Relationship between the pattern of open urban space and increasing density

Abstract

Since the late 20th century, urban living environment is experiencing unprecedentedly fast development. Buildings and urban spaces in metropolises are continuously transcending definitions with emerging new patterns, including new forms and organizing ways. Because the natural contradictions between previous top-down and bottom-up approaches, although many recent studies attempt to identify a third way to achieve sustainable cities with a comprehensive understanding pattern of urban spaces, it is still a lack that to study the pattern of urban spaces comprehensively from an architectural scale. In this study, the author put forward the term “open urban space” (OUS) for studying the coordinate processes of diverse urban spaces since the 1970s in Hong Kong. The “open” directs to both concept of “open” on a flexible system for a time-series of changes and “open” on multiple attributions of OUS in a relatively static time point. Although the density of urban areas in Hong Kong seems extreme, this high-rising development mode is not an exceptional case around the world. Since the 1970s, limited land resources and pressure from economic development have pushed the building density (plot ratio) to rise faster as a new round of urbanization in Hong Kong. This study proposes a new approach (Level-Type framework) to tracing and rethinking how the current pattern of OUS is formed with a time-series of increasing density. Two core districts in Hong Kong are analyzed and compared to systematically seek better opportunities for the future of OUS in different degrees of high density. The empirical study includes three steps are operated with Level-Type framework: analysis of Wan Chai case, analysis of Mong Kok case, and comparison of the two cases. During developing the study framework in first two steps of two cases respectively, three main conceptions involved in the methodology as three dimensions for examining the situations of OUS: combinations of different attributions in OUS as a horizontal dimension, the level of publicness in an OUS system verticle dimension, and a time-series comparing as the third dimension. This study is fundamentally a qualitative study by analyzing the historical materials and observing the changes of spatial forms on several groups of a time-series 2d or 3d maps. During this process, trends of several parameters about spatial forms and density are graphed for assisting in inspecting the changes of OUSs. After comparison of two districts, four kinds of relations between increasing density and OUS are unpacked in chapter 6. They proved that the framework is useful and workable for estimating the roles and trends in the dynamic OUS system. Moreover, three kinds of transformations of OUS’ patterns are concluded from the synthesis findings on these relations. OUSs are changing from the universal and extensive leisure land in urban to the refined multi-level and multi-type places. These transformations are important trends for understanding OUS in contemporary cities accurately.