- Urban Quality and Designing of Spaces    951 kb by    Amin, Khairy | khairyamin@hotmail.com    Short Outline It is believed that ''good'' urban design involves the design of spaces within the built environment. Within a rich professional vocabulary for appropriateness of a space and its quality, three approaches will be studied. The imagability of the city which is shared by all inhabitants through their mental perception. Urbanity of spaces that encourages people's activities and the geometric characteristics of space physical elements and details. Abstract Urban quality and designing of spaces Dr: M. Khairy Amin ISOCARP Member The abstract It is widely believed that “good” urban design involves the design of spaces within the built environment. Consequently, urban designers are always interested in what makes a good design. They consciously think about space components and the relationship between them. In general, there is a rich professional vocabulary for appropriateness of space, or in other word the quality of space. The criteria which define the quality of these spaces have been changed several times along the past century different times. This could be easily figured through city urban structure and its space patterns. Meanwhile, problems for contemporary urban built environment could be seen through many aspects such as following: Poor living environment: While housing condition and interior quality have received great attention in terms of fundamentals as lights and air, spaces which surrounding homes are still fragmented, noisy and visually polluted. Loss of public life: the public life in streets and squares has declined, leaving public life dependent on planned formal places, mostly in protected internal locations (shopping malls, bowling centers… etc.). Loss of orientation: vast residential areas, which are created by massive transportation, make people feel irrelevant to their places. People therefore, have less sense of orientation. In attempting to achieve quality within these notions, urban designers have two main approaches. The first one deals with the design of space itself (improving facades, introducing benches,…etc.). The second team argues that while all these are important in context as a local level of design, the key factor in understanding urban form and its use is how space relates to other spaces in a system- as a global pattern. Due to the limitation of the research, three main approaches will be studied and investigated. The first concerns with the imagability of the city- the visual intelligibility which is shared by all inhabitants through their mental perception. The second relates to the effect of the geometric characteristics of physical elements of the urban fabric (streets & squares) and their mutual relationship. The third refers this quality to the urbanity of spaces, the unforced, informal liveness that creates sense of safety and belonging. Although the research is dealing with a universal phenomenon, referring to the Egyptian context will be indicated. Key words Environmental quality – Imagability – Intelligibility – Urbanity – Aesthetics. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2002: The Pulsar Effect   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper