Elements of the City: Visualizing Local Pedestrian Accessibility

A fundamental goal of the smart-growth paradigm is to encourage, promote, and plan for pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods. This analysis employs advanced spatial analysis techniques and their ability to evaluate and interpret smart-growth goals with the elements that define the pedestrian accessibility of the city. In the book The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch identifies five elements of the city that underlie urban analysis: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. These concepts now are viewed through the lens of a modern GIS system.

By using these elements—specifically paths and nodes—and analyzing them with spatial techniques, it becomes possible to visualize the city in new and innovative ways. This image displays the geographic areas within the urban growth boundary that have the highest potential of being pedestrian-oriented. By using Metro’s Regional Land Information System (RLIS) dataset, it is possible to interpret basic geographic data (road centerlines) as elements of the city (paths, nodes) in order to measure and visualize them.The core of this analysis is a very rare sidewalk database that contains data resulting from an inventory for the region.

Courtesy of Nathaniel Brown.