Welcome to the Movement Economy

From Bill's e-mail (Feb 24), and article by the ULI.

Welcome to the Movement Economy
by Chris Larsen

Cities really are no “field of dreams.” According to Martin Butterworth, if you build it, they might come. Butterworth, managing director of Space Syntax Australia, says cities that rely on “attractors” alone for success are planning to fail. His company specializes in providing evidence-based analysis to build “movement infrastructures” and to generate urban economies. In other words, it assists the movement of people and vehicles in order to make the “attractor” property viable.

Space Syntax, a Sydney-based strategic design and property consulting company, uses evidence and computer modeling to demonstrate how movement through a space, such as a building’s interior, will work or fail.

Butterworth, who originally studied architecture and who worked for architecture firms in Brisbane and London, says cities work best when their urban centers are organized around highly accessible spatial layouts that naturally generate pedestrian and vehicular movement.

Land uses that seek movement—such as retail and commerce—migrate to these movement-rich streets and urban places, producing an economic multiplier effect that attracts more diverse building uses and increased densities. Space Syntax, which Butterworth established in 2000, refers to this as the “movement economy,” which generates economic vitality and social cohesion in cities. But the reverse also is true—when spatial accessibility, movement patterns, and land use do not add up, then economically unsustainable and antisocial environments emerge.

This principle applies not only to cities but also to master-planned communities and other property developments, and even to building interiors. “A foundation stone for a prosperous city is a vibrant public realm, with abundant pedestrian movement,” maintains Butterworth. “Public and private transport networks provide additional means by which pedestrians are delivered to a city center for easy access to urban facilities. Spatially integrating those urban facilities with a highly accessible public realm produces key economic multiplier effects that were once prevalent in cities,” he notes.

“A basic requirement for a viable pedestrian infrastructure is a simple, interconnected, spatially integrated, continuously animated and intelligent public realm.” Put simply, it is not enough to have a “build it and they will come” mentality towards attractors if it is not easy for people to get there in the first place. “This attractor idea of planning is one of the problems, because you don’t look at how the city works,” says Butterworth, who advises public and private sector clients about movement economy design for urban regeneration. “You provide arbitrary links to them and say ‘they’ll work.’”

And no urban space is immune to betterment, according to Butterworth.

“Great cities around the world have underperforming areas that can be improved,” he notes. “We’ve found that around 20 percent of movement—vehicular and pedestrian—has to do with attractors alone. About 70 percent tends to involve the accessibility patterns of how to get to those facilities. By spatially integrating the new, you can produce many more joined cities—through a diagnostic and prognostic process.”

Butterworth says fragmentation is another classic mistake in urban planning. “Urban fragmentation lies at the heart of some of the problems of modern cities because it constrains economic potential, making it difficult for individual developments to create sufficient levels of natural movement.”

“Fragmentation happens when accessibility is unintelligible,” he observes. “At the large scale, urban fragmentation spreads space across cities, isolating and segregating suburban areas, producing enclaves rather than communities. Residential areas are isolated from employment areas. Office parks and industrial estates are so segregated that they can develop no local retail potential.” Butterworth notes.

“Easily walkable urban centers with convenient public transport links are limited to older parts of cities. The main problem of urban fragmentation is that it relies solely on attractors to make a new park or urban center work,” Butterworth maintains. “While attractors may produce some pedestrian movement, if urban accessibility is poor, they will not be able to take advantage of the local urban layout to generate economically sustainable amounts of natural pedestrian movement,” he explains.

With the right amount of pedestrian and vehicular movement to make attractors achieve their full economic and social potential, how well will the street system function? That is the critical question.

Space Syntax’s work has produced some surprising results—some with important implications not just for property development but also for investment. For example, pedestrian use of Trafalgar Square in London increased 1,300 percent “when a strategically located staircase was put to use,” Butterworth explains.

He also points out the unusual example of the suburban high street at Auburn in western Sydney, which has the same number of pedestrians per hour as the most active part of Flinders Street in Melbourne. “It questions the way we consider investment,” says Butterworth. “You could say that Auburn is a very powerful place that isn’t even on the radar of investors. Melbourne could be improved.”

Think globally, act locally, is Butterworth’s creed.

While the mistakes of the past might have long-term effects in the future, Butterworth contends it is never too late to improve the planning of Australian cities, or to learn from experiences overseas.

“I think there are people now who realize we can’t just keep making problems for ourselves in cities,” he says. “It’s important for politicians to understand this evidence-based [planning].

. . . We can no longer use the ‘I thought it was a good idea at the time’ approach.”

Borders—whether national or within a city—can be parochial barriers to a better understanding of how to make cities more successful.

“We’re creating the same planning problems across the world,” Butterworth asserts. “We don’t seem to learn from our mistakes. Parts of our cities are quite successful. [But] we’re building large parts of cities that aren’t working the way we wanted them to. We’d do better to look at places that fail as well as those that succeed to get a better understanding,” he adds.

“We usually consider projects (ending at) the dotted line of a project boundary. We need to consider beyond that, and sometimes to great distances. It’s often global understanding we find to be the missing link . . . that’s the link between economics and transport.”

Thinking globally but acting locally might just be the tonic for poorly planned cities.

“What happens for urban centers between council boundaries may affect other urban centers. . . ,” Butterworth says. “The localness is needed in that there’s a political responsibility. But there’s also a responsibility of councils and state governments to work [together] hand-in-glove . . . .”

Chris Larsen is editor of Property Australia. (Adapted and reprinted with permission from Property Australia, February 2006.)