Human Factors in Land Use Planning and Urban Design

Methods, Practical Guidance, and Applications

Nicholas J. Stevens, Paul M. Salmon, Guy H. Walker, Neville A. Stanton

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317120247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Health & Safety
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The integration of Human Factors in Land Use Planning and Urban Design (LUP & UD) is an exciting and emerging interdisciplinary field. This book offers practical guidance on a range of Human Factors methods that can be used to rigorously and reliably explore LUP & UD.

It provides new ways to interpret urban space and detail context sensitive analysis for the interpretation and design of our surroundings. The methodologies outlined allow for the consideration of the technical aspects of the built environment with the necessary experience and human centered approaches to our urban and regional settings.

This book describes 30 Human Factors methods for use in the LUP & UD context. While it explores theory, it also focuses on the question of what Human Factors methods are; their advantages and disadvantages; step-by-step guidance on how to carry them out; and case studies to guide the reader.

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• Describes the practice and processes associated with urban and regional strategic planning

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• Constructed so that students, practitioners, and researchers with an interest in one particular area of Human Factors can read the chapters independently from one another

1

INTRODUCTION TO HUMAN FACTORS METHODS IN LAND USE PLANNING AND URBAN DESIGN

1.1 What Is Human Factors?

Human factors (HF) is the discipline dedicated to understanding the interactions and interface of humans with their environments. Through the application of theory, principles, and methods, HF practitioners seek to optimize human behavior, well-being, and system performance. The discipline contributes to the design and evaluation of systems that are compatible with the needs, limitations, and abilities of people. Most often associated with systems of work, it is a multidisciplinary field that bridges psychology, industrial and systems engineering, and computer, safety, and sports sciences. It provides an end-user focused approach for better understanding measured behavior and capabilities, rather than assumptions or trial-and-error, within complex systems of all kinds.

1.2 What Is a Human Factors Problem?

Most readers will be able to identify an example of an HF problem from their own experience of work, study, or just their daily lives. An HF problem will more than likely possess some, or all, of the following attributes. It will be a problem that impacts negatively on individual behavior and overall system performance. It will involve humans in systems who are not behaving as they were expected to because elements of the system were not designed to fit their needs and capabilities. These elements may include the artifacts they are using, the physical environment, the training they have received, the procedures they are working too, the other humans they are interacting with, and so on. It will be a problem that existing methods of design, evaluation, and procurement have somehow not captured, despite in-depth testing and analysis. Above all, it will usually be frustratingly resistant to a whole range of purely technical interventions.

These HF problems impact our daily lives. Their impacts range from minor frustrations, such as cumbersome and difficult to use products, to major catastrophes with significant injuries, fatalities, and social and economic costs. The focus of the HF discipline is to remove these issues through informed system design that is based on an understanding of human and system behavior and the factors that influence it.

The impetus for this book emerged from the realization that HF can play a key role in the analysis and design of our urban environment. Indeed, the description of HF problems above certainly rings true when considering the challenges faced by the disciplines working in land use planning and urban design (LUP & UD). The authors recognize that there are significant parallels between the HF and LUP & UD disciplines. In fact, it is many of these parallels that make this suite of HF methods relevant and effective for exploring our cities and regions. First and foremost of these is that both disciplines recognize that human behavior almost always occurs within systems that are complex in nature.

1.3 Cities as Complex Systems

A complex system, in its simplest sense, is a system with a large number of elements that exchange stimuli with each other and with their environment (Batty, 2007; Ottino, 2003). As such any complex system, including cities, will display specific properties. For demonstrating city complexity, Batty (2007) refers to Durlauf (2005) who states these properties are nonergodicity, phase transition, emergence, and universality. Nonergodicity is defined as a system that lacks probable behavior over time and, in the context of cities, can be characterized by exogenous shocks—for example, economic, environmental, social (Durlauf, 2005). Phase transition refers to a complex system having tipping points in which a convergence of elements can change the system. In recognizing the first two properties, emergence refers to the new systems properties that arise from the interaction of system components. It is the evolution of the system and is true to the notion that a system is greater than the sum of its parts (Batty, 2007). It is emergent changes that, from a positive perspective, can lead to innovation, novelty, and surprise, whereas from an HF safety and risk management approach may represent adverse events or accidents within the system (Rasmussen, 1997). Finally, universality refers to the system property that when examined at different times and spatial scales, the system is able to be recognized as the same (Durlauf, 2005).

Our cities and their urban and regional environments display all these properties. In fact, cities and urban systems have long been recognized as complex. As Batty (2007) highlights, general system theory provided the early impetus (1950s) as an attractive description of cities, emerging then into the top–down city as machine (e.g. Corbusier, 1967, engineered systems) to the more bottom–up city as organism (e.g. Holling and Goldberg, 1971, biological systems). As machine, cities were conceived as systems and subsystems which could be influenced by system control, and therein they could be better understood and even kept on task. Early work on supply and demand influences on transport, and land use integration reflects this logic (Batty, 2007). As organism, McLoughlin’s (1969) Urban and Regional Planning: A Systems Approach sought to provide a framework for the “emerging problems of understanding and planning of cities and towns” (p. 16). It was an approach that conceived the complex systems of human activity in the whole context of the planets ecological systems. Whilst not the only theorist to conceive cities in this way, McLoughlin’s work was critiqued at the time as an oversimplification of the processes by which decisions are made (Faludi, 1973).

From these foundational explorations of planning and systems theory, through to the present, it is arguably Professor Michael Batty who has the most articulate approach to the idea of our cities as complex systems (Batty, 1971, 1976, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2013, 2015). His work focuses on agent-based computer modeling of cities, their visualization, and related spatial analytic methods. The New Science of Cities (2013) provides the background, application, and future of how city design and decision-making can be supported by mathematical modeling and simulation. It provides the means to conceive and simulate the necessary bottom–up approaches that can deal with dynamic and unpredictable city systems. It is the evolution, rather than revolution approach to change in city systems, and talks to issues of emergence, which are also fundamental for HF understandings on urban complexity and systems.

Acknowledging previous systems explorations, the work presented in this book endeavors to provide practical and accessible means for practitioners, researchers, and students to empirically examine our complex city systems and to engage in design process that can cope with this complexity.

1.4 Human Factors and Land Use Planning and Urban Design

What is agreed about complex systems is that they cannot be understood by studying the parts in isolation (Batty, 2007; Ottino, 2003). However, without appropriate methods, this has largely been the approach of the LUP & UD disciplines. The use of interdisciplinary methodologies, such as those offered here, presents an alternative to the continued perpetuation of the predict and provide mindset upon which we have relied. They perhaps offer more than another set of normative principles or descriptive visions of technology-rich futures. The business as usual approach to urban and regional development is no longer sufficient.

Urbanization and development are occurring at a quickening pace on a global scale. In 1800, 2% of the population lived in urban centers; today, it is 54%; in 2050, it will be closer to 65% (UN, 2014). On World Health Organization’s projections, it will be 6.5 billion people living in cities worldwide. Right now, either through childbirth or migration, there is a net urban movement of more than 1 million people to cities every week. New ways to explore the use and reuse of our cities are needed —from the individual site to the strategic nation-building initiatives. Ways in which practitioners, politicians, researchers, and the community can conceive the complex and competing demands of our urban and regional environments.

The current book is not the panacea, but a shift to the HF systems thinking philosophy has important implications for our ability to explore and design for complex environments. Significantly and most importantly it recognizes that the overall system itself is taken as the unit of analysis and must be studied in the context of wider organizational, social, and political factors. For example, although individual physical and cognitive processes should be examined, the systemic factors influencing them should also be considered. This approach to understanding behavior and optimizing system design is now widespread in most safety critical domains including surface transportation (Read et al., 2017; Salmon et al., 2016a;), aviation (Stanton et al., 2016), maritime (Lee et al., 2017), defense (Stanton et al., 2010), mining (Donovan et al., 2017), and it is time for LUP & UD to explore the possibilities.

This book focuses on the methodological legacy and accomplishments of the HF discipline and uses them as a launching pad to generate new knowledge for LUP & UD. As such, the work, tasks, and outputs of LUP & UD must correctly be viewed as complex systems. What LUP & UD disciplines may refer to colloquially as a project, design, setting, or environment is considered in the context of this book to represent a system or indeed a subsystem.

The authors recognize important parallels between HF and LUP & UD. Both disciplines operate within complex systems settings, yet further than that it is possible to recognize these as important sociotechnical systems (STS). STS comprise social and technical elements coengaged in the pursuit of shared goals. The interaction of these social and technical aspects creates emergent properties and the conditions for either successful or unsuccessful system performance (Walker et al., 2010). Stripped back, our urban environments comprise people and communities interacting with technology (objects and artifacts) within environments or indeed a range of urban contexts (Stevens, 2016). The purpose and priority of STS is the optimization of people, technology, environments, and researchers in HF identify that STS approaches have some key features. Importantly, they consider safety as an emergent property and recognize that systems and component performance is variable and that systems are often hierarchical structures (Read et al., 2013; Salmon et al., 2010; Stanton et al., 2013a). These considerations are immediately applicable in the priorities for LUP & UD. That is an understanding that city performance is variable and dynamic, safety is a priority, and that cities are systems within which the hierarchy of context from site to strategic is imperative.

Further discipline alignment is reflected, in that neither field resides exclusively within the purview of engineering, nor are they the exclusive domain of social scientists. Both HF and LUP & UD require careful consideration of exacting tolerances while remaining vigilant and inclusive of the human experience within the system.

Both disciplines also share many methods for data collection, including case studies, surveys, interviews, simulations, visualization, and observation. The naturalistic nature of many of the HF methods is fit for purpose in LUP & UD. Significantly, the use of HF methods presents novel insights and applications to the types of qualitative and quantitative data that LUP & UD are already familiar with collecting and collating.

A key differences is that HF have developed a range of methods that allow them to better understand complexity in terms of how components in a system interact to create emergent behaviors. They have established means to include and explore the physical and cognitive processes associated with human and environmental interaction. LUP & UD continues to struggle with this complexity and is where the ...