Edge city, beyond edge city

Evolutionary urbanization by dynamics of landscape ecology

Master thesis (2017)

Authors

S. Lee Architecture and the Built Environment

Contributors

T. Kuzniecow Bacchin (supervisor 1)
Han Meyer (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Architecture and the Built Environment
Copyright: © 2017 Seul Lee
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Published Date

2017

Language

English

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Faculty

Architecture and the Built Environment

Abstract

Historically, cities have been shaped by the transport system as it was considered as the most crucial element for economic growth. However, the advance of infomation technology broke the strong relationship between the city shape, the transport system and the economic growth. Since the flow of information is no longer dependant on the physical transport system today, modern cites recently show the limits of current design methods in their urban spatial structure.

In the meantime. Landscape urbanism has been discussed as an alternative way of designing urban spatial structure. However, the actual method for design process is not developed yet. The problem of the method developing process is that Landscape urbanism does not have a quantitative part to materialize the concept of landscape as a structuring element.

For this reason, this paper attempts to combine landscape urbanism with a quantitative tool, Spacematrix. By the marriage between them, landscape urbanism have a tool to materialize the idea of re-structuring a city with nature. At the same time, a new usage of spacematrix for design process is discovered.

San Jose is a case chosen for the process of developing the method because the current situation of the city shows the struggle of the new urban transformation. It is located in the southern part of San Francisco bay, greatly overlapped with the area of silicon valley. Since the silicon valley has shown noticeable economic performance last decades, it has been gradually expanding, and reaching the periphery of the city toward the sea.

Today the area cannot offer enough land for new development of the silicon valley because of the shortage of available land. Besides, the trend of sea level rising is also threatening the availability of land. As a result, the migration of silicon valley is getting accelarated every year. In the process of developing the method. Therefore, this paper focus on providing a solution for both the development issue and the flood problem based on landscape urbanism and spacematrix.