Form and Fuction: Benchmarking Real And Ideal Cities provisório

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Planning cities for pandemics: review of urban and transport planning lessons from COVID-19

Publication . Monteiro, João Pedro Medina; Sousa, Nuno; Pais, Filipe; Rodrigues, João Coutinho; Jesus, Eduardo Natividade

For the past few years, the world has been facing one of the worst pandemics of modern times. The COVID-19 outbreak joined a long list of infectious diseases that turned pandemic, and it will most likely leave scars and change how humans live, plan and manage urban space and its infrastructures. Many fields of science were called into action to mitigate the impacts of this pandemic, including spatial and transport planning. Given the large number of papers recently published in these research areas, it is time to carry out an overview of the knowledge produced, and synthesising, systematising and critically analysing it. This paper aims to review how the urban layout, accessibility and mobility influence the spread of a virus in an urban environment and what solutions exist or have been proposed to create a more effective and less intrusive response to pandemics. This review is split into two avenues of research: spatial planning and transport planning, including the direct and indirect impact on the environment and sustainability.

2023-05Journal article

Open access

Benchmarking city layouts: a methodological approach and an accessibility comparison between a real city and the garden city

Publication . Monteiro, João Pedro Medina; Sousa, Nuno; Jesus, Eduardo Natividade; Rodrigues, João Coutinho

This article presents a comparative accessibility study between a real city and its redraft as a Garden City. The benchmarking methodology involves defining and evaluating a location-based accessibility indicator in a GIS environment for the city of Coimbra, Portugal, and for the same city laid out as a Garden City, with the same number of inhabitants, jobs, and similar number of urban facilities. The results are derived as maps and weighted average distances per inhabitant to the facilities and jobs, and show that, for the Garden City, average distances drop to around 500 m for urban facilities and 1500 m for the combination of facilities and jobs, making much of the city accessible by walking and practically the whole of it accessible by cycling, with positive impact on transport sustainability and accessibility equity. The methodology can be extended to other benchmarking indicators and city layouts, and the quantitative results it yields make a valuable contribution to the debate on the ideal layout of cities. Moreover, it gives directions on how to improve real cities to address current and future sustainability concerns.

2022-04-22Journal article

Open access

The impact of geometric and land use elements on the perceived pleasantness of urban layouts

Publication . Sousa, Nuno; Monteiro, João Pedro Medina; Jesus, Eduardo Natividade; Coutinho, João

This article presents a model to estimate the impact of geometric and land use elements on citizens’ perception of urban layout pleasantness. An ordinal regression cumulative link mixed model with those elements as regressors is proposed and calibrated using data from an online survey. Results show that landscape building height and density of green areas are the factors that most impact the perception of pleasantness. Based on the model, a methodology to derive pleasantness mean scores for a city is also proposed and applied to a case study. The methodology allows for benchmarking the pleasantness of different cities or comparing neighborhoods within a city. It can be used both as an urban evaluation tool and a decision-aid for city expansion programs.

2022-09Journal article

Open access

The potential impact of cycling on urban transport energy and modal share: a GIS-based methodology

Publication . Monteiro, João Pedro Medina; Sousa, Nuno; Jesus, Eduardo Natividade; Rodrigues, João Coutinho

This article presents a methodology to estimate the maximum potential impact of a well- built and conserved cycling infrastructure, measured as modal share for accessibility trips, as well as the associated transport energy that can be saved in those trips. The methodology uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to estimate active trip probabilities, from which the output variables can be obtained. It was applied to a case study of a mid-sized city in Southern Europe, and results show that an adequate cycling infrastructure can achieve cycling mode share in that city on par with the world’s most cycling-friendly cities. Concerning transport energy, a full-cycling scenario is estimated to reduce fossil energy intensity by approximately 20%, mainly by inducing a mode change for residents on the closest outskirts. It is also argued that cycling investment in commuting routes will have the most impact on reducing fossil transport energy.

2023-02-10Journal article

Open access

Filling in the spaces: compactifying cities towards accessibility and active transport

Publication . Monteiro, João Pedro Medina; Para, Marvin; Sousa, Nuno; Jesus, Eduardo Natividade; Ostorero, Carlo; Rodrigues, João Coutinho

Compactification of cities, i.e., the opposite of urban sprawl, has been increasingly presented in the literature as a possible solution to reduce the carbon footprint and promote the sustainability of current urban environments. Compact environments have higher concentrations of interaction opportunities, smaller distances to them, and the potential for increased active mode shares, leading to less transport-related energy consumption and associated emissions. This article presents a GIS- based quantitative methodology to estimate on how much can be gained in that respect if vacant spaces within a city were urbanized, according to the municipal master plan, using four indicators: accessibility, active modal share, transport energy consumption, and a 15-minute city analysis. The methodology is applied to a case study, in which the city of Coimbra, Portugal, and a compact version of itself are compared. Results show the compact layout improves all indicators, with averages per inhabitant improving by 20% to 92%, depending on the scenario assumed for cycling, and is more equitable.

2023-03-09Journal article

Open access