Sociospatial reframing of walking through inclusive streets and urban heritage

• Main Author: Wang, Yongcheng
• Other Authors: Wong Yiik Diew
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Civil engineering::Transportation
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/142770
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The complexity of pedestrian behaviour is entwined in the interconnected physical and perceptual dimensions of the built environment. With an exploratory mixed methodology adopted, the research approaches urban walking and walkability—both as a transport mode and as a type of urban experience—through two lenses: (1) inclusive streets and (2) urban heritage. On the inclusive streets strand, the growing presence of recent street design guides, and the multitude of desirable street qualities presented in them, were addressed by conducting a systematic review of this oft-overlooked grey literature. The review revealed the conceptual triangulation of street (re)design and user inclusivity by transport mode as well as by mobility capacity. Moving from international practices to local experiences, mobile ethnographic interviews were conducted with older adults and persons with disabilities in Singapore to understand their mobility needs and perceptions. The semi-structured interviews unveiled a wide range of sociospatial themes, including movement within an extended pedestrian network, such as detouring and taking shortcuts, and ambivalence about space sharing that is in part caused by both the complications of rights-of-way among active transport modes and preconceptions of social norms in a local-foreign divide. Then, to reach a wider demographic, a street-intercept survey was conducted to investigate perceived importance within a set of six different inclusive street design dimensions in relation to the movement and activity functions of streets. The results confirm the importance of safety and security but also highlight the desirability of streetscape and urban vibrancy with respect to street design. The inclusive street design regime was also found to be compatible with the notion of urban heritage in a meta-narrative review to explore the potential of urban heritage being repositioned for urban and transport planning in which the promotion of walking is a high priority. The meta-narrative review identified six research traditions, namely the ecological model, the new mobilities paradigm, heritage discourse, public life, rhythmanalysis and space syntax. While it was beyond the scope of this thesis to utilise methods of all these research traditions, synthesising respective narratives provided for a roadmap for the other research modules against a unified discourse of heritage for urban and transport planning. To explore how urban heritage may be repositioned for walking in urban planning using an alternative data source, a thematic analysis of heritage- and walking-related newspaper articles was performed. The analysis revealed broad themes such as a vision of a “car-lite” city and the broadening scope of urban heritage, and specific themes such as heritage trails for learning while walking and the blurred line between locals and tourists. Furthermore, insight into policy implications was derived from a mixed-methods study of the public consultation exercise on urban redevelopment in Macao. The spatial and content analyses of public feedback demonstrated an argumentative diversity in debating a variety of redevelopment/conservation methods, despite a downward trend of intensity over the recent years. Also confirmed was the intricate street network in the historic district emerging as one of the key considerations for urban conservation. Underscored by qualitative and quantitative findings, this thesis could potentially provide urban planner and policy makers with an interdisciplinary framework of inclusive streets and urban heritage, and the integration of the two, to foster pedestrian-oriented planning practices that are responsive to community needs and sensitive to local contexts. This sociospatial approach to walking will also deepen our understanding of active mobility in the perceptual and humanistic dimensions, and of urban conservation as the management of change in both the built environment and the movement and activity patterns.