On Urban Attractiveness

In an era of global competition, every aspect of a city that contributes to its desirability or undesirability is been increasingly regarded as a key factors to maintain and strengthen its attractiveness and by consequence its competitiveness. A city’s attractiveness is determined by a wide range of elements based on their own wealth, security (i.e. The Safe City By Leo van den Berg), history, cultural assets, and excellent landscape, measured with quantitative data such as in Richard Florida’s work and the indexes of Mercer, and the UN’s State of the World’s Cities, Quality of “Business” Life. Character, identity and uniqueness are also crucial ingredients in a city’s attractiveness, which can only be exploited by careful planning at a local level and highlighted in more qualitative surveys such as FT’s Cities of Dreams and Monocle’s top liveable cities.
These indicators inform the urban policies and politics of major urban areas and polycentric metropolis with implications on the management of these places and the practice of urban planning and urban design (see Manuel Castells Talk on the Implications of Networks on Urban Planning). The strategies for enhancing attractiveness include city-centre redevelopment, cultural policy, the role of events, city promotion and infrastructure. They were characterized by the so-called “culture-led” regeneration of the New York City Waterfronts and its 4-months Waterfalls public art exhibit that has been playing a role in enhancing city image and achieving economic deindustrialisation of the piers in Lower Manhattan and West Brooklyn. Similar strategy use the concept of “event city” that has come to signify to policy makers that special events can be used to give a specific character to the city that hosts them. Other examples take the forms of new cultural infrastructure, including galleries, theatres and concert halls, as a tourist attraction and a community platform for culture-related economic activities to expand.

The impact of these strategies is only partially measurable (when not too costly), although it is generally accepted that there is a conspicuous impact of these projects on city image, which is reflected in increases in the number of tourists and the demand for tourism-related services. However, these strategies could play negative roles as cites with large suburbs where centers become centres of consumption, apart from production; they might become less about living rather than becoming a place to visit for shopping and eating out, to take part in social events, to have cultural experiences at movie theatres, concert halls and museums, to meet and communicate with others.

In other words, city centers have been the focal point of citizen’s urban life. Therefore, the lack of monitoring of their attractiveness could be regarded as an immediate threat to the liveliness of their economy. Measures from urban data (e.g. land use, census, traffic data) and statistics (e.g. NYC’s Sustainable Streets Index) traditionally feed the suspicions and are less traditionally augmented with the systematic collection of people’s experience, as suggested by Marek Kozlowski’s PhD thesis Urban Design: Shaping Attractiveness of the Urban Environment with the End-Users that aims at obtaining subjective views of end-users and integrating this information into the urban design process.
My work on urban attractiveness proposes a third, complementary avenue that exploits the logs of people’s explicit and implicit interactions with urban infrastructures as evidences of the evolution of attractiveness of a space. The analysis of the temporal density and spatial distribution of digital footprints could help ensuring the sustainability of a city attractiveness by keeping indicators on the evolution of the experience of the space. They are an opportunity to inform urban designer and policy makers to enhance urban quality through post-occupency evolutions. Finally the development and assessment of strategies to enhance urban attractiveness involves of a wide range of local stakeholders and strong partnership among. The visualization of the evidences extracted form digital footprints can help the discussion that contribute to extend the contextual knowledge and deepens understanding.

An evidence of temporary low attractiveness of a space in relation to other areas?

Relation to my thesis: Further motive and ground my latest research work. Keep on highlighting that “it seems that the interface with technologies and networks is still not taught in land use planning and urban design“.