Chapter 4 Influences on the Design of Urban Structure

In the above chapter, we analyze the relationship between traffic and urban structure, and give a more detailed introduction of the urban structure design method: what is the current popularizing urban structure form, and take this as the basis. We found that urban structural design was influenced by a wide variety of influences, including the professional persuasion involved and their social backgrounds - including those originally designed by professionals. When it comes to clear design guidance, we see a clear lack of guidance in the overall form that a street model should take. In the absence of such model guidance, juxtaposing the road hierarchy with a clear direction may traditionally encourage the default use of a tributary layout.

The analysis is based on the investigation of certain specific forms, considering what kind of overall model values the design guidance of urban structure, and secondly, the quality of the survey synthesis model should be possessed. First of all, it is worthwhile to consider the design environment. This is done by investigating the values that influence design. Where does the influence of different types of design come from? Secondly, the professional background of urban structure design and its relationship with other design processes are considered.

4.1 The Importance of Urban Structure Design

We see street patterns in design often from the design manual for street patterns. And street patterns come from the imagination of the designer. These raise the question of further guidance: what are the concepts that guide designers, and what are the motivations for creating different solutions? Here, we explore the ways in which urban structure design is related to culture, including different professional cultures and different design concepts.This can help explain the different approaches to design expertise and how we achieve the ideal type of urban structure and street patterns.

4.1.1 Urban Structure and Culture

As with any physical or non-physical design that may be considered a product of its time, place and culture, the design of streets and street patterns can also be seen as a reflection of cultural or social ideology.

Social ideology is one of the main ways to influence urban design, which is the degree of control of urban regional master planning. However, as previously mentioned, the lack of formal planning may lead to irregular development forms, while in the social form types of the overall urban planning, it may lead to more orderly forms.

At the most basic level of social organization, the emergence of agriculture leads to fixed settlements, division of labor, and centralized or hierarchical control of society. This combination will pave the way for what we understand as urban planning, as they allow for the creation of cities and planners.

The designers made a distinction between“agricultural and feudal urban planning”, forming a direct connection between the society and the street pattern. Similarly, “social production city”and“social reproduction city”also make a distinction.

As a meaningful design symbol in urban planning, traffic network can be used in combination. Urban structure is usually the expression form of some cities, which has its own characteristics and historical development significance. The urban design layout formed in various forms has specific cultural connotation. Even during periods of rapid colonial development. Street traffic network model is equal to be created from the tradition, he quickly established a refinement of streets and the traffic system, because of the rapid change of industrialization is the traditional form of network broken colony and military requirements, industrialization and the traditional form of transport interweave together, formed a special cultural connotation in colonial times. With the external influence of culture and the development of technology in the new era, the traffic network as a complex layout gradually increased its external influence. Road grade expresses and strengthens social grade through the division of design. Different historical periods, culture and design blend. The broad historical period related to the production of construction and transportation is divided into four parts: the establishment period of the early colonial period and the era of globalization. It can also be understood as a description of the characteristics of the classical modern post-modern structure. The design of street plan cannot be completely divorced from the development of social and historical background. The situation and development of new construction environment is the inevitable reaction of the progress of historical, cultural and artistic design. Of course, such progress refers to a certain development direction.

The traffic grid may be a“reasonable”layout, rather than one based on capricious traditions, mysticism or historical events. But choosing to adopt reason first, the plan itself can be said to be capricious. In extension, promoting the choice of street layouts based on "functional"criteria as sanitary facilities, ventilation or traffic capacity can be seen as an act of political will. The background of the colony may be thought to indicate the superiority of technology, the introduction of rational planning, and the transcendence of native traditions. Indigenous forms may have other qualities, such as beauty, intimate scale, tradition, spiritual meaning, and whether all of these would give lower priority and would be devalued by implication- to replace the“reasonableness”of colonial times. Of course, indigenous forms may also exist functionally and have advantages in providing shading, security, opportunities, etc. Informal trade and cultural exchanges, which may have a more recent similarity in promoting“rational”traffic. Engineering value is higher than“soft”urban design quality, which can also be seen as a reflection, especially in the era of modernism. Whatever the culture of a society is, there will be a more specific design“culture”, which will directly affect the form of urban planning and the purpose of street pattern. Therefore, planners and designers themselves should be subject to some scrutiny.

4.1.2 The Nature of the Problem

With the emergence of more and more design ideas, the concept of creating order seems to have the essential feature of“plan”. Creating orderly layouts and orderly towns seems to be largely an affirmation of urban planning. And to some extent, the idea of creating towns ahead of time, it seems that when a town is specifically called a“planned town”, it usually means that one's design is somewhat orderly and prescient. If creating order is the positive side, then eliminating chaos and chaos is the negative side. As a result, much of the talk about the plan has to do with complaining about“chaos”in the existing state.

Perhaps a response to contemporary modernist planners. The town's traffic reviles the irregularity of the“unsatisfactory”road model as the irregular description of it as the“nature of the problem”. How do we plan across the board and not keep the current mess going? The designer comes up with a market-led approach or a nice embellishment of an older program. Of course, the planning literature is full of cities and towns that speculate on the aspiration and quality of the ideal. These ideas about cities have led to normative statements and advice about what should be done to turn today's sub-optima into a better tomorrow.

But what style, thought, and philosophy do planners represent, and where do their aesthetic judgments come from? There is no clear specification and identification. Most planning decisions are largely based on intuition, or, rather, on oversimplified aesthetic ideas and physical implications for urban form and layout. Embodies the determinist assumptions about how best to adapt to a diverse economy and society.

At the same time, transportation planning is sometimes seen as an expense for technical research based on rational principles. Plans can be made on the basis of actual inputs. However, as mentioned earlier, this fear is precisely because effective functionalism can also be considered irrational moralism. Technically reliable transportation solutions are modified repeatedly to make the design reasonable.

Therefore, the problem cannot be attributed to direct opposition and irrational barriers between planning. As the outlook has changed, design thinking in the planning industry has gone from loathing chaos to accepting complexity.

4.1.3 Planning Complexity

Paradoxically, the creators of the traditional order, planners may now want to ensure the“vitality”of the city through diversity and complexity. This dynamism is certain, albeit at the cost of chaos. Neat towns may no longer be the designers'goal. Create mixed-use and differentiated cities. In a sense, this argument might be equivalent to an argument against the“plan.”In this case, planning is equivalent to general proposition and customization. We can say, however, that in the current situation, planners would aim for a more complex order, perhaps equating organizational complexity.

The chaos of the old street model is resolved through another modernist order.

4.1.4 Implications for City Design

The way living in urban planning seems to depend not only on how it is implemented, but it may be influenced by them.

Early settlements would be marked on the ground, that is, without planned procedures; The plan was not conceived on a drawing board. We can imagine how these methods will work in the incremental process of urban growth, as it has no“top-down”geometry. The master plan involves preparing a plan on paper and transferring it to the ground by setting up the technology.

The form of towns seems to be influenced not only by the way they are laid out, but first they need to be conceptualized.

The planning idea seems to filter all the historical factors and the emotions behind the city into something rough, and then come up with different designs after careful consideration, reorganizing them into independent and clear entities. These design achievements reflect the regional and block planning concepts and the key foundations that make up the city, rather than the city concept based solely on route structure layout, which reflects the different traditions of the design industry.

The road network diagram drawn by traffic engineers is undoubtedly a simplified urban design. But this is an abstract design of actual salient features. The transit route, though, may only show a specific part of the city, because it shows the border where there is no border, showing something where homogeneity does not exist. This approximation is actually misleading. This is not just a commentary on the views and ways of different professions, but is also used as a basis for design.

The basic“skeleton”of traffic routes is formed by combining the layout of buildings and other functions. And it can be done on the ground. However, if similar“eggs”are used as a starting point for design, the result could be a town plan similar to the egg-shaped or evenness limits.

Jane Jacobs thinks the traditional city represents organized complexity. Modernist planning seems to assume that the complex parts are chaotic, with only the organization left, and ultimately creating organized simplicity. In other words, the preconceived idea of modernist urban planning may be consistent with the universal desire for orderly towns, but in fact, modernist planning seems to be inconsistent with the desire to create organizational complexity. The implications of different planning and design approaches will be revisited. However, for the time being, we are more concerned with the differences between the two, and the relationship between different professional approaches to design.