EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN URBAN ROADS, URBAN FORM AND ECONOMIC ACTIVITY IN AHMEDABAD USING SPACE SYNTAX

摘要

Urban growth and form are outcomes of various underlying factors such as population growth, migration of people, policies of local government, local and global market forces, individuals' reactions to these interventions, etc. Recent studies have indicated that spatial configuration and the relationship between different streets are also factors that influence human activity and agency,reflecting the differences in accessibility and connectivity over the city as a whole and also within different localities within the city.Space syntax analysis provides various measures in using space as a means of investigating the structure of a city, directed at how different components of this structure are related with the configuration of the built environment and activities which take place within it. This configuration influences people's perception about their built environment and therefore their behaviour, such as their movement and activity patterns within the city. This research performs a Space syntax analysis of the city of Ahmedabad, India that is then used to examine relations between accessibility and land use, job distribution and building height for five different parts in the city. We use the AXWOMAN extension tool for ArcGIS to generate the axial map for syntax analysis and the global integration and local integration values for the street network. Spatial interpolation techniques are used to generate a surface of syntax values of the streets to estimate those values on the building level for easy comparison with other indicators. One conclusion of this research is that land use patterns do vary with spatial configuration and accessibility. Commercial land uses concentrate in highly accessible or 'movement-rich' localities whereas residential land uses tend to be found in 'movement-poor'localities within Ahmedabad. Another conclusion of this research is that the city's syntax centre, I.e., the best integrated locality in terms of road network, has shifted towards the western side of the city, while the concentration of jobs is still near the old centre which is on the eastern side. This shift points to a potential mismatch between the road layout, road typology, traffic distribution and employment, possibly contributing to an increased congestion on the city's roads. The third conclusion is that high rise buildings are associated with highly accessible localities. This type of analysis can help planners and policy makers to better appreciate the relationships between road network design, urban form and human activities, providing an additional tool for the ex-ante assessment of road layout for town planning schemes or other improvement projects.