ST 6 AN EVIDENCE-BASED INTEGRATIVE MAPPING TECHNIQUE FOR GUIDING SOCIALLY-RESPONSIVE URBAN DESIGN PROPOSALS
PAULA BARROS
UFMG
Resumo
The role that design has to play in the generation of popular urban open spaces
has been an important topic in theory, teaching and practice of urban design, as reflected in
the large amount of literature on public urban open spaces. However, despite the accumulated
body of knowledge in the field, the contemporary urban condition raises issues regarding the
effectiveness of some design proposals in contributing towards the generation of well-loved
and well-used public urban open spaces.
Even though human-environment inter-relationships are necessarily multifaceted,
most of the theory, teaching and practice of urban design have focused on the visual aspects
of open spaces, an emphasis which has led practitioners to over-emphasize the appearance of
their creations. Recently this ocularcentrism has been highly criticized (Bentley et al., 1985;
Carmona et al., 2010; Landry, 2006; Lynch, 1971; Malnar et al., 2004; Pallasma, 2005;
Shaftoe, 2008; Taylor, 2009) as well as design solutions based exclusively on the
practitioners’ own preferences and intuitions (Bentley et al., 1985; Gehl, 2010; Rapoport,
2005; Ward Thompson, 2010).