The urban vitality conditions of Jane Jacobs in Barcelona: Residential and smartphone-based tracking measurements of the built environment in a Mediterranean metropolis (original) (raw)

Introduction

In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs theorizes on the features that award cities with the capability of being vital environments in which human life would thrive. Her views are recognized as present-day benchmarks in the comprehension of how cities work, and as a consequence, are considered as theoretical backbones of recent planning and urban design currents (Downs, 2005; Klemek, 2007). In the academic arena, the work of Jacobs seems to have been recently re-discovered in empirical studies that aim at testing her ideas through thorough and innovative applied analyses (De Nadai et al., 2016; Sulis et al., 2018; Sung et al., 2013; Sung et al., 2015; Delclòs-Alió and Miralles-Guasch, 2018b).

Jacobs provides a synthesized view on the attributes that the built environment of neighborhoods ought to present in order to, among others, attract pedestrian activity, which she understands to be the main reflection of urban vibrancy, something she refers to as a “sidewalk ballet” (Jacobs, 1961). Jacobs developed her theories based on her own day-to-day experiences and the observations which she meticulously conducted in her beloved Greenwich Village, New York, USA. As a consequence, the street and the neighborhood became a central part of her theses. In a similar way, studies that explore the relationship between the built environment and individual pedestrian activity have traditionally been focused on the characteristics of the neighborhood in which people reside (Cervero, 2002; Frank et al., 2016; Marquet et al., 2017; Marquet and Miralles-Guasch, 2014).

This approach has recently been recently contested via the consideration of two main issues: 1) the definition of the spatial context that actually exerts an influence on human behavior still remains unclear, and this is termed the ‘Unknown Geographic Context Problem’ (Kwan, 2012); 2) the majority of daily mobility patterns, including walking activity, occur beyond the immediate residential environment, which is related to the so-called ‘Local Trap’ that is identified in epidemiology studies (Cummins, 2007; Vallée et al., 2014). Therefore, the contact of individuals with the built environment cannot be narrowed down to the potentiality of this rather limited spatial context (in a similar way to territorial effects on broader mobility patterns and the use of public space not being limited to the residential locus (Blanco and Apaolaza, 2017; Olivares and Pérez, 2015). Further, even though the residential environment can still be an adequate arena within which specific questions ought to be addressed, there is much more to explore by analyzing actual daily walking itineraries (Palmer et al., 2013; Yip et al., 2016).

In this context, tracking technologies, such as GPS-enabled smartphones, can provide researchers in the areas of geography and urban studies with objective and high-resolution data regarding the spatiotemporal behavior of individuals (Birenboim and Shoval, 2016; Chen and Akar, 2016; Shoval et al., 2014). Specifically, these devices have recently been used to define and explore the content and characteristics of daily activity spaces (Hirsch et al., 2015; Vich et al., 2017; Zenk et al., 2011), to explore urban issues such as segregation (Yip et al., 2016), and to relate individual walking itineraries with high-resolution spatial data on the built environment (Hahm et al., 2017).

In this line, the present study is aimed at analyzing the urban vitality principles of Jacobs at two different spatial extents: (a) the immediate residential context as the environment in which these individuals are potentially connected to, and (b) the environment with which individuals are in actual contact when walking, defined as pedestrian activity space. To do so, we rely on a tracking experiment based on a smartphone app that tracked the daily walking itineraries of 241 individuals between 18 and 29 of age. Much of the research found in the body of literature on walking that is based on tracking technologies has been aimed at specific age groups such as children (Babb et al., 2017; Demant Klinker et al., 2015) or older adults (Hirsch et al., 2015; Meijering and Weitkamp, 2016). Nevertheless, the way in which young adults interact with the built environment has been analyzed to a lesser extent (Cohen et al., 2018). Some attributes that are specific to this demographic present themselves as particularly interesting in terms of everyday outdoor behavior. While their mobility is more autonomous compared to that of children and adolescents, they may still be faced with less financial resources when compared to older sections of the population (Howell et al., 2017). In turn, young adults are faced with greater amounts of time spent in-between locations compared to other sociodemographic groups (Delclòs-Alió and Miralles-Guasch, 2018a), which can be regarded as evidence of lower residential stability and lower work-related stability that are specific to this age (Buchmann and Kriesi, 2011).

This study is set in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region (BMR, located in the Catalonia region of Spain), which presents a mixed urban configuration. On the one hand, the BMR still preserves areas with the traditional vital nature characteristic of the Mediterranean city (Martín-Ramos, 2012; L. Salvati et al., 2015), characterized by higher rates of daily walking mobility (Marquet and Miralles-Guasch, 2015). On the other hand, Mediterranean metropolises such as the BMR have been progressively overcome by a suburbanization process that is characterized by lower densities, higher morphological fragmentation, and a larger dependence on high-capacity transportation infrastructures (García-Palomares, 2010). This dual urban nature is presented as an interesting test of the validity of the ideas of Jacobs on urban vitality, and for this reason different types of neighborhood within the BMR are analyzed.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The main conditions for urban vitality as expressed by Jacobs are summarized in Section 2. Section 3 describes the materials and methods that were used in this study. In Section 4 the results of the analysis are presented. Section 5 includes a discussion and the conclusions.

Section snippets

Main drivers of urban vitality according to Jane Jacobs

Jacobs proposes a set of basic conditions that the built environment should present in order to promote a vibrant street life. These are basically four in number, complemented with two accessories based on the interpretation of Sung et al. (2013).

According to Jacobs, the first condition for urban vitality is Diversity, which has been traditionally studied as land-use mix (Christian et al., 2011; Hirt, 2016), and which refers to a combination of urban uses such as residential, retail,

Study area: Barcelona Metropolitan Region

The Barcelona Metropolitan Region (BMR) is the urban core of Catalonia and one of the main metropolitan areas in Southern Europe, and was populated with approximately 4.8 million inhabitants in 2017 (IDESCAT, 2017). This metropolitan region consists of areas that present significant differences from a built environment perspective. In this sense, the BMR can be categorized into four different urban morphologies, drawing from the Report on Urban Form and Social Cohesion at the Barcelona

Results

Data provided by the tracking experiment show that only 30.5% of daily walking activity among this group of young adults took place inside the residential buffer. The fact that the majority of daily walking activity is conducted beyond the residence surroundings provides evidence as to why it is relevant to analyze not only the characteristics of the built environment at the immediate neighborhood environment, but also to explore the itineraries conducted on a daily basis beyond this limited

Discussion and conclusion

The present study was aimed at analyzing the ideas on urban vitality of Jane Jacobs in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region (BMR) at two different spatial extents: a group of participants' neighborhood environment measured by a 600 m network Residential Buffer (RB) and their daily walking itineraries measured by Pedestrian Activity Spaces (PAS). The use of these two different spatial measures was aimed at understanding not only the potential contact with the built environment at the residential

Acknowledgments

The research presented in this paper has been possible thanks to financial support received from the FPU14/02638 grant (Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Gobierno de España) and from the Project CSO2016-74904-R (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Gobierno de España). The authors would like to thank Dr. Matt Copley for his professional proofreading services and for his editing suggestions.