Assembling Transit Urban Design in the Global South: Urban Morphology in Relation to Forms of Urbanity and Informality in the Public Space Surrounding Transit Stations

Abstract

The imperative to address the challenge of transforming car-dependent cities and promoting sustainable mobilities requires that we engage with the relationships between urban morphology and forms of urbanity in public spaces surrounding transit nodes. While there has been a surge of interest in investigating the agency of urban planning and design in mitigating urban sprawl and its environmental impacts by creating mixed-use, dense, and walkable places, the extent to which the public space can enable streetlife intensity in proximity to transit remains underexplored. Through extensive urban mapping and comparison of two transit nodes in Tehran, this paper articulates the key morphological elements of building density, functional mix, and access networks, how they work in relation to forms of urbanity and informality in public space around stations, and what inferences can be made on how public space within station areas work in the context of rapidly urbanising cities compared to those in Western contexts. The nexus between functional mix, retail edges, and forms of urbanity has been found critical to the spatial configuration, performance, and transformation of transit station areas. Forms of informality have also been found integral to how public space works in the context of transit urban design. This paper contributes to the newfound accent on urban design dimensions concerning TODs in the context of less formal and more congested cities of the global South.

Keywords

• transit urbanism
• TOD
• urban form
• accessibility
• density
• functional mix