//week four - Urban Analysis

exercise one A - Brisbane timeline

 exercise one B - Brisbane timeline

Mapping Brisbane's timeline was very interesting. In particular I would have thought that the main part of the city would be the oldest part of Brisbane and then expansion out from there would have occurred. Although this is not the case, in fact from completing the history mapping exercise it is obvious that the first hub of development occurred in the Fortitude Valley are of Brisbane and it wasn't until 1874 when the city center was developed.

 exercise two - mobility analysis

In the mobility analysis map above shows the transport routes of the city cat, cross river ferry, trains and main bus ways.

 exercise three - functional analysis

 exercise four - urban morphology

reflection... when completing these maps I began to think about the planning of Brisbane city in more depth and how a map of a city can show so many thing about the city depending on how you manipulate the map.

Urban morphology is analysis of a city which helps reveal human settlement patterns (Steiner, F. R. 2008). As we experienced in the tutorial whilst completing the urban morphology map, it is evident that the human settlement patterns can be seen in plan by colour coding the heights of the built environment. By completing this exercise you begin to form a map which shows a bit of the city's history. Whitehand mentions the notion of an urban fringe which constitutes to a major part of the urban area (Whitehand, J. W. R. 1987). I found this quite interesting that there is a space just outside of the town or city that is almost like a buffer zone between the urban and rural environments. I had a little look at some city maps where this is clearly evident.

 

As you can see in the map above of Chur, Switzerland, that the urban fringe (buffer zone) is coloured in white with the rural area in green and the urban city in gray.

      -Whitehand, J. W. R. (1987). The Changing Face of the City. Oxford: Institute of British Geographers.
      -Steiner, F. R. (2008). The Living Landscape: an ecological approach to landscape planning. America: Island Press