Micro- and Macro-structures of a More Sustainable City
3.8 Conclusions
The investigation of city forms that respond positively to the generally agreed upon sustainability criteria has come up with evidence that both the micro- and the macro-structure of the city are of considerable importance. The first provides access to services and facilities and to transport nodes, and therefore responds to the most basic functional needs of provision and mobility. The second influences the environmental quality of urban areas and access to open spaces
and the countryside, and with it the potential for a symbiotic relationship between city and country.
It has become clear that a hierarchical structure of provision centres and transport systems and nodes is valid for all cities, city regions and conurbations.
It has also become clear that cities and conurbations can have a variety of different macro-structures as long as they have the appropriate micro-structure of nodes and link-ages that is responsible for access to provisions and services and mobility.
All conclusions regarding micro- and macro-structure represent highly probable assumptions, some of which are based on empirical data to back them up (or, indeed, to refute them). A virtual (or, better, a real city) laboratory would be most useful in order to obtain additional evidence and empirical data. Many attempts have been made to obtain research grants in order to establish such a laboratory, but to date they have failed; the bodies that provide grants seem to be content with clearly defined and rather limited (and therefore inevitably exclusive) research proposals and do not seem to understand the need for multi- aspect and multi-disciplinary research, which they consider to be too complex and ambitious to be successful. Well, much of current research in the field of the
‘sustainable city’, for all its mostly inconclusive results, demonstrates that without ambition the complex issues of a sustainable city region will not become more tangible and we will continue to rely on assumptions.
What can, however, be done in this context is to provide evidence that the developed micro- and macro-structures are relevant for real cities and city regions and can be applied in an attempt to generate a better-functioning and more user- and environment-friendly city. Therefore in Chapter 5 an attempt is made to explore the applicability of the model urban structure developed as a result of the comparison of the performance of different city forms and the pursuit of sustainability parameters. Glasgow will be used as exemplar and the objective will be to find out how, and to what degree, the application of the net city model could be viable.
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