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1 11 Future Human Factors applications In L and use PL anning and urban d esig n 11.1 Introduction Both human factors (HF) and land use planning and urban design (LUP & UD) are at an exciting juncture in terms of their increasing role in the design of our future world. A world that will be increasingly technology centric and developing in areas such as automation, artificial intelligence, and big data. Although the possibilities for optimizing systems and human behavior are tantalizing, the potential to create systems that are cumbersome, inefficient, and even killers is omnipresent. HF will play a key role in ensuring that future systems do not frustrate, injure, and kill people on a regular basis, whereas LUP & UD has a critical role in the design of the environments in which our future lives will play out. Integrating the two disciplines provides a compelling opportunity to ensure that the design of our future living environments is optimized for human use based on long-standing theory, method, and principles. As such, the possibilities are endless. The current chapter will highlight the ongoing implications and application of HF methods in LUP & UD. It first considers the past and the ongoing efforts of LUP & UD to elucidate and provide meaning to the complexity of urban and regional development. These are practices that have often not resulted in substantive change but instead have provided reflective and normative descriptions of how we have and should be living, working, and playing. Next, readers will be challenged to consider the future implications of cities and 333

2 334 HUMAN FACTORS IN LUP AND UD urban form that prioritize empirically understood models of the complex nature of humans, technology, and their environment. The synergies between the HF and LUP & UD disciplines are strong and we give thought to the role of HF practitioners may play in supporting LUP & UD. The appetite for HF in the LUP & UD domain is clear and the possibilities for knowledge exchange considerable. Further, we contemplate how HF can enhance the wider exchange of knowledge between a range of existing (and necessary) interdisciplinary approaches that collaborate and interface with LUP & UD. To that end, an entirely new paradigm, that of Sociotechnical Urbanism, will be introduced. This presents itself as a vital research and practice agenda for future HF and LUP & UD applications Back to the Future It is possible to identify a long legacy of theoretical, conceptual, and practical efforts that seek to create better cities and interpret their complexity. There have been theoretical paradigms ranging from Walter Christaller s central place theory (Christaller, 1966) (proposed in 1933) to Lindblom s (1959) exploration of incrementalism and the science of muddling through. The land use planning discipline has conceived participatory and transactive approaches that draw upon and, indeed, prioritize community input and dialog (Forester, 1999; Friedman, 1973). There are communicative and collaborative approaches that seek to incorporate the range of interests and their associated experiences, including individual subjective participation within urban settings (Healey, 1997). Although the literature around LUP & UD provides insights into how these approaches can be studied and delivered, it has continued to struggle with the identification of practical means or proactive strategies for necessary change. In the past, there have been a variety of conceptual and applied approaches that have sought to deliver utopian and best-practice models of urban integration. These range from Ebenezer Howard s (1902) Garden City Movement to the enduring concentric zone model of city form offered by Ernest Burgess in 1925 or the multiple nuclei

3 FUTURE HUMAN FACTORS APPLICATIONS 335 model of Harris and Ullman (1945). A noteworthy aspect of nearly all utopian models of urban integration is the extent to which they have delivered distinctly dystopian outcomes, more often than not because people in these cities did not behave as expected. Perhaps the classic example is Le Corbusier s Quartiers Modernes Fruges, an ideological and esthetic experiment in prisme pur or machines for living. Far from the expected rationality, Le Corbusier s modernist homes, which were provided for workers of the nearby Fruges factory, were quite quickly personalized, adapted, hacked, or otherwise adjusted to suit the needs and whims of their occupants. This behavior is an inherent property of all sociotechnical systems and a recurring theme in the perceived downfall of most techno-utopian urban planning dreams. More recently, there has been a range of planning and design movements that seek to provide leadership and guidance on good city structures around distinctly human constructs such as quality of life, infrastructure efficiencies, and city futures. Congress for the New Urbanism (1993), for example, advocates quality of life in urban neighborhoods in its charter, foregrounding the mix of different land uses in walkable communities. Transit-orientated developments seek to have commercial, residential, and community facilities, all within the walkable proximity of major public transport nodes such as railway stations (Cervero et al., 2002). In the twenty-first century, we recognize and conceive creative (Scott, 2006), smart (Caragliu et al., 2011), or knowledgeable (Ergazakis et al., 2004) cities that focus on the use of human resources, social capital, education, innovation, and information communication and digital technologies. Common to all of them, however, are the often simplified assumptions about how the decisions made by designers and planners will enhance or constrain human behavior within the environment that is subsequently built. We argue that the underlying weakness with many of these approaches is that they tend to provide sets of standards, guidelines, and normative principles for the way-built environments and urban form should be designed and developed. Because of this, they often deliver generic and illustrative guidance on best-practice examples, detailing instances from different contexts in the expectation that the ideas may transplant to other regions. This translocation of a successful place is often limited in

4 336 HUMAN FACTORS IN LUP AND UD success, as the underlying emergent factors that made it work in one setting are not understood and indeed not transferred to a new location. All this reflects a key issue for the LUP & UD discipline as a whole. When considering the methodological guidance available to LUP & UD, it is clear there is little literature that assembles practical approaches to data analysis and application. In other words, a strongly empirical and evidence-based approach, particularly with regard to human behavior in built environments, is difficult for the typical practitioner to access. Of course, there are books that deal with urban planning methods in the context of research and policy analysis (Bracken, 2014), whereas broader land use planning texts have largely provided insights into the development and changes to theory and practice over time (Fainstein and Campbell, 2002; Paris, 2013). Alternately, LUP & UD books often represent edited chapters of reflective practice that reiterate the need for planning principles while contemplating potential future city circumstance (Freestone, 2000; Hall and Tewdwr-Jones, 2010). There is some guidance on urban-planning analyses that takes subdisciplinary views such as economics, the environment, or public health. These texts also often outline key principles and normative approaches, and they are largely restricted to a dialog between disciplines and are scant on practical methods of analyses or applications (Brooks et al., 2012; Frumkin et al., 2004). What has been lacking, until now, for LUP & UD is a suite of accessible methods and the means for all practitioners, researchers and students to explore the inherent complexity of cities. Such complexity will only increase with the advent of smart cities, and it is a complexity that stems from an inviolable social and technical interconnection. Past experience shows that we have failed to establish ways to identify the formative possibilities of what could happen within our cities. Rather, we continue to be surprised when people in our urban landscapes behave in ways we have clearly enabled yet not predicted or considered when designing them. This book is a direct response to this, offering a range of HF methods that may be used in a variety of geographic and jurisdictional contexts. We offer ways for LUP & UD disciplines to begin to explore the use of the voluminous data that our urban communities generate but which we struggle to utilize effectively for sound evidence-based decision-making.

5 FUTURE HUMAN FACTORS APPLICATIONS Beyond Business as Usual Without appropriate interdisciplinary understanding, LUP & UD may only be expected to generate the inefficient, resource hungry, and placeless urban settings to which we have become accustomed. The ways in which we have designed and delivered our urban and regional environments over the past century cannot continue unchecked. After thousands of years of progress in urban development and organization, we have plateaued. Cities are not safer, healthier, more efficient, or more equitable despite sometimes brave and visionary approaches to changing the status quo. Indeed, they are getting worse. The statistics on fear of crime and chronic disease in our urban environments paints a bleak future as do rising road tolls and congestion and emissions levels. Globally, the accommodation and support infrastructures (i.e., transport, social, and economic) cannot be built fast enough to support the urbanization of the world s population. There is an urgency to understand and plan for the ways in which we want to live in urban communities. We need to explore the cities we have and retrofit and redesign them to accommodate much higher density and more resource-efficient living. Yet, they must still offer the amenity and urban design quality to ensure that they are not simply shelters, machines for living, but homes and communities where life s necessities and services are met. This is not the utopian dream, this is the reality of the situation that must be addressed, and the best way to explore these complex human-centered urban systems is with complex systems methods. We all agree that urban development and LUP & UD are complex systems. If we consider two aspects of this complexity that have held back LUP & UD, it is possible to identify that HF methods and theoretical approaches may offer the required insights. First, planning must deal with a range of significant issues at a variety of scales, from the site to the local to the regional. There are the human-scale interactions seating, fittings, and fixtures right through to significant large-scale exogenous shocks disasters, technology, or terrorism. There are also a range of complex issues such as transport, water, and even the economy that are crosscutting from the micro to the macro scale, as they traverse formal and informal regulatory and spatial systems. HF methods have the

6 338 HUMAN FACTORS IN LUP AND UD capacity to enhance the understanding of this complexity that is, both as discrete issues across different spatial and temporal dimensions as well as the interdependence of a range of issues at a particular scale or hierarchy. Second, LUP & UD involve an increasing range of stakeholders and finance from the public and private sectors. LUP & UD are big businesses and expensive pursuits, requiring commitment for results that are often long term (beyond the political cycles) and frequently in the face of competing public and private sector priorities. Further, we face issues that require collaborative and multidisciplinary approaches, often at different times and often at the same time. Here too, HF can help the consideration of complex and conflicting stakeholder systems. They permit ways for decision-makers to understand the value and evidence in commitment. All participants in the system can be afforded the opportunity to see their places in the puzzle and, indeed, that their priorities are reflected, considered, and optimized. The use of HF methods reveals ways to recognize the consequences of choices and trade-offs and be assisted in understanding the interdependencies and possibilities of better coordination and cooperation in the delivery and design of city systems New Work for Human Factors and Land Use Planning and Urban Design The message for LUP & UP professionals is clear: HF offers a new approach for achieving a more balanced sociotechnical outcome for current and future cities a way to capture the human requirements of urban form. The message for HF practitioners and researchers is that there is a deep well of unresolved complex urban issues that can benefit from your attention. These subsume the entirety of day-to-day issues with which you are familiar: whether it is the daily commute, the neighborhood we live in, the parks and open spaces we visit, the redevelopment of the high street, or the urban sprawl that consumes your country. These are the challenges in which your expertise can assist. In being a complex sociotechnical system, the built environment is not only amenable to HF methods, but HF methods, in their turn, offer the possibility to discover small, clever, and inexpensive LUP & UP solutions that yield disproportionately large effects.

7 FUTURE HUMAN FACTORS APPLICATIONS 339 Moreover, now is the time to become involved in a new frontier of HF research and application. For those in parallel disciplines who continue to despair at the state of our cities, and its impacts on human health, wealth, and happiness, HF methods offer a way to explore the synergies and interactions between known complementary fields. The nexus between LUP & UD and transportation systems (active, passive, and autonomous), between LUP & UD and preventative and public health (physical and cognitively engaging cities), between LUP & UD and technology and the arts (our smart and creative cities), the balance between LUP & UD, ecological systems, and the economy it does not have to be one or the other. We contend that HF methods and HF systems methods particularly offer new ways to explore the possibilities for productive, efficient, and community-centered cities and towns through evidencebased and scientific approaches to LUP & UD A New Agenda Sociotechnical Urbanism In a rapidly changing world where smart cities are desired and urban megacities are increasingly a reality, we need to explore the potential for Sociotechnical Urbanism. It is a paradigm that builds on the legacy of recognition of the city as system and reinforces the notion that they are indeed sociotechnical systems. The application of HF methods and importantly multiple methods to complex sociotechnical systems provides this new agenda for land use planning and urban design research. It is an agenda to support HF, ergonomics, and the array of LUP & UD researchers and practitioners in exploring, learning, and applying human factors and sociotechnical systems approaches. It is an agenda to allow for the demonstration, tailoring, and detailing of experiences in the practical design and application of these methods for optimizing our urban and regional environments. Sociotechnical Urbanism, operationalized through the use of HF & STS methods, calls for all stakeholders to begin to conceive and design LUP & UD processes and outcomes that explore and leverage from the recognized properties of city complexity nonergodicity (lack of probable behavior over time), phase transition (tipping points in the system), emergence (new systems arise from interactions), and universality (despite difference, it is recognized as the same system).

8 340 HUMAN FACTORS IN LUP AND UD This is the potential for new designs, policy, and processes that recognize complexity and make the constraints we face explicit. It is an approach that is valid for the design and understanding of Smaller urban settings a footpath, a bus stop, parks, and squares The neighborhood, the mixed-use urban corridor, and subregional catchments Beyond to the city, the state, and global systems and urban challenges like terrorism and climate change Significantly, it is also the critical and enhanced exploration (at each of these scales) of change over time and the important interim uses of our cities. Understanding and optimizing the inevitable and important short, medium, and long-term transitional phases of urban and regional development. This is not a flight of fancy, it is necessity, and Sociotechnical Urbanism offers a coherent, accessible and comprehensive means to allow for the valid analyses of the urban and regional network of systems and subsystems. The time is right for effective and specific guidance that will assist in addressing some of the perennial and universal challenges of built environment design and analyses. What is certain is that the integration of HF & STS methods in the urban and regional development problem space provides new opportunities for our current and future communities. Constraints, complexity, and emergent behaviors are not necessarily concepts that are ordinarily associated with urban development. However, it is the acknowledgment, identification, and optimization of these systems characteristics that have the most to offer our LUP & UD futures.