We need to start by thinking of the layers of the city up on top of which the buildings sit. There are multiple facets to these layers:
1) In the beginning there is the natural, the greenfield place created before man. The natural may have features such as rivers, or varying topography. Such features often have a significant degree of permanence in any urban structure for they are very hard to alter.
2) The next layer is made up of the big changes man has made, such as major roads, railways, or bridges. Quite often these features emerge before any development around them, such that later development must be designed around these and the retained natural features. This means these often sever places- think of the phrase in the US “on the wrong side of the tracks,” where the railway divides different neighbourhoods.
3) Then there are general zones of types of uses, such as office parks, industrial estates, areas of housing and centres (eg town or local centres) where uses mix. Within any of these zones may be nodes such as a train stations.
4) Then there are the roads, and the infrastructure in these roads such as drains, water, and power. This is the street structure which knits the urban place together.
5) Where roads intersect they leave areas of land between them known as blocks, these blocks are commonly subdivided into a series of plots of different land ownership- but not always; sometimes you may have one large building on a block.
6) Within the ownership plots sit individual buildings, sometimes these are joined to other buildings, sometimes not.
All of these different layers in the urban place relate to each other in different ways and ultimately shape the feel of the spaces between buildings and the feel of the place we experience. These layers are universal, whether a medieval city centre or a suburban housing estate, the same layers exist, however the structure of them and the relationships between them will differ and is responsible for the different characters.
Once the structure of one layer is fixed it then becomes very difficult or impossible to change it once the next layer has been built. Think of a place where the streets have been built and where all of the homes are single storey houses, on single deep thin plots with large gardens. If there is a need to deliver more homes and increase density, this density must be built within the existing plots and roads. But those long thin plots don’t suit building apartment blocks for each has to be long and thin and so the side of each building is faced by the side of another long thin building in the next long thin plot. This means barely any space for windows or natural light- for the windows could only be in the front and the back of the building- for each side directly faces another long thin building. This is a problem that could be resolved by having a different plot structure.
Don’t get it? -Well watch video 3 next, and see if that helps:
Section 7 next stop.
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