SBL6313 Site Planning

Nur Hayati Hashim

Pensyarah Senibina Landskap
Jabatan Teknologi Maklumat
Fakulti Pengurusan & Teknologi Maklumat (FPTM)
Universiti Sultan Azlan Shah (USAS)
 WEEK 8

SPACES FOR PEOPLE

(BEHAVIORAL STUDY)
SPACES FOR PEOPLE

❖ To consider in detail who will use the site, how and for what.

❖ Spaces between buildings and with open areas of land.

❖ In the built environment, the internal and external uses of a site are inextricably linked and must be
planned and designed together (Canter, 1977).

❖ Chapter Environmental Settings and Quality of Life- Highlights some of the issues that face the site
planner trying to identify present as well as future user needs.

❖ Chapter User Requirements- Presents some basic information about people’s activities and their
associated environmental requirements to help the site planner decide on the best approach to site
layout and design.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

Quality of life (QOL), according to Britannica, is the degree to which an individual is healthy, comfortable, and able to
participate in or enjoy life events. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines QOL as "an individual's perception of their
position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations,
standards and concerns".

ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS

❑ The concept of the ‘environmental setting’ or also known as the ‘behavioural setting’, is a tool to aid site planning and
design.
❑ The word ‘setting’ is the spaces that form the city. These spaces are the basic support system for human activities, the
settings for all outdoor activity.
❑ The whole of the outside is a sequence of spaces, small and intimate, others vast and seemingly limitless.

Place and Space

▪ Humans tend to understand their immediate environment in terms of the sequence and qualities of spaces that make up
the areas they most use. People carry images of places in their minds and knowledge of how these places relate to each
other.

▪ People have a clear image of what they define as home territory.

▪ It is because all humans construct their personal mental image of places in relation to the way each individual experiences
their environment.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

Visual Characteristics of Spaces

▪ Each space has different visual characteristics: shape, scale, relative height of the edge, the appearance
and degree of transparency of the edge, the appearance of the floor and the sub-spaces within the
major space.

▪ As Lynch (1960) suggested in Image of the City, the concept of ‘edge’ is crucial to understanding spaces in the
city. The ‘edges’, whether formed by landform, vegetation or structures, or a mixture of elements, in
creating in minds the image of a place.

▪ Five elements related to understanding of space in the city according to Lynch: ‘edges’, ‘paths’, ‘nodes’,
‘districts’ and ‘landmarks’.

▪ The landmarks of an area have strong influence on memory of place. It tend to be objects—like the local shop, a
tree, cross-roads as well as the more obvious objects like church towers, water towers, town halls, other large
buildings or major landscape features.

▪ Lynch developed the concept of ‘Imagibility’, or termed ‘legi bility’, the idea that each particular place has an
image that can be interpreted easily and clearly remembered.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

Factors Influencing Perception of Spaces

• The sequence and types of spaces • The individual’s cultural

passed through on the way to the
space
• The other spaces seen from the • Educational
particular space
• Past knowledge of the space and • Social and economic background
of similar spaces
• The state of mind • Aesthetic sensibilities

• Past experiences of the natural • State of physical well being

environment
• Evidence of human activities
(noise, dirt, smell)
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

Site Planning, Environmental Settings and the Sense of Place

▪ To allow a specific range of activities to take place.

▪ To work out the range of facilities that will be required to allow these activities to be performed.

▪ To ensure the site will be managed in such a way that the planned activities can take place.

▪ To ensure that people will experience the place as being a satisfactory setting for their activity/activities.

▪ In part this involved using the characteristics of the existing place and understanding their role in how people
experience place; in part it involves developing new places with new characteristics.

▪ People react to and experience environmental settings as the place in which their daily or occasional activities
take place. Therefore, it has to assess the effectiveness of any proposals such as:

➢ To work out whether the proposals for its future layout and design make life easier for those who will use
the site.
➢ Working out what will make the site a sufficiently satisfying and interesting place to encourage people to
stay and enjoy being there.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

Making Sites Livable

▪ The site planner’s role is to make the spaces people inhabit fit for habitation, but another equally important role
is to make them livable. (Lynch and Hack,1984)

▪ Factors affect habitability: dirt, road noise, polluted water, polluted air.
Site planner have to limit the impact on the site users.

▪ The limitation- The knowledge of how humans behave in relation to their environmental settings and why they
react as they do.

▪ Therefore, it is difficult to work out what people will consider is a livable environment. Knowledge of how people
are likely to react to given situations, what will please them so that they continue to use a space, what will
alienate them so that they do not use a space, or even what makes people feel free to vandalize a space is
lacking.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

HOW PEOPLE EXPERINCE ENVIRONMENTS

❑ The factors that influence how people understand and experience environments are listed below:

❖ The senses : sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste

❖ Needs : survival (physiological needs- food, water, shelter)
security (physical and psychological needs)
belonging (to a group and a place)
expression of individual identity (the need for the self to be worth while)
experience a sense of self- fulfilment ( the achievement of aspiration)
❖ Desires : knowledge (to understand present and to be able to predict future occurrence)
❖ Aesthetics : what is seen, heard, smell, touched and tasted is filtered by past learning and
experiences and judged qualitatively by the individual.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

HOW PEOPLE EXPERINCE ENVIRONMENTS

❑ Kaplan (1973) developed a model of how people experience and make sense of the built environment.
❑ He showed the importance of being able to gather information about the environment and suggested a
person’s cognitive map included four domains as indicated below:
1. Recognition: knowing where you are.
2. Prediction: knowing what happens next.
3. Evaluation: knowing whether what happens next is good or bad.
4. Action: what to do.

❑ Maslow (1967) suggested that it is possible to identify the basic needs of human life; these are set out below:

1. The physiological needs are met- we are able to assuage hunger and thirst.
2. Feeling secure and have a place to shelter and able to keep ourselves warm.
3. Feeling we belong to a group or society.
4. Free to express our individual identity in some way.
5. Live in an environment which allows us to experience a sense of self-fulfilment.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

HOW PEOPLE EXPERINCE ENVIRONMENTS

The Human Habitat

▪ Humans survive in an immense variety of conditions. It has been that very adaptability which has allowed those involved
in the planning process (the politicians, the planners, the developers, the financiers and others).

▪ Newman (1976) and Coleman (1985) have both studied in depth the alienation that can result, if individuals feel they
have no control over their environment; their work has indicated the importance of a concern for the human habitat as a
social support system at the local level and emphasized the need for site planning to take place on the basis of a full
understanding.

Information As A Basic Requirement Of Survival

▪ A common characteristic- humans need a continual supply of information about their environment to survive and thrive.

▪ As Kaplan said, ‘people crave new information and are at the same time repelled from information too far from what they
can comprehend and deal with’.

▪ People need to understand, to make sense of their environment. To enable them to do this it has been suggested that
people have an in-built desire for involvement with their environment.

▪ Much human motivation and emotion is information based and that this is one of the reasons people are so aware of
their environment, so fascinated by it.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

HOW PEOPLE EXPERINCE ENVIRONMENTS

The Role of Fascination

▪ Kaplan (1982) states that people like to feel fascinated. Fascination can take the form of becoming interested in and
involved with what is potentially educational, dangerous or important to the individual in some social way.

▪ Considers people’s fascination with things green—whether gardens, wilderness, parks or even house plants to be part
of this link with the natural world.

▪ Hebb (1982) considers that it is a fundamental part of living things that they must be active—both the brain as well as
muscle.

▪ The environment stimulates both and without that stimulation mental function and physical health have been shown to
deteriorate. Fascination with the environment is seen as a basic requirement of survival and not just a manner of
behaviour adopted to fill people’s leisure time.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

HOW PEOPLE EXPERINCE ENVIRONMENTS

Making Sense of Environmental Information

▪ In an essay on the quality of living, Farber (1966) makes the following relevant statements:
‘Most of us need to aspire, to create, to give, and to belong’. He states ‘Social planning is indispensable in a crowded
world’ but it also has to include a recognition of our ‘non-material needs’.

▪ Farber also identifies altruism as a characteristic of humans, described as ‘intrinsically motivated’.

▪ The statement implies- the perfect environment which did not involve people in doing something or struggling against
something, could never make people happy with their lot.

The Human Need for a Homebase

▪ Washburn (1972) stresses that the environmental conditions within which Homo sapiens (modern man) developed have
changed considerably over the last 50,000 years.

▪ Humans are remarkable among the primates in that they require a location to which they can return and where they can
expect to be helped by fellow humans, a place that will be there every night—a homebase.

▪ Another way humans differ from them is in the amount of land they use. For instance, primitive human beings—hunters
and gatherers—used hundreds of square miles of land, whereas no other primate ever uses much more than 15 square
miles.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

HOW PEOPLE EXPERINCE ENVIRONMENTS

The Need to Belong To A Place and Group

▪ Humans have developed a strong sense of territory.

▪ As Greenbie (1981) has described when discussing proxemic and distemic spaces in the context of site planning, people
can clearly define their land and what belongs to others.

Implications for Site Planning

▪ The site planners imply that for people to feel satisfied with their environment, they need to understand where they are and
they need to identify with the place they call home.

Seeing Landscape
▪ Those within the design professions tend to see things in a different way from the general public of which they are a part
(Greenbie, 1989).

▪ The individual’s perception and attitudes are influenced by the society of which the individual is a part and the place to
which the person belongs.

▪ Group images undoubtedly exist and are related to the sharing of similar needs, ideals and loyalties. This ‘public image’
has been identified as a basic bond of any society or sub-group of society.

Continued to next slide…

ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

HOW PEOPLE EXPERINCE ENVIRONMENTS

Seeing Landscape
…Continued
▪ The way people see things can be observed to have changed through history.

▪ The concept of landscape beauty is part of a continuous discourse about nature, landscape and society.

▪ The visual symbols we use to interpret what we see both shape and are part of the cultural context. ‘Reality’ is
continuously re-presented and re-interpreted over time.

▪ Deciding the value of a local landscape is as much to do with the local history and cultural development and the social
condition of the local people.

▪ To take account of the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ qualities of a landscape, in terms of the human response as well as
the objects in and form of the landscape. It suggests various methods for field survey and how the information can be
analysed by breaking landscape down into areas of similar character.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

SITE PLANNING AND HUMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PREFERENCE

❑ As the Kaplans (1982) questioned, ‘What kind of environment would be suited to a knowledge-hungry organism,
one concerned to comprehend and to explore, and yet quite limited in how much (information) it can handle at
any one time? What kinds of environments do humans prefer? What properties must environments possess to
enhance people’s well-being and effectiveness?’

❑ Issue- The implication that preference involves something frivolous, suggesting something decorative or an
unnecessary extra rather than something essential for human life to thrive.

❑ The Kaplans point to the scientific evidence that in evolutionary terms makes this a false interpretation The
evidence is that for survival, organisms prefer an environment within which they are likely to thrive.

❑ They dislike and shun environments which harm or hinder them: ‘preferred (human) environments will in general
be ones in which human abilities are more likely to be effective and needs are more likely to be met’ (Kaplan,
1973).

❑ Preferences must be seen as important indicators of the environments in which people can be constructive and
effective.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

SITE PLANNING AND HUMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PREFERENCE

Places in Which People Choose to Live

▪ Once people are living beyond the basics of economic survival and have some freedom of choice open to them,
they seek to live in places which please them.

▪ The identification of the characteristics of these places would be a good starting point for the site planner intent
on investigating the content of preferred environments.

Complexity and Diversity

▪ For people to find an environment fascinating, it must have complexity and/or diversity so that they become
involved with it.

Mystery
▪ Appleton (1975) and others writing about the aesthetics of landscape that mystery is an important element in
involving us in environments. For instance, if a path winds out of sight ahead of people they tend to want to find
out what is there, they become intrigued.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

SITE PLANNING AND HUMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PREFERENCE

Legibility
▪ Need to be able to make sense of their environment.

▪ To have coherence and structure so that the parts make a whole. This is where Lynch’s concept of legibility as
an attribute of any environment becomes a useful aid to the site planner.

▪ Coherence helps make sense of the experience of a place. As the Kaplans stated, such an attribute is a
comforting feature in any landscape or townscape, reassuring us that we can predict that the places we have
yet to experience will also be understandable and therefore not threatening to us. Coherence without diversity
can, however, result in deadly dullness.

The Influence of Past Experience

▪ Involves the previous experiences of the individual. The individual’s knowledge and expectations have a bearing
on preference.

▪ Because of past experiences, it can be comprehended and linked in the mind to previous places. This is where
the aspects of environment that are often described as being appropriate, ‘having a sense of rightness’, come in
to site planning.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

SITE PLANNING AND HUMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PREFERENCE

Preferences Vary Between Individuals and Groups

▪ To identify the common ground as a starting point and then look at the particular needs of the individuals who
will use a site.

▪ Lynch (1960) writing on the city stated ‘…there is always more than the eye can see, more than the ear can
hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its
surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences’. ‘Moving elements in a
city (people and their activities) …are as important as stationary parts.’

▪ Lynch (1960) suggests that a good environmental image creates an impression of harmony. This sense gives its
possessor an important sense of emotional security.

▪ People need their home territory to be distinctive. His studies showing how people like to adapt and change their
plot or frontage, would seem to support this contention (Cooper Marcus and Sarkissian, 1986).

▪ Lynch sees a ‘vivid and integrated physical setting, capable of producing a sharp image, play(ing) a social role…’

Continued to next slide…

ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

SITE PLANNING AND HUMAN ENVIRONMENTAL PREFERENCE

Preferences Vary Between Individuals and Groups

…Continued

▪ Carr (1967) developed Lynch’s and others ideas about how people react to city environments into a list of criteria
to help the city planner. Among these are criteria which suggest the city planner should:

Make available in the immediate neighbourhood a wide variety of

environmental settings which each individual could choose to
1 experience, the use of these areas to be encouraged by the way in
which they are connected;

Enhance the visual qualities of the setting to emphasize the

2 uniqueness of the place so that people develop individual attachments
and group perceptions.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

HUMAN ADAPTIBILITY

❑ As has been indicated humans can and do survive in habitats which are neither optimal nor preferred. Their in-built
adaptability allows them to do so—but the cost to the individual and to society of the adaptations that people make may
well be great. The environmental factors that cause stress have been discussed by the Kaplans (1982).

Environment Must Make Sense To The User

▪ Environments which is difficult to make sense create such an overload of information for the individual- causes the
individual to be alienated and to fail to become involved with that environment.

▪ Factors which cause people to experience stress and, therefore, to have difficulty in adapting to an environment are
identified below:

Crowded environments

The level of aggressiveness in the local community

Feelings of not being in control of one’s own daily life

Feeling lack of privacy

Feeling that one’s worth as an individual or part of a community is not recognized

by society at large
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

HUMAN ADAPTIBILITY

Crowding and Stress

▪ Crowded situations can increase the likelihood of irritability and aggression and have been seen as a cause of stress in
many societies.

▪ Greenbie (1974) has suggested that the important factor is how space is structured to accommodate crowding. Crowding
has been linked with health as well as other social problems.

▪ A study by Westminster City Council (1980) showed that when there were more than five or six children per ten dwellings,
the level of vandalism and crime rose.

Hostile Environments Breed A Sense Of Aggression

▪ People living in environments which they experience as hostile have been shown to have fewer friends. They have also
been found to feel little or no involvement with a local community (Appleyard and Lintell, 1972).

▪ Can lead to aggressiveness in individuals. Aggressiveness normally means that a local community is unsettled and the
people dissatisfied with their immediate environment; it can be associated with high levels of vandalism and crime.

▪ The impact of crowding on people’s attitudes to their environment appears to be modified by local cultural and social
attitudes.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

HUMAN ADAPTIBILITY

Not Being In Control Of One’s Own Daily Life

▪ Strangers both fascinate and threaten us. It is an important factor that, when there are too many strangers, we
feel alienated from the environment containing them.

▪ The reasons for site planners to indicate clearly who owns which piece of territory within a site. No territory should
be ambiguous—it should be clear which is public and which private.

▪ The site planner has to attempt to compensate by doing everything possible to increase the sense of control
individuals can have over their own territory.

▪ The re-designs work best when the site layout is changed so that it consists of a smaller number of dwellings
accessed from each entrance point.

▪ Social and economic factors have a part to play in the way people behave towards their local environment. The
site plan can only influence people’s lives to some extent. The most basic issue - if people feel they have some
control over what is happening in their area, they can cope with a certain level of environmental stress. If not, then
there will be problems.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

HUMAN ADAPTIBILITY

Privacy And Personal Territory

▪ People prefer to maintain themselves without overlapping with the bubbles of others. People will space
themselves out often at fairly regular intervals ([Link],1966).

▪ Privacy is about the right of each individual to control what the world knows about him or her. Westin (1967)
suggested that four basic states of privacy can be identified; these are shown below:

1. Solitude: complete visual privacy

2. Intimacy: privacy when people are part of a small social unit.
3. Anonymity: privacy as when the individual is in a public place but is able to observe
without feeling observed.
4. Reserve: the psychological barrier against intrusion allowing us to remain ourselves
within the group situations which are part of all human life.

▪ A design must allow people to perceive that they have sufficient space to choose between social interaction or
privacy.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

NATURE AND `GREEN' IN LIFE AND IN CITIES

❑ For site planning, ‘green’ is important as it constitutes a major part of the diversity that is required to make places
satisfactory settings for human life. To improve the livability of cities through a concern for ‘greenness’— through the
preservation of and introduction of plants and wildlife.

❑ In recent years the word ‘green’ has even developed political connotations. The more people become aware of the
damage that has been done to man’s habitat and the natural world which supports the existence of that habitat, the
more they appear to become ‘green’ in their thoughts and actions.

❑ Site planners to preserve and to introduce nature and ‘greenness’ on every site where it might be possible and
appropriate.

Nature Matters to Everybody

▪ Barbara Mostyn (1979) and Alison Millward and Barbara Mostyn (1989) have looked at reactions to natural areas in
cities and Carolyn Harrison, Jacquelin Burgess and Melanie Lamb (1988) at the role of urban green in people’s lives.
The studies have illustrated how much more valuable at the site planning level qualitative information is about the
environment, than that produced by quantitative studies.

▪ This section highlights some of the findings of the qualitative studies.

ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

NATURE AND `GREEN' IN LIFE AND IN CITIES

Findings from the Group Discussion

▪ Mostyn in her studies included the benefits and disadvantages indicated as below:

Community Benefits from Local Open Spaces

✓ A sense of belonging is important if a space is to thrive
✓ All types of people, not just nature lovers, are interested in nature in cities
✓ People comprehend the recreational value of wildlife and natural areas in a city

Benefits To The Individual

✓ Emotional
✓ Intellectual
✓ Social
✓ Physical

The Disadvantages To The Individual of Being Involved With Natural Areas

✓ Feeling of a lack of control over events.
✓ Spoke of the personal upset it caused if vandalism happened on their land
✓ Fear of loss
✓ Dislikes- not enough colors in the site, looking untidy.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

NATURE AND `GREEN' IN LIFE AND IN CITIES

Parallel Discussion with The Local Planners

▪ Planners and designers felt that the public would really prefer a formal traditional park to a natural site (Millward
and Mostyn).

▪ The planners had also thought the sites ought to be bigger, but the users liked what they saw as small natural
parks, they had spoken of their familiarity with the sites and how they felt they could grasp that size of space
and, feel safe in it.

▪ The natural areas would encourage more trouble amongst teenagers, but in fact there was less. Teenagers
expressed their feeling of freedom there.

▪ Women were more likely to use areas when a warden was there. There is a tendency for parks and natural
places to be seen as dangerous places in cities. Site planner to ensure that any space in the city is understood
by the user to be someone’s responsibility.

▪ The role of open space in cities was to make them more livable. When people do not use open spaces it is
because they do not know what to do there, as well as the more obvious problem of safety.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

NATURE AND `GREEN' IN LIFE AND IN CITIES

What Are The Open Spaces of A City?

▪ Open space- specifically set aside for public enjoyment and as urban green areas in general.

▪ The users experienced green as part of the totality of the city. Urban green is part of the lives. The research
showed that people were aware of being in contact with urban green on a daily basis.

▪ They were aware of the enormous sensual pleasure they experienced from contact with nature—seeing
sunsets, experiencing seasonal changes, the smell of leaves and flowers, walking on springy turf, watching
insects, birds and animals involves us all with nature. Such experiences provide everybody with contrasts with
the sterile built environment which comprises too much of our cities.

▪ A discussion has been done to identify the similarities and differences between the perceptions of the different
groups in relation to their attitudes to open space in cities.
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

NATURE AND `GREEN' IN LIFE AND IN CITIES

Common Attitudes Towards Open Space

▪ Some of the most common attitudes arising from these discussions as recorded by Harrison, Limb and
Burgess (1987) are listed below:
➢ Nature is fun
➢ Open Space in a city has a symbolic value
➢ Childhood territory
➢ The loss of variety in urban areas

Differences Between The Social Groups

▪ The research by Burgess, Harrison and Limb indicated significant differences between the social groups in their
perceptions and attitudes:

➢ Social groups
➢ Men and women
➢ Women want to feel free to use open spaces without fear
➢ Ethnic groups want parks as social spaces
➢ Natural landscapes and danger
ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS AND QUALITY OF LIFE

NATURE AND `GREEN' IN LIFE AND IN CITIES

The Importance Of Open Space For Communities

▪ Those who lived in the environments most deficient in open space who attached the greatest importance to
open space.

▪ They wanted it as both social space and living space. As far as the site planner is concerned the most important
finding of this research has been that people look for diversity of experience of open and greenspace right on
their doorsteps, freely available for all sections of the community.

▪ In this context, the fact that women are inhibited from using many existing open spaces is a crucial design and
management issue which has to be addressed by the site planner.
USER REQUIREMENTS

❑ The task of a site planning- ‘Making places that fit human purposes.

❑ Two things have to be understood: the nature of the site, on the one hand, and how its users will act in it
and value it, on the other’ (Lynch and Hack, 1984).

❑ As the Kaplans (1982) said, ‘the role of the physical environment in human experience requires a fresh look’.

❑ There are some approaches to the problem of finding out about the experiential qualities of settings. Some of
these are indicated below:
USER REQUIREMENTS

PUBLIC PARTICIPATION

❑ The public participation movement of the 1970s and early 1980s- largely directed at attempting to find a means of finding
out what the public wanted.

❑ An identifiable group of people can be expected to react with considered opinions about precisely defined spaces, spaces
which they or people like them will use.

❑ To consider the purpose of any survey and the limitations on its usefulness in advance of drawing up the questionnaire.
The site planner initially has to decide the minimum range of information about the users which will be needed to begin.
planning a specific site.

❑ The aim
- to construct a scenario of the activities that might take place in the future within the area to be covered by the site plan
the activity list.
- to develop this to describe the range of experiences that the site users will be most likely to appreciate and which will allow
them to make maximum use of the new site—the environmental settings.

❑ Lynch and Hack (1984) in Site Planning indicate a range of methods which site planners can use to identify user
requirements.
USER REQUIREMENTS

DRAWING UP THE USER BRIEF

❑ Includes developing a scenario of site activities and appropriate environmental settings.

❑ Dealing with people is a subject which is well dealt with in the architectural press and so only those issues mainly
related to outdoor areas are examined here.

❑ Overcoming any artificial division-developing clear lines of communication between those concerned mainly with
the construction of a building and those concerned with the manner in which the total site must work.

❑ List out the main activities that will happen and around a site with the client and the future users.

❑ Identifying all the different user groups (e.g: age groups, interest groups, cultural groups or a mixture of them all).

❑ Site plans always have to be flexible and adaptable as people tend to be interested in doing different things at
different stages of their life cycle.
USER REQUIREMENTS

DRAWING UP THE USER BRIEF

Identifying The Major Activities

▪ In relation to the land-use category to which the site is allocated( e.g: for houses, shops, industry, education,
recreation etc.)

Identifying The Spin-Off Activities

▪ Site users are likely to become involved as a result of the development of the major activities within the site, as
well as those on the adjacent land or nearby sites.

Identifying The Environmental Settings

▪ To identify the experiential needs of a known group for whom the site is being planned.
▪ To use studies of similar sites and user groups elsewhere as the basis for extrapolating the likely requirements
of future site users.
▪ Must aim to describe the settings that would be most appropriate to develop within the site. This involves
providing a brief which goes well beyond a list of the activities people first think of when asked what they want to
do on a site.

Identifying How People Might Use A Site

▪ To anticipate where people will naturally congregate and how they will move into and out of a site and move
through it.
USER REQUIREMENTS

USER SATISFACTION

❑ To understanding the user’s needs to assess the relative degree of user satisfaction with various aspects of the physical
environment.

❑ A simple method for the non expert- to ask questions which allow the respondent to reply using a five-point scale of
satisfaction. Such a scale allows the respondent the opportunity to describe their reaction from highly satisfied to highly
unsatisfied.

Activity Lists
▪ The list does not attempt to be all-encompassing; it is intended to give an indication of the many different types of land-
use with which a site planner might be asked to deal and for which activity lists will need to be developed.

➢ Residential (family home or cluster of houses, care unit for a specific social group, holiday homes or hotel)
➢ Educational (nursery school, primary level educational establishment )
➢ Commercial and retail (shop or shopping centre, retail warehouse)
➢ Industrial (workshop or factory, water supply, waste disposal)
➢ Health and social welfare ( Surgery or health centre, specialist care centre, cemeteries)
➢ Leisure (individual recreational facility, family recreational facility, water sport camping)
➢ Farming or forestry (crop or animal production, fish production, timber production)
➢ Conservation (nature reserve, recreational experiences
➢ Wilderness (habitat preservation, recreational experiences)
USER REQUIREMENTS

THE RANGE OF SETTINGS

❑ To consider the environmental qualities that might be needed to support use of the site.

❑ Below are summarizes the reasons why the site planner should be aware of people’s experiential needs at the
site planning and design stages:

1. Instinct : the need for environmental information

2. Result : environmental awareness: people are aware of their environment at all times
3. Action : the site planner builds on this involvement as people are predisposed to be fascinated
by their environment and involved with it.
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THE RANGE OF SETTINGS

The Five Senses and The Environment

▪ Some of the ways in which people experience their environment through the senses:

Continued to next slide…

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THE RANGE OF SETTINGS

The Five Senses and The Environment

…Continued
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THE RANGE OF SETTINGS

Ensuring Diversity of Sensory Experience

▪ To determine sufficient interesting experiences available on a site and that any problems with unpleasant effects on the
senses can be mitigated.

Catering for People’s Psychological Needs

▪ To identify how to create environments which can support human needs.

▪ Kelman (1958) suggested that people can learn certain lifestyle needs. They do this by learning through their daily life
what makes them feel satisfied. He has identified a certain pattern to this:

➢ The first stage is imitation: people do or experience something just to copy others, to please others, to be with others
or to be accepted by others.
➢ The second stage: people recognize that they have gained a sense of satisfaction from doing or experiencing
something.
➢ The final stage: people recognize that they would miss the activity or the experience if they could not be involved in
it; it has become an important component of their satisfaction with the quality of their lives.

▪ It provides the expectation that, provided people can experience some form of satisfaction, the new environments and
activities will be accepted and absorbed into local lifestyle.
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THE RANGE OF SETTINGS

Factors Involved in Perception of Place

▪ To determine that there are sufficient interesting experiences available on a site and that any problems with
unpleasant effects on the senses can be mitigated. The factors are identified below:
USER REQUIREMENTS

THE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF A PLACE

USER REQUIREMENTS

THE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF A PLACE

The Role of ‘Green’ in Developing Special Local Character

▪ Parks and gardens have been valued for centuries for giving people living away from the countryside contact
with nature.
▪ It was good for the health of the urban population to have access to open spaces.
▪ The possibility of going into green spaces is considered to ease the burden of urban life by city dwellers and to
give added opportunities for social interaction.
▪ A basic list of the characteristics which people want from outdoor areas in cities:

➢ Places where contact with animals and birds and the more attractive insects like butterflies is possible
➢ Places with visual variety
➢ Places which are full of plants and give an experience of greenness
➢ Place where children can learn about nature and social life through contact with animals
➢ Places to loiter in and watch the world go by
➢ Places which are conducive to harmonious social interaction, where it is possible to meet people casually,
people one would not otherwise come across
➢ Places to chat while children play
➢ Places for family outings
Continued to next slide…
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THE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF A PLACE

The Role of ‘Green’ in Developing Special Local Character

…Continued

▪ City dwellers would like greenspaces on their doorsteps;

➢ Small spaces available to all, not open spaces which consist of a series of no-go areas
➢ Spaces to give a variety of visual experience locally with color on the doorstep. Its availability in parks is no
substitute. People do not want city greenspaces as substitute countryside, they want them to be different.
➢ It is important to people that the local open spaces do not appear neglected
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PREPARING BRIEFS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING

❑ Lynch and Hack (1985) described behaviour settings as ‘small localities, bounded in time and space, within
which there is some stable pattern of purposeful behaviour, interacting with some particular physical setting.’

❑ Lynch saw behaviour settings as ‘in part self-regulating, changing their surroundings to maintain themselves,
while also adapting to their surroundings’.

❑ One of the methods for learning more about behaviour patterns is the type of observation study where you sit
down and make a sketch of the setting that you are viewing and then annotate that to indicate how the users
behave within the space.

❑ Both Wurman et al. (1972) and Hester (1990) have described the process in detail, showing that performance
standards can be described for each activity by considering the ‘who, what, where and when’.

❑ Here the subject of performance standards will be considered at greater length, as it is a crucial concept in
relation to site planning and the link between that and the design process.
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PREPARING BRIEFS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING

Performance Standards
▪ Wurman et al. (1972) describe how it is possible to think of each activity independently and decide what is
required for it to happen. Below are illustrates this process:
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PREPARING BRIEFS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING

Deciding Where The Activity Should Be Located

▪ The main being the demand for availability of the activity and the presence of the correct physical setting (this
can be one that is already in the vicinity and has all the appropriate characteristics, or it can be one which is
created by the site planning team to meet a demand).

▪ It is necessary to see which activities are compatible and which will need their own special area.

▪ To get the right fit between activities and spaces is a challenging and fascinating process involving working with
the information gathered about the physical and natural characteristics of the site and its surroundings, as well
as with the information about the user needs.
CONCLUSION

❑ Site planning, if properly carried out, will lead to richer more stimulating environments. Improving the
quality of life in cities does not imply an inherent increase in the quantity of publicly looked after land, nor
of associated costs to the community of supporting such land. It implies the reverse in many ways.

❑ Above all, a change of approach is needed at the level of the site plan, so that small scale spaces, rich in
visual interest, wildlife and the opportunity for informal activities and social contact, are incorporated into
the design.

❑ This richness can be provided as much in people’s gardens and in the streets and parking areas as in
any officially designated open space, but in order to meet people’s need the whole range of spaces is
needed.

❑ Whatever public land is made available within any site must be managed and maintained at the level
appropriate to the setting that is created and when necessary wardening must be allowed for.
Thanks