RE-CONFIGURING THE SOCIO-SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF NEW COMMUNITIES TOWARDS SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract

Rapid urbanization is considered a complex combination of many social and economic forces on a global scale. In the middle of the 20th-century, contemporary urban development created newly expanded and fragmented urban cores towards the emergence of new centralities and new cities. The newly built environment in these cities should have a particular intelligible configuration to adapt to human agents from the perspective of ‘socio-spatial.’ Thus, exploring other ways to reimagine scenarios for socially sustainable communities is essential. The research aims to explore the socio-spatial relations, introducing new parameters and approaches that can influence social integration/ segregation in the new urban communities. This helps understand the complexity of these relations at the local scale through the spatial configuration approach among different socio-economic groups who live in the same geographical area. This requires first studying the socio-spatial structure that tends to yield social sustainability characteristics for more socially integrated communities.

This study investigates the interrelated relations driven by the socio-spatial structure integrative theoretical framework and the proposed relational model. Multiple methods and tools are introduced as; space syntax, geographic information system (GIS), and statistical analysis methods to conceptualize, analyze, and measure these relations. The research explores the association in the scope of study between the syntactic measures of the streets and the ground floor use and investigates its significant relationship with the social behaviour and socio-economic and demographic study as a contributor to minimizing the social segregations. The syntactic measures of the streets have been studied using space syntax analysis. Through observations with video recording, the study highlights places of social interaction, gathering spots, and the other segregated areas. The socio-demographic and economic variables have been conducted from the questionnaire. These methods and tools have been studied through comprehending the results altogether and reading the relations. Then, the proposed relational model explores the statistical correlation analysis between the socio-spatial identified variables, followed by principal component analysis (PCA) to deduce the most related variables.

The research findings explore the relations between the street syntactic measures on the global and local scale and the ground floor categories distribution, which could help better allocate the commercial shops and other uses categories in future urban planning in the new communities. There is also an explorative study between the syntactic measures of the streets and ground floor use distribution with the diversity in socio-economic and demographic conditions and social behaviour related variables study (mainly walking and social interaction behaviour). These findings reveal that socio-spatial structure study and the wider spectrum of related variables using the proposed methodological approach can lead to a better understanding of the segregation phenomena, looking for the potential to better guide street design, create more walkable communities, and achieve social integration.