SSSEIC – StreetScapes for a Social-Ecological Inclusive City

Ideally, future liveable cities will guarantee a socio-ecological and integrative environment; they will ensure a sustainable, efficient and equitable distribution of urban space. But in order to fulfil that task a new way of systemic thinking and a fundamentally different understanding of space is required.

The research project ‘SSSEIC - StreetScapes for a Social-Ecological Inclusive City’ is developing an innovative instrument for the re-discovery and ultimately also for a new conceptualisation of urban commons. The basic prerequisite for this is that public street space is not viewed in isolation from the surrounding buildings and systems, but is seen, analysed, examined and treated as an intrinsic part of the urban parterre (i.e. the structure of streets, buildings and their base zones, souterrains and inner courtyards).

Not only since the beginning of the ongoing crises cycle (health crisis, climate crisis, economic crisis, political extremism...) have various disciplines been researching urban public space with the aim of (re)designing it in order to enable the mixed, inclusive, climate-neutral, circular, compact city – currently also known as the ‘15-minute city’. However, a large number of manuals on redesigning the urban street space deal exclusively with the street space itself, as if it were not part of a larger whole that we want to create.

Based on the Urban Parterre Modelling, or UPM approach (developed in the course of the FWF-funded 4-year research project Stadtparterre Wien), a completely new representation and thus the possibility of a new systematisation of street space is undertaken. SSSEIC thus offers an essential, hitherto non-existent basis for any further inter- and transdisciplinary examination of urban space.

The currently funded project scope (12 months) enables a pilot study, which initially focusses on the type of ‘secondary streets’.

Research objective
The result of the pilot study will be a BIM-compatible 3D visualisation method with which street spaces can be comprehensively mapped. On the way there, the research project is pursuing a compilation of suitable spatial, systemic, urban planning, traffic-related, climate-relevant and sociographic criteria as a basis for the development of a qualitative catalogue of criteria for public street space.

By answering questions such as: What constitutes the urban parterre under investigation, what are its space-forming, function-specific elements? How does the spatial fabric work? What qualities does it have in terms of proportions (shading...), geographical orientation (microclimate, air circulation...), infrastructural supply, street substructure (potential for tree planting or street underground garages or storage), permeability of the adjacent ground floor facades, actual level of use, public density (presence, movement, flow, residents), commercialisation, vacancy rate of the adjacent ground floor spaces, etc., a new urban spatial syntax is defined. As a result, this - not least task-orientated - approach will also provide the potential for the development of concrete planning guidelines for a redefinition of urban street space.