Interface between houses and streets: Understanding the spacial organisation of English speculative estates, 1880-2018

Wir-Konas, Agnieszka (2019) Interface between houses and streets: Understanding the spacial organisation of English speculative estates, 1880-2018. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the spatial relationship between houses and streets in housing estates in Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne between the 1880s and 2018. Urban form can be perceived as a bi-polar system of continuous open spaces of streets and discontinuous enclosed spaces of buildings. These two significantly different elements can be seen as fundamental parts of the spatial organisation of every city. Their distinction and interdependence is most visible on the interface between the two, as the interface not only divides but also forms and defines the spaces on both of its sides.
The aim of this work is to examine how the interface between the architectural and urban form affects the structure and use of both. To achieve this two configurational approaches are combined in GIS: space syntax for the urban scale and graph representation for the architectural scale. In order to allow for comparison between the three urban elements: streets, houses and interfaces, the typologies of each were developed based on their topological characteristics.
This work concludes with four main contributions to the body of knowledge. Firstly, it is observed that there is a fundamental mismatch between the architectural and urban scale in English housing estates. This is manifested as an increase over time in the number of important streets lined with passive interfaces, and in the number of houses that interface with the street network in an atypical manner. This highlights the importance of studying the way urban elements interact in order to assure that the full potential of both elements is met. Secondly, the mismatch between those scales progressively worsened over time. Thirdly, this thesis contributes an original dataset on the interfaces between houses and streets. Finally, an original methodological framework is proposed that allows for integration of the architectural and urban analyses in GIS.

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