Walkability and sustainability， the method for evaluating walkability

Osmond, P. (2005, September). Evaluating urban ambience-an investigation into quantifying the qualities of the walkable city. In The 6th International Conference on Walking in the 21st Century.

Walkability has strong relationship with Sustainability. A walkable city encourages pedestrian movement and public transport development, which reduces car over-dependency and emission of carbon dioxide. How to evaluate the walkability for a city? This article by Paul provides a method for evaluating walkability by using space syntax and fractal analysis. Two target sites are Paddington and Quaker`s Hill. The three indexes (connectivity, integration and intelligibility) will be presented by analyzing the street network. The connectivity means measuring the how many nodes connecting one node. The integration the space syntax is to analyze the convenience of street network. The intelligibility is the correlation between the connectivity and global integration values for each node in the system. However, space synyax cannot distinguish this "convenience" is for vehicle or pedestrians. The other method is fractal analysis, which is a little bit difficult for me to understand. What they do is to take photos and measure the distance. This method analyzes the index of network complexity. Paul points out that visual diversity, which was analyzed by fractal analysis, has ability to encourage walkability and the length of streets also has relationship with walkability.