Urban design quality and walkability: an audit of suburban high streets in an Australian city

ABSTRACT

If well planned and designed, suburban high streets can fulfil important economic functions and carry social significance, in addition to allowing for the passage of traffic. However, in newer cities which have been built around the automobile, suburban high streets have struggled to attract and retain customers. This study quantitatively assesses the design quality of suburban high streets in Brisbane, Australia, employing an existing framework. The results suggest that a lack of vitality and walkability in Brisbane’s suburban high streets is due to their low urban design quality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Proponents of the picturesque theory, such as Cullen (1961) and Gosling (1996), have not been included in the list because, rather than articulating frameworks, these authors maintain that the elements of the environment cannot be disassociated. In their view, the way built and natural environment elements are combined produces a holistic visual appeal which none can have separately (Marshall 2012). Frameworks by Lynch (1960) and Alexander (1965), whose unit of analysis is the entire city, have been excluded as well, as the scale is incompatible with the present study which focuses on individual streets.

2. Note that in Australian common parlance, ‘suburb’ is the commonly used terminology for any neighbourhood that is outside the CBD (including those in the inner city).

3. In a single case, the fieldwork was conducted from 3 pm to 3.30 pm.

4. The quality of the relationship represented in Figure 6 is somewhat compromised by the fact that the ‘number of pedestrians on street’ is already accounted for in two dimensions of the total urban design quality score (imageability and complexity), albeit only at a fraction. Whenever there is multi-collinearity, relationships between two variables may appear stronger than they are in reality. The ‘staying’ factor (see Mehta 2007) was not measured as it was not a component of the framework.