Respondents appreciated the streetscape details and/or the architectural scale of buildings on the street, the views from the street, and its cleanliness and landscaping.
AT&T Park is a landmark and attracts large crowds on game days, resulting in crowded sidewalks. Users reported that the place is a good attractor for travel, commerce, recreaton, and aesthetic enjoyment. This is facilitated by the 392.1 feet per mile of vacant street frontage. 15.4 percent ‘green gaps’ in street frontage complement the busy boulevard. The park lawn, which opens a vista to the bay, complements the urban design and sense of place, mostly on the east or bay side of the street.
San Francisco Photo Gallery
Connecting a place becomes the precursor to connecting people. People live in places and move between places. Besides the tangible aspects of a place, there are intangible aspects of imageability, identity, and sense of belonging shaped by a community’s values, memories, behaviors, and interactions. The Audit Tool presented in this travel destinations includes both the tangible and intangible dimensions that impact the place, people, and transport connectivity directly or indirectly. It can be used in a variety of ways:
• Research: Researchers can objectively and consistently develop metrics for different dimensions based on the context of the area under review. A rating scale for connected places can be developed using the metrics for places with similar contexts.
• Planning and urban design: Planners and urban designers can take an inventory of the physical characteristics to assess the quality of an area, identify problems, and recommend improvements. A before-and-after evaluation using the Audit Tool can measure the success of the strategies.
• Community input: A number of dimensions in the Audit Tool incorporate the community’s perceptions and feedback. Community rating sheets can be developed for each dimension based on the context of the area under review.
Most future global population growth is projected to occur in developing cities, where the number of residents is growing more rapidly than in advanced economies, alongside more rapid motorization, modernization, and industrialization. With some 70 million new residents added to these cities each year, the challenges of creating livable, sustainable communities while providing basic but critically important services such as shelter, education, and affordable transport are immense. Given that poverty-linked problems are most pronounced in parts of the world where there is vast urban growth-that is, the Global South-special attention must be given to the social, environmental, and physical challenges of connecting places in these very different environments.
