Assessment of social and spatial effects of urban design in Athens: insights for a methodological approach

This paper aims to briefly present an integrated methodological framework concerned with the social impact of urban design for the sustainable development of cities, which was elaborated within a research project conducted by the National Centre for Social Research-Institute of Social Research (EKKE). The research project aims to assess the emergent social and spatial effects of urban design based on the empirical investigation of selected urban design projects implemented in Athens area during the last three decades. Therefore, a set of interrelated methodological approaches and tools was developed in order to formulate an integrated methodological framework with regard to the evaluation of the impact of urban design on urban sustainability. The surrounding areas of the selected urban projects have been identified applying an appropriate algorithm and descriptive statistics aiming at finding their socio-demographic similarities and dominant characteristics in order to estimate the social integration of the projects in the local tissue. The changes of land uses before and after the implementation of the projects have been recorded and analyzed in order to estimate the actual effect of urban design on the functional and spatial organization of the study areas. A detailed recording of business activities and their modifications was carried out so that the actual adaptability of economic activities to be revealed within the context of the examined urban design interventions. The analysis of the political and scientific discourse was carried out based on the recording of the views and considerations of planners, researchers and public agents in order to shed light to aspects of the necessity, the social acceptance and the possibilities of urban projects implementation. Finally, a main part of the empirical investigation was based on the quantitative analysis of the findings of a survey carried out with a questionnaire addressed to people working in businesses that are currently established close to regenerated open spaces. This investigation aimed to collect the opinions of this target group of users as they experienced the changes of the regenerated public open spaces, in order to reveal social and spatial implications of urban design.The paper briefly describes the above methodological approaches and tools and discusses their main strengths and weaknesses. Given the lack of an established framework regarding the study of urban design social and spatial effects, the main finding of the paper is the proposal of an integrated methodological framework to monitor the impact of urban design on urban sustainability.