Are you interested in how multifunctional urban spaces can contribute to increasing the quality of urban life in dense cities?


Summary of the article titled Multifunctional Urban Spaces – a solution to increase the quality of urban life in dense cities from 2020 by Atieh Ghafouri and Christiane Weber, published the Manzar journal.


Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how urban spaces can be designed and managed to promote social inclusion, community engagement, and sustainable development in the face of rapid urbanization and increasing density. The article presents the potential of these spaces to provide a range of social, cultural, and recreational amenities that meet the diverse needs of urban residents.


As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

The main goal is to improve the quality of life in densely populated cities and this can be achieved through efficiency but we must be able to create spaces for new functions – we must create multifunctional spaces.
A multifunctional space could be identified with these two characteristics: allow different functions, actors and different users to use it and fulfill the different roles a space might have in line with the environmental, economical and social sustainability.
When multifunctional cells are put together with a comprehensive vision, the benefits are much more significant than the sum of the advantages each cell could achieve individually.

You can find the article through this link.


Abstract: As urban population increases, cities face a dilemma on one hand, the horizontal growth causes devastating effects on the environment, and on the other hand, vertical growth leads to a decrease in the quality of life of citizens and causes a variety of mental illnesses. This dilemma has left city managers with a complex puzzle: a city that must be able to accommodate more people with minimal interference ensuring their optimum quality of life. This research presents the idea of multifunctional urban space design as a solution to the mentioned problem. The definition of multifunctional spaces in this research has been investigated using its definition in agriculture and environmental studies. The hypothesis of this research is based on the fact that the comprehensive definition can take a new perspective on urban design, improving the functional performance of existing urban spaces and thus reducing the need to build new facilities while maintaining the quality of life in dense cities. The research method is qualitative and based on bibliographic studies. First, the notion of functional performance and multifunctional space definition are examined in disciplines that produce a more specific interpretation of the subject, and then the definition of concepts is extended to urban design and urban space, highlighted and discussed.


Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

No.135 - Interview with Paul Satur about multifunctional urban spaces;

You can find the transcript through this link.


What wast the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the shownotes are also available.


I hope this was an interesting episode for you and thanks for tuning in.


Music by Lesfm from Pixabay

Twitter Mentions