planning models tend to plan towns and cities at a larger scale with a reliance primarily on automobile travel.
• In the compact city, human scale factors should be given greater emphasis from the viewpoint of achieving a better quality of life, and therefore consideration of the effects of the local environment are key components in such planning.
Urban development
The availability of land became an ever-growing issue owing to claims made by the rapidly increasing levels of mobility.
• In the 1980’s the population increased rapidly; when it stabilized, households became smaller and as a result number of households increased.
• Whilst the need for housing and for urban space kept on growing, the negative effects of urban sprawl called for a change in the outwards-oriented movement in the surge for urban space.
Concepts describing the development paradigm of the compact city
New Urbanism
New urbanism is an American urban design movement that arose in the early 1980‘s.
Its goal to reform many aspects of real estate development and urban planning, from urban retrofits to suburban infill.
• Creation of diverse, compact, and mixed neighborhoods.
• Everyday activities, such as housing, work, schools, shops, and other amenities, are all ideally within 19 minutes‘ walking distance of each other.
• The aim is to provide a pleasant, comfortable, interesting, and safe environment for pedestrians, and to provide alternatives to car use such as public, transit and cycling facilities.
Advantages of the compact city
• Less car dependency, low emissions, reduced energy consumption by.
(1) Shifting from car to walking, cycling and public transport.
(2) Reducing trip distances.
(3) Reducing total number of trips.
• Better public transport services, increased overall accessibility, re-use of infrastructure and previously developed land.
• The rejuvenation of existing urban areas and urban vitality, a high quality of life, the preservation of green space and a milieu for enhanced business and trading activities.
• Strengthening of the self-containment, diversity and multifunctionality of the city.
Urban sustainability
* Sustainable development involves more than environmental conservation; it embraces the need for equity. Both intra-generational equity providing for the needs of the least advantaged in society, and inter-generational equity, ensuring a fair treatment of future generations, need to be considered.
* Challenges generating models of urban sustainability:
• proliferate and transform the entire global economy into a balance-seeking relationship with our natural ecosystem.
• reconcile humankind with the natural environment, whose health is the precondition for all human activity.
• develop and maintain a continually re-balancing relationship among their internal social and economic activities and with their wider natural and agricultural landscape.
• to develop a real and viable alternative to decline, not merely on a theoretical basis, but in a real place: the sustainable city.
Indices for evaluating urban sustainability
The principles common to most definitions are the maintenance of the urban system’s survival, the fostering of evolution in the long term, and the consideration of urban development in terms of three key features:
Conclusion
• Empiricism: for example, the reduction of car mobility did not occur, and the enormous need for housing made urban spread in the countryside unavoidable.
• Although the compact city was initially not meant to be a blueprint for sustainability, belief in the positive effects of this concept is widespread.
* The compact city concept is most of all a spatial concept with the intention of intensifying the use of existing urban space as much as possible, thereby improving the quality of urban life and sparing the countryside.
* Compactness as a concept for sustainability seems primarily to be a belief in a simplicity that is not there. Hence its role has been taken up by the idea of urban sustainability.
(UPADSD) international conference – 2nd version
The 2nd Conference on “Urban Planning and Architectural Design for Sustainable Development” (UPADSD), to be held in Italy, follows the success of the very first version which took place in Lecce, Italy during the year of 2015.
this conference will discuss critical issues such as: City planning, sustainable energy, Rural developments, Sustainability and the built environment, Energy resources, Transportation, etc.
