| Title |
An Study of Pedestrian Efficiency in Apartment Complexes - Focused on Pedestrian Path in Apartment Complexes - |
| Authors |
Yang, Dongwoo ; Yu, Sang-Gyun |
| DOI |
https://doi.org/10.5659/JAIK_PD.2018.34.11.85 |
| Keywords |
Apartment Complexes ; Pedestrian Path ; Pedestrian Accessibility ; Pedestrian Efficiency ; Network Analysis |
| Abstract |
This study aims to investigate how easy pedestrians get around within/through the "Apartment Complexes (AC), " a common style of high-rise multi-family housing in Korea. Over the past six decades, the AC has been the most conventional way to provide standardized housing efficiently to address the problems of the shortage of housing and the substandard housing, due to the explosion of urban population with the rapid industrialization. The AC is a huge chunk of homeogenous multi-family housing, mostly condos with decent infrastructure, including parks, pedestrian passages, schools, ect. Both in the new town development and urban renewal programs have utilized the advantages of the AC. Since the design principals of AC tend to adopt the "protective design" to prevent cars and pedestrians coming outside from passing it, it has been criticised for dissecting the continuity of socioeconomic context in neighborhoods. The neo-traditional planning urbanists, including Jane Jacobs, emphasize that smaller blocks and grid road newtworks are the key in improving social, cultural, and economic vitality of the neighborhoods, because these design concepts allow more pedestrians and different types of people to be mixed in a neighborhood. In this study, we first adopted objective measures for pedestrian accessibility and pedestrian efficiency. These measures were used to calculate the lengths of shortest paths from residential buildings to the edges of AC. We tested the difference in shortest paths between the current pedestrian networks of AC and hypothetical grid networks on the AC, and the relative difference is considered as the pedestrian efficiency, using the network analysis function of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Python programming. We found from the randomly selected 30 ACs that the existing non-grid road networks in ACs are worse than the hypothesized grid networks, in terms of pedestrian efficiency. In average, pedestrians in AC with the conventional road networks have to walk than 25%, 26%, and 27% longer than the networks of 125×45m, 100×45m, and 75×45m, respectively. With the t-test analysis, we found the pedestrian efficiency of AC with the conventional network is lower than grid-networks. Many new urbanists stress, easiness of walking is one of the most import elements for community building and social bonds. With the findings from the objective measures of pedestrian accessibility and efficiency, the AC would have limitations to attract people outside into the AC itself, which would increase dis-connectivity with adjacent areas. |