Charging Station Planning for Electric Vehicles

Charging station (CS) planning for electric vehicles (EVs) for a region has become an important concern for urban planners and the public alike to improve the adoption of EVs. Two major problems comprising this research area are: (i) the EV charging station placement (EVCSP) problem, and (ii) the CS need estimation problem for a region. In this work, different explainable solutions based on machine learning (ML) and simulation were investigated by incorporating quantitative and qualitative metrics. The solutions were compared with traditional approaches using a real CS area of Austin and a greenfield area of Bengaluru. For EVCSP, a different class of clustering solutions, i.e., mean-based, density-based, spectrum- or eigenvalues-based, and Gaussian distribution were evaluated. Different perspectives, such as the urban planner perspective, i.e., the clustering efficiency, and the EV owner perspective, i.e., an acceptable distance to the nearest CS, were considered. For the CS need estimation, ML solutions based on quadratic regression and simulations were evaluated. Using our CS planning methods urban planners can make better CS placement decisions and can estimate CS needs for the present and the future.

The Tall Building and Urban Space

If public spaces in the urban environment are seen as extensions of one’s home, then what role do tall buildings play in this setting? In terms of space, they can have various roles. They are visible from afar and often act as landmarks, but at the same time they give one a possibility to see the urban whole in its entirety, from above. One of most iconic images of modern urban planning and modern urban space – Le Corbusier’s plan for Paris – is shown from such a vantage point, depicting an urban area dotted with individual buildings set within a continuous spatial field. This modern space has often been described as open and homogeneous. The simplified general interpretation has further been complemented by the concept of heterogeneous space, paving the way for a more diverse spatial theory. Heterogeneous space has brought much needed complexity to interpretations of architectural space. Modernist space is revisited in this article, explored through two particular cases. In addition to Le Corbusier, the study includes the work of another architect and urban planner of the early 20th century, Eliel Saarinen. The role of tall buildings in the designs and writings of the two architects is compared, with a specific focus on the spatial implications of these buildings in the cityscape. The comparison illustrates the fact that modern architects were not unanimous in their visions of urban space, although they shared the knowledge of a contemporary spatial theory.

Conceptualization and digitalization of the heritage of soviet architects: A.V. Makhrovskaya, V.I. Kochedamov and A.I. Naumov within the Preserved Culture project

Проект «Сохраненная культура» уже более десяти лет занимается изучением и продвижением в сети Интернет достижений отечественной науки и культуры ХХ века. Статья описывает и систематизирует уникальный опыт проекта по исследованию и актуализации творческого наследия выдающихся советских архитекторов: подготовку и публикацию воспоминаний об ученом-градостроителе, члене-корреспонденте РААСН А.В. Махровской, оцифровку личного архива историка градостроительства, декана архитектурного факультета Академии художеств В.И. Кочедамова и выпуск 4-томного издания его трудов с комментариями современных ученых, а также создание документального фильма «Архитектура блокады», посвященного памяти А.И. Наумова, доктора архитектуры, члена-корреспондента Академии строительства и архитектуры СССР, автора трех генеральных планов развития Ленинграда, организатора маскировки города в годы Великой Отечественной войны. Особое внимание в статье уделено проблеме цифрового разрыва и прикладным подходам и методам его преодоления, позволяющим сохранять и популяризировать памятники «бумажной» культуры прошлого века в условиях информационного общества через создание активного исследовательского сообщества. The Preserved Culture project has been researching and promoting the achievements of Russian science and culture of the 20th century on the Internet for more than ten years. This article describes and systematizes a unique experience on the study and update of the creative heritage of the distinguished Soviet architects. This includes the preparation and publication of the memories about scientist-urban planner, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Architecture and Building Sciences A.V. Makhrovskaya; the digitization of the personal archive of the urban development historian, dean of the faculty of architecture of the Academy of Arts V.I. Kochedamov, as well as the release of the four-volume edition of his works with commentaries of modern scientists. The article also presents the documentary film “Architecture of the Blockade” which is dedicated to the memory of A.I. Naumov, the Doctor of Architecture, corresponding member of the Academy of Construction and Architecture of the USSR, author of three Leningrad master plans, organizer of the city masking during the Great Patriotic War. Particular attention in the article is paid to the problem of the digital divide and applied approaches and methods of overcoming it, which make it possible to preserve and popularize non-digital cultural monuments of the last century in the context of the information society through the creation of an active research community.

The synergy of patterns vs. processes at a community level: a successful mechanism underlying subtropical native forests along the urban riparian zone

Riparian zone possesses ecological position with biota differing from aquatic body and terrestrial lands, and plant-animal coevolution may be the main factor for the framework of riparian vegetation. In the current study, the riparian plant community patterns along the subtropical mountainous riparian belts of Chongqing, China, was proposed to be regulated by co-evolving with the avifauna through propagule-dispersal process. The results show that: 1) the forests’ species composition and vertical layers are dominated by native catkins of Moraceae species with adapting traits of small and numerous propagules to frugivorous bird species, revealing an evolutionary trend different from the one in the terrestrial plant climax communities in the subtropics, and which forms a biological base for the plant-bird co-evolution; 2) there are significant associations of plant-bird species clusters, i.e., four plant-bird co-evolution groups (PBs) were divided out according to the plant species’ dominance and growth form relating to the fruit-dispersing birds’ abundance; 3) the correlation intensity within PB ranks as PBⅠ>Ⅱ>Ⅳ>Ⅲ, indicating the PBⅠis the leading type of co-evolution mainly shaped by the dominant plant species; 4) the PB correlation may be a key node between patterns vs. process of a riparian ecosystem responsible for the native vegetation, or even the ecosystem health. The results theoretically contribute new evidence to plant-animal co-evolution interpreting the forests’ characters in riparian environments, and urban planner and managers may simulate the native forests for restoring a more stable riparian biota, a better functioning ecosystem in subtropical zone.

Concrete Island: Lost Sites and Hidden Heritage

<p>In cities like Auckland, suburban sprawl has led to the introduction of extensive elevated motorways that create barriers and cuts across the ordering elements of the city. Urban planner Roger Trancik refers to the areas beneath and adjacent to these urban motorways as “lost sites”, considered ‘unbuildable’ even though they occur within the central business district. This research investigation looks at how architecture can help return a sense of place identity and cultural significance to otherwise placeless zones defined by elevated urban motorways. The central Auckland site for this design-led research is the Central Motorway Junction (CMJ), commonly referred to as ‘spaghetti junction’ — a site physically and environmentally inappropriate for housing development, but large and high profile enough to contribute significantly to Auckland’s ‘cultural hub’. The proposed programme for this investigation is a new facility to house Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’s stored collections. Arguably New Zealand’s most valuable cultural holdings, only 3% of Te Papa Tongarewa’s collections are on display at any time. The rest of the museum’s stored collections are completely hidden from public view within its back of house facilities and warehouse structures in Wellington. Due to Wellington’s location on major fault lines, studies are underway to permanently move the stored collections to Auckland, where they will remain removed from the public eye. This design-led research investigation proposes that once these collections are relocated to Auckland, if they are made visually accessible to the public, they could provide a vital extension of the cultural hub for the city centre. The investigation proposes to architecturally inhabit one of Auckland’s most prominent lost sites, the Central Motorway Junction, in a way that celebrates its iconic elevated motorway as a viable urban context capable of actively contributing to urban re-vitalisation and cultural consolidation. The thesis investigation examines the city’s motorway infrastructure as a framework for a new typology for architecture that actively uses the ‘motorway typology’ to establish architectural and place identity. Simultaneously the investigation explores how expansive elevated motorway sites can provide significant footprints for new public buildings to enhance the cultural identity of the urban centre.</p>

Concrete Island: Lost Sites and Hidden Heritage

<p>In cities like Auckland, suburban sprawl has led to the introduction of extensive elevated motorways that create barriers and cuts across the ordering elements of the city. Urban planner Roger Trancik refers to the areas beneath and adjacent to these urban motorways as “lost sites”, considered ‘unbuildable’ even though they occur within the central business district. This research investigation looks at how architecture can help return a sense of place identity and cultural significance to otherwise placeless zones defined by elevated urban motorways. The central Auckland site for this design-led research is the Central Motorway Junction (CMJ), commonly referred to as ‘spaghetti junction’ — a site physically and environmentally inappropriate for housing development, but large and high profile enough to contribute significantly to Auckland’s ‘cultural hub’. The proposed programme for this investigation is a new facility to house Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’s stored collections. Arguably New Zealand’s most valuable cultural holdings, only 3% of Te Papa Tongarewa’s collections are on display at any time. The rest of the museum’s stored collections are completely hidden from public view within its back of house facilities and warehouse structures in Wellington. Due to Wellington’s location on major fault lines, studies are underway to permanently move the stored collections to Auckland, where they will remain removed from the public eye. This design-led research investigation proposes that once these collections are relocated to Auckland, if they are made visually accessible to the public, they could provide a vital extension of the cultural hub for the city centre. The investigation proposes to architecturally inhabit one of Auckland’s most prominent lost sites, the Central Motorway Junction, in a way that celebrates its iconic elevated motorway as a viable urban context capable of actively contributing to urban re-vitalisation and cultural consolidation. The thesis investigation examines the city’s motorway infrastructure as a framework for a new typology for architecture that actively uses the ‘motorway typology’ to establish architectural and place identity. Simultaneously the investigation explores how expansive elevated motorway sites can provide significant footprints for new public buildings to enhance the cultural identity of the urban centre.</p>

PEDESTRIAN BEHAVIOR FOR DEVELOPING STRATEGY IN TOURISM AREA; AGENT-BASED SIMULATION

Agent-based modelling is an approach to develop a design strategy in socio-related studies to understand pedestrian behavior by using simulation through validation using field observation. This study area has a historic city so that having several potential advantages as destination tourists and also having urban issues. Some facilities disseminate prosperous for domestic tourist destinations, transportation hubs (land and water-based transport), and public facilities. The purpose is to develop a design strategy of pedestrian behavior in urban space to be procedure based on computational modelling. By merging the result, it helps designers to depict pedestrian movement flow, permeability, and connectivity patterns, which represent the presumptions of the origins or source of movement, destinations, generators, and attractors of movement. This simulation examines and valuates spatial behavior models allowing to route preferences of each pedestrian in order to be used in the strategy of design process for architect, urban planner, or other designer stakeholders. The result will imply a walkable pedestrian-way design, where this approach of a pedestrian experience might be an effective tool in city planning.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (b. Neuruppin, 1781–d. Berlin, 1841) was a celebrated Prussian architect, theatre set designer, artist, furniture and object designer, urban planner, and civil servant. Born into modest yet respectable circumstances as the son of a deacon, Schinkel, by virtue of his talent and work ethic, rose in his own lifetime to become one of Prussia’s most celebrated cultural figures and its chief royal architect. He worked mostly in Berlin and its surrounding territories, including in some areas that are now part of Poland. His built works suffered heavy destruction during the Second World War, but important examples still survive or have been reconstructed, including the Altes Museum, the Friedrich-Werder Church, the Theatre (Schauspielhaus), and the New Guardhouse in Berlin, as well as the Charlottenhof and Glienicke Palaces in nearby Potsdam. His paintings, drawings, and personal archives can be found mostly in collections in and around Berlin, including at various departments of the Berlin State Museums. Recent debates have surrounded the potential reconstruction of Schinkel’s celebrated masterpiece, the Berlin Bauakademie (which was demolished in 1962), bringing a consciousness of Schinkel’s legacy to the fore in German public life once again. Despite his fame in Germany and his noted status as a reference-point for German avant-garde modernism, Schinkel’s work has remained under-explored in the English language (with some notable exceptions) due to difficulties accessing both his buildings and his archives in the years between the Second World War and German reunification. Since the 1990s, however, Schinkel’s international reputation has been steadily restored due to the efforts of a number of scholars and curators who have sought to disseminate his work more widely than ever before. Schinkel’s oeuvre is as eclectic as the tools and media he employed to realize it are versatile. They reveal traces of neoclassicism and the neogothic, French Enlightenment formalism, German Romanticism and Idealism, and 19th-century historicism. But at the same time, his work resists absolute categorization, by virtue of the fact that he lived and worked suspended between two epochs: he was born too late to be immersed in the worldview of the 18th-century Enlightenment and French Revolution, but nor did he live to see Germany’s development as a fully industrialized and unified nation. Occupying this ambiguous historical moment has given Schinkel’s work a versatility, a freedom, and an inquiring rigor that has assured its originality and enduring value.

Free and paid software on Architecture and Urbanism: Essential tools for the contemporary professional activity

Nowadays, the architect and urban planner’s professional have their professional practices intrinsically tied to the use of computers and software. Besides the acquisition of hardware, the prices of these softwares are a barrier for many professionals that are just now entering the job market, who end up using them by improper means -violating intellectual property laws. Such practice incurs illegal activity and creates distortions in market prices practiced by professionals. That’s why there is a need to study architects’ and urban planners’ workflow to formalize guidelines as to the possibilities of free and paid software. To do so, it’s pursued to creating an infographic about the workflow of architects and the free and paid software that can e used. It’s about raising awareness of the legal aspects of the professional activity, bringing recommendations for the academic environment, and enhancing the role of the architect and urban planner

IMAGINING THE CITY OF TOMORROW THROUGH FORESIGHT AND INNOVATIVE DESIGN: TOWARDS THE REGENERATION OF URBAN PLANNING ROUTINES?

Ecological and digital transitions alongside concerns over social inequalities have signalled the advent of complex new challenges for contemporary cities. These challenges raise issues pertaining to the dynamic capability of urban planners: more specifically, their ability to revise their tools and planning routines in urban projects. New paradigms of collective action for the transition towards innovative cities have been developed in large organisations. European companies, especially in public transportation, have developed such tools based on innovative design theories. One of these methodological tools, the Definition-Knowledge-Concept-Proposition (DKCP) process, was used to generate a new range of planning options for an urban district in Montreal, Canada. For many municipal organisations, the formulation of innovative ideas only concerns one stage of the process, represented by the ‘P’ phase. However, innovative routines should rather include the earlier phases of identifying the scope of possible innovations, the search for intriguing knowledge and disruptive design activities. The desire to tackle the complex challenges of 21st century cities has led to a new professional identity: the ‘innovative urban planner’.