초록
The importance of designing urban building complexes so that they obtain 'urban' power, rather than become isolated from the surrounding urban context, has been well recognized by both researchers and practitioners. Nevertheless, most current discussions are made from architects' personal experiences and intuition, and lack a quantitative understanding, to which obstacles include an in-depth exploration of the 'urban' power between building complexes and the urban environment. This paper attempts to measure this feature of 'urban', i.e., 'urbanity,' through a new analytical approach derived from the opendata environment. Three measurements that can be easily collected though the Google Maps API and Open Street Map are applied herein to evaluate high or low values of urbanity. Specifically, these are 'metric depth', i.e., the scale of extended public space, 'development density', i.e., density and distribution of point of interests (POIs), and 'type diversity', i.e., diversity of different commercial types. Six cases located in Japan, China and Hong Kong respectively are ranked based on this analytical approach and compared with each other. It shows that Japanese cases, i.e., Osaka Station City and Namba Parks, Osaka, obtained clearly higher values than cases in Shanghai and Hong Kong. On one hand, the insight generated from measuring and explaining 'urban' power would help to assist better implementation of this feature in the design of urban building complexes. On the other hand, this analytical approach can be easily extended to achieve a large-scale measurement and comparison among different urban building complexes, which is also helpful for design practitioners.