In recent years, it has become a commonplace to argue that cities should be the focus point of sustainable development. Various authors have presented a variety of arguments why cities should be the preferred target to foster sustainable development-focused innovation; - The average consumption of resources of urban dwellers is higher. - The population of cities is growing continuously, while rural populations stabilize. - Deteriorating living conditions and segregation in cities caused by processes of gentrification of traditional neighbourhoods that drive out lower income groups to the suburbs. - Cities are ‘concentrated’ emitters of pollutants and therefore solutions and re-use might be easier to implement. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11185013 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karel-mulder-163aa96/
Void street interfaces (VSIs) – building plinths with restricted visual interaction, accessibility, and public use – constitute an urban feature often associated with undermining the public domain, limiting free access and preventing interaction between social groups. Moreover, VSIs have been described as products of inequality designed to segregate and hinder integration between public and private urban spaces. This study assesses VSIs across six cities in Brazil, a country notable for its profound inequality and sociospatial fragmentation. The main aims of this research are: (i) to develop and test a predictive model for VSIs using socioeconomic indicators drawn from open-source ground-truth data; (ii) to identify the variance of VSI within selected case studies. In the development phase of the predictive model, data from the city of Recife are used to build the model. The testing phase involves the analysis of VSIs in the cities of Fortaleza, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba and Porto Alegre. The model can potentially assist urban planners in better understanding and locating VSIs and mitigating undesirable outcomes.
