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Functioning as space connectors, path structures in urban parks may rarely present social interaction opportunities, although centralized activity spaces are available. This paper investigated the interrelationships between the visual and physical accessibility attributes of path structure and their impacts on passive social interaction intensity across urban parks in Kuala Lumpur.

The concept of social interaction has been studied elsewhere in social cohesion, social affiliation and sense of communication. Still, it has not been studied in the context of urban park design. This study employed mixed methods using an adaptive and unique combination of qualitative and quantitative data collections to analyze urban parks with a bit of visual vegetation barrier. The experiential landscape method was applied to determine visual accessibility by interpreting experiential landscape maps. The space syntax method based on quantitative analysis is considered to measure physical accessibilities and vigorous activities along the designated paths by conducting integration analysis and gate observation. The data were crossed-analyzed using a Geographic Information System (GIS) classification technique, correlation analysis and Microsoft combo-charts to generate the relationship between patterns of activities and their accessibilities.

The results suggested that designated paths with higher accessibility attributes, impressively more elevated than other tracks, could influence the intensity of passive social interactions. The findings supported the understanding that activity nodes and active areas adjoining designated routes could make accessibility attribute areas more critical. These findings verify that visually enriching the spaces along the path structure toward activities is a pivotal contributor to urban planners and designers to enhance the paths’ local integration (LI) and visual accessibility to predict more passive eye contact among park visitors.

The proposed interrelationship among variables in this study has limitations because of not considering other qualitative methods and techniques like cognitive maps and interview simultaneously. These techniques could discover why some paths generate more passive eye contact among park users (Mohammadi Tahroodi, 2018).

Kuala Lumpur Structure Plan 2020 emphasizes Kuala Lumpur’s unique image as a tropical garden city via preserving and developing the iconic historical urban parks in the city center (CHKL, 2004, pp. 3–3). The latest Draft Kuala Lumpur Structure Plan 2040 has outlined the strategy to achieve a conducive, good-quality neighborhood that encourages social interaction. The findings could assist urban planners and designers better public parks by considering accessibility and permeability aspects of design. This research endorses the appropriateness of interrelationship between accessibility attributes of path structure and social interaction in urban design research, which local urban designers have not fully considered until now. Evaluating the visual convenience of designated paths and assessing LI of the axial lines constructing each designated route of urban parks during the primary stage could enable urban designers to estimate to what extent the paths are accessible and respond to passive social interaction. Then they could enrich with salient landmarks, views and activity nodes to make them attractive. The considerable number of designated paths connections, specifically while they shape the sides of activity nodes, could increase the connectivity and integration of spaces within the parks. These patterns of positioning the activity nodes make the designated routes more legible and provide ease of movement. As a result, it will give urban park users more information about the activities. Allowing people to use the paths will increase people’s presence and, subsequently, passive social interaction. One way is to locate accessible lands that provide social activities at direct visual access paths within urban parks for legibility.

The socially responsive urban design enhances the quality of life and provides life satisfaction, happiness and society’s overall health. Being in urban social parks in any passive and active situations has psychological benefits. It facilitates relief and rests from a stressful modern lifestyle that significantly impacts their mental health and well-being. The framework applied in this research integrates the social, spatial and physical aspects of parks design. With this regard, principles and indicators facilitate physically and socially attractive urban parks for Kuala Lumpur city center and applicable to similar contexts elsewhere.

The concept of social interaction has been studied elsewhere in social cohesion, social affiliation and sense of communication. Still, it has not been studied in the context of urban park design. This study employed mixed methods using an adaptive and unique combination of qualitative and quantitative data collections to analyze urban parks with a bit of visual vegetation barrier.

The purpose of this paper is to trace how the relationship between city governments and citizens has developed over time with the introduction of urban informatics and smart city technology.

The argument presented in the paper is backed up by a critical review approach based on a transdisciplinary assessment of social, spatial and technical research domains.

Smart cities using urban informatics can be categorised into four classes of maturity or development phases depending on the qualities of their relationship with their citizenry. The paper discusses the evolution of this maturity scale from people as residents, consumers, participants, to co-creators.

The paper’s contribution has practical implications for cities wanting to take advantage of urban informatics and smart city technology. First, recognising that technology is a means to an end requires cities to avoid technocratic solutions and employ participatory methodologies of urban informatics. Second, the most challenging part of unpacking city complexities is not about urban data but about a cultural shift in policy and governance style towards collaborative citymaking. The paper suggests reframing the design notion of usability towards “citizen-ability”.

A public space is a place of significance when it fulfils the human need for social interaction and attachment. However, the scarcity of public spaces poses a challenge to support socialisation for people within a defined social and cultural group. The purpose of this paper is to explore the association between place attachment and social interaction within public spaces in the city centre of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Face-to-face interviews with urban users were conducted to examine the users’ engagement in three main public spaces in the city and the significance of these spaces to everyday social interaction. Field observations were carried out to examine patterns of users’ activities and interactions.

The authors uncover a lack of multi-functional spaces to support diverse forms of interactions in the city. A street has an important function to generate activities. However, spaces for people to sit and stay remain scarce, and are in most cases consumed by extended commercial use and thus considered private. Opportunities for social interaction are very limited. The significance of the places relates strongly to commercial and tourism functions, and hence place attachment evolves around those activities. Participants associated their familiarity and engagement with interaction between familiar people, close ethnic relationships and business acquaintances.

The authors argue that more robust and socially responsive public spaces should be reclaimed for the culturally diverse users.

Development of attachment through meaningful spaces for people to stay and interact could enhance the role of public spaces in the city.

By understanding the social meanings of places, particularly in a multi-cultural setting, a stronger basis for designing and managing urban places towards resiliency and social sustainability can be provided.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how experimentation with open Internet of Things data can be institutionalised in an inclusive manner at scale.

The approach is conceptual, addressing key challenges discussed in the literature on experimental cities. This exposition of the problem of scaling experimentation is anchored in findings from two projects (Dampbusters and OrganiCity), which seek to implement experimentation as a practice of sustainable digital urban development.

One central finding is that local interventions need transferable frameworks and mechanisms to achieve scaling effects of experimentation as a practice. In addition, experimentation must embed common engagement principles, structures of data and interfaces, and governance principles across use cases to be scaled.

The authors outline how and why experimentation can be a useful approach to address challenges of implementing urban informatics into concrete uses and procedures for co-creation. Based on reports from two projects, the authors develop recommendations for experimentation at scale that reflect the need for engagement principles, the need for common data structures and interfaces, as well as governance principles.

Citizen participation in urban governance has established itself as a paradigm, promising greater democracy, empowerment, and more cost-effective public service delivery against the backdrop of increased urban conflicts. The dominant focus on the “citizen” or even “smart citizen” in the context of smart cities and urban innovation is however a relatively recent phenomenon. A growing number of initiatives seek to revamp the smart city as a human smart city. Therein, design thinking and human-centered design have become the buzzwords of choice to describe “putting people first” approaches that promise to develop solutions tailored to citizens’ needs. What was previously known as user-centered design in the context of information and communication technology (ICT) product and service development now proliferates the urban through innovation labs or civic hackathons. But what are the implications of using design thinking in a smart city context? And moreover, how to unpack human-centered design and design thinking within urban scholarship? This chapter contextualizes the phenomenon of design thinking in cities and renders implicit design thinking processes more explicit. Drawing upon ongoing research in Manchester and Amsterdam since 2014, my work-in-progress suggests that governing through design thinking results in a designing of the social rather than for the social. This trend requires historically informed political analysis and alternative ways to govern if the “right to the smart city” is not to become yet another iteration of shape-shifting neoliberal strategies.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the influence of three selected physical components of the urban environment – physical design, space layout and functionality, and store external appearance – on consumers' perceptions of service quality and behavioural intentions (desire to stay and repatronage intentions).

The research framework is based on the atmospherics, servicescape and service quality literatures. The proposed model is tested with a survey conducted in an inner‐city shopping street in Benevento (Italy).

Results show that physical space functionality and store appearance provide cues upon which customers base their perception of service quality provided in the shopping street and that service quality inferences, in turn, are able to affect desire to stay and repatronage intentions.

Findings are able to provide policy makers and retailers with suggestions in developing appropriate strategies for managing the urban setting with particular reference to individual shopping streets with the objective of improving customers' perception of service quality and subsequent behavioural outcomes.

The paper contributes to both retail and place marketing literature in that it is one of the few empirical studies aiming to investigate the influence of atmospheric stimuli on consumers' perception in an urban setting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore through a project the feasibility of testing Carpo’s preposition of the second digital turn. It further argues that if media architecture could progress into a new digital design that makes use of large amount of data, the ability of computers to filter through these data and the computers capacity to generate a physical output based on data enabled through a “digital trial and error” process and “age-old problem” in media architecture design could be addressed—in the following called Master/Slave relationship. Its breakdown is then consequently a result of applying second digital turn thinking to media architecture.

The paper outlines two aspects to discuss the design of a media architecture installation: first, a qualitative method using the e-mail trails between the research team developing the installation to uncover trends in thought and opinion to identify if a Master/Slave outcome could have been avoided, thus it has the second digital turn thinking provided a “neutral judge”. Second, a design research approach where the designed outcome of the installation is discussed and evaluated. The scope of the chapter only allows for a short overview of the design process as such.

The authors could demonstrate that the design approach using second digital turn principles had overcoming the problem of a Master/Slave relationship in media architecture. Further, media architecture provides to the second digital turn, the advantage of providing input variables is of a technical nature and a clear set of objective relationships between the technical variables and constraints. Hence, it is easier to design x-number of design options. Media architecture also has advantage that the aesthetic judgement is potentially easier (which option to choose), as the primary function of most media façades lies in communicating dynamic text, graphic or images.

The paper understands its value in opening up and contributing to the question on how to judge objectiles. When designers are now in a position to develop computer programs that can design objects how does one judge which is the best object out of all the potential options? The paper argues that if the aesthetic quality of the outcome is understood a later judgement might be easier.

The purpose of this paper is to review, analyze and synthesize different pieces from literature to explore, define and describe the concept of social capital and its relationships with urban neighborhood design concepts. Additionally, to define the indicators and principles that can enhance social capital within urban design context. Moreover, to suggest theoretical urban neighborhood design concept that can adopt the changing discourse of social capital.

This research used the theoretical, analytical and descriptive approach-driven case study method. In all, 29 papers were analyzed to conclude the indicators that can measure social capital within the urban neighborhood design context and to conclude the required neighborhood design features and principles that influence social capital. Additionally, two new urban neighborhoods design concepts, cohousing and hybrid concepts that adopt new forms of social interaction, were studied, analyzed and then synthesized to suggest new neighborhood design concept, which is a heterotopia concept.

Heterotopia neighborhood concept aims to create real, different and heterogeneous functional spaces with different layers of meanings for people from different cultures in one place. Different visible enclosures are merged into spaces of otherness while the diversity gives a sense of entering another alternative place. The heterotopias neighborhood design principles aim to create a wide variety of forms, shapes and elements [different new spaces for different ritual activities to reflect the otherness self-reflection (homogeneous and scattered spaces)] and create linkage, hierarchy, contrast and mingling between spaces and places; well-defined functional effective spaces; different fantasy and leisure spaces; high standard quality of life and otherness space; flux in social realm and fluidity of spaces; mixed use and joint experience; and innovated technologies spaces to offer strange new temporalities.

This research recommended that different community stakeholders should participate in planning process, neighborhood urban design and decision-making process about public spaces to strengthen the community ties and achieve a heterotopia concept. Architect, urban designers and planners should adopt bottom-up design approach when designing neighborhood. Additionally, to avoid poor social capital research studies, the new researchers, practitioners and journal reviewers approaching social capital for the first time must read widely to gain an understanding of the concept from different perspectives and narrow their scope to their particular area of interest.

This research highlights the needs for empirical studies to examine the relationships/interrelationships between all neighborhood design principles and social capital. This might increase the knowledge on how we can design and increase the quality of neighborhood to foster social capital, which might offer interesting insights into how neighborhood urban design principles are combined to foster social capital within neighborhood context.

Neighborhood-based research encourages new suggesting concepts in designing every single place in the residential neighborhood in a way that can adapt the new forms of social interaction. This research scanned the current concepts of neighborhood design that concerned successfully with the changing forms of social relationships to conclude some design features and principles for neighborhood design to ensure and promote social public health and well-being. This research offers a unique perspective for better understanding the relationships between the neighborhood urban design as a spatial dimension and social capital. This research aims to enrich the socio-spatial knowledge and build a resilient urban community by suggesting theoretical urban neighborhood design concept, which is the heterotopia concept, and providing the urban designers and architects with a valuable thinking tool to design spaces.

The purpose of this research is to conduct a comparative analysis of the views of architects and urban designers in the West and the Middle East on whether the COVID-19 pandemic could affect architecture and urban design shortly and what is the future of our home design? A further purpose was to explore and explain how the pandemic will change the future of architecture and urban design by reviewing, analyzing and synthesizing different and related viewpoints to create a grounded theory, hoping to provide some insight for the entire world.

Different research methods were used to achieve the research purposes including grounded theory, desk reviews, reviewing the limited existing literature and semi-structured interviews.

This research found that most surveyed architects believed that the COVID-19 pandemic would affect the future of architecture and urban design and help to create new design features. Future concentration will be in living, working, learning, leisure and teaching spaces. All future designs should be independent, self-sufficient in terms of power and water usage and using nonrenewable energy sources. The home design should focus on the interior design, transparency, open to the inside (introverted spaces), quality of life, natural daylighting and ventilation, healthy indoor air quality, use of plants and natural materials, green roof, the relationships between indoor and outdoor spaces and quality of building materials. Additionally, transitional space is an important primary entry point to the home. Moreover, folding furniture may be a solution to enlarge the room when needed and turn it into multifunctional spaces. The home office will no longer be a small desk, chair and lamp located at the small corner anywhere. The future home office should be equipped with all the necessary technology. The open-plan design trend and the concept of flow space will not exist anymore. The pandemic will encourage the use of touchless and smart technologies in design and construction. There is a need to separate heating and ventilation systems in detached houses and multistory buildings to avoid infectious diseases. Social norms have changed over a few weeks of social distancing. Therefore, we can change the system of negative habits, old traditions and society’s bad behaviors.

This research raises many proactive ideas, and the results are relevant to all actors in the construction sector, as it contains findings of understanding how the interaction of people with the built external or internal environment evolved during the pandemic process. In this sense, it will provide socio and economic benefits for the society in terms of seeking an answer to the question of “how should we design” for possible new bad scenarios to evolve the spaces in the “lockdown” situation. This research discusses how to make our homes comfortable and ready for an extraordinary time, suggested a practical design solution based on construction technologies.

This research links theory to practice, and it facilitates the adaptation to the current situation. It has a high impact on society, as it guides designers to rethink spaces that can help occupants face the COVID-19 pandemic challenges. Therefore, it should create and implement architectural design guidelines for health and safety. The architects should think about how to create and organize multifunctional, flexible, aesthetical, healthy and clean spaces under the new roles of interaction and social distancing. Architects should incorporate technological and innovations from different fields to organize spaces, promote public health and enhance the quality of life.

Architecture and urban design suddenly become medical, and we can use the built environment as a way to control epidemic spread. Additionally, and by reviewing the literature, there is no published qualitative research that has been explored on how the COVID-19 pandemic will change the future of architecture and urban design, but there are some personal viewpoints and short interviews. This topic is a new growing concern and becoming a top social topic and priority for policymaking in the world. The topic is important in terms of design input for designers to create new living spaces, as it includes the views and observations of architects from the east and west to the pandemic process. We have all been encouraged to reimagine the space in which we live, how the place fits our needs, how we use it and enjoy it during the pandemic. Therefore, this paper appeals to an international readership by linking the COVID-19 situation to architectural design.

This paper aims to investigate the ways that could enhance residents’ social interaction in low-rise residential building neighbourhoods of Basra city in Iraq. The lack of social interaction among residents of Basra city prompted the authors to frame a strategy for this case study.

The spatial design characteristics of low-rise residential building neighbourhoods implicated to support the residents in terms of social interactions in comparison to those exhibited by a single home and traditional neighbourhoods. The statistical data demonstrated that by using this strategy, several unique features of secured, collective, responsive and supportive spaces could enhance the residents’ social interaction.

This study found that all collective space factors have a significant influence on social interaction. “Fostering proper proximity and accessibility” factor was ranked first and the most significant factor with an influence on social interaction. Secured spaces (hierarchical spatial structure, physical security supports and construct) have a significant influence on social interaction. The most interesting finding in this study is that all factors of the supportive spaces construct have a significant influence on social interaction. Finally, this study showed that two factors of the responsive spaces construct, increasing variety and increasing legibility, have an insignificant influence on social interaction.

The design of low-rise residential building neighbourhoods in Basra city may be used to develop social interaction as the contributing factor for maintaining values of traditional neighbourhood communities. This study highlights certain recommendations for architects, especially urban designers, to reinforce residents’ social interaction in low-rise residential building neighbourhoods in Basra city.