Buildings, streets and sea-views: relating built forms, locations and movement.

Abstract

In many cities, rapid urban growth results transform the urban grid and ways of living, promoted by speculative real estate practices. Understanding that urban life is essential to public space, that urban form impacts on uses and that locations promote movement, this paper identifies relations between locations of urban configuration, built form (typology, interface, building height), land uses and movement at Miramar neighbourhood streets in João Pessoa - PB. Due to its privileged location - between three structural avenues and close to the sea, the neighbourhood has attracted investments and exhibited building renovations. To analyze clues of impacts of these transformations on real movement, five streets were chosen with varying and recurrent centrality values, exhibiting different building types and land uses. Results showed relationships between cars and pedestrian movement with different centralities, and with land uses and building types. Streets with higher diversity of land uses exhibited higher pedestrian flows, while vehicular flows was more linked to urban grid’s centralities. Monofunctional streets, especially linked to the most recent isolated building type with blind fronts had fewer people on the streets, pointing to interaction’s deficiencies between building and street, negative for urban life.

Keywords:
Urban configuration; Building form; Urban life; Miramar neighbourhood