Article:

Urban streets will have to be retrofitted to improve walkability and to providespace for a diversity of transport modes. This paper introduces a frameworkwhich combines space syntax and shape grammars in a design support methodfor generating scenarios for urban street retrofitting. A procedure to hierarchizestreets and select priority locations for urban street retrofitting is presented. Fourdifferent angular choice analyses with decreasing radii are used to derive thehierarchical structure of target urban areas with the aim of triggering shapegrammar rules and generating bottom-up intervention designs. The samemeasure using a local radius to represent walking modal is then used todetermine which streets should be retrofitted to improve pedestrian safety andwalkability for the largest number of people. An application study using thisprocedure is presented and results are compared to street hierarchies from twodifferent sources. This study is the first step towards automating the generation ofdesign scenarios for urban street retrofitting.