Amenity - can we move beyond the concept diagram? - Part 1: Introduction

Amenity is a concept that has been part of the urban design and planning lexicon for a significant period of time. Amenity is a concept drawn from principles of Livability. These principles serve to focus planning intent, investment and notion of value (people-centric places, enhancing existing networks, creating new networks, environmental balance, resilient land uses, sustainability, partnership-centric and economic viability).

This is the 1st part of a series of articles introducing a framework that aims to take amenity planning from concept diagram to a locate-able and measurable set of metrics. This post sets the scene for subsequent posts that will walk through an emerging framework that aims to "Locate" amenity, something we all recognize but have great difficulty in codifying. The aim of this series of posts is not to prescribe a solution but, with luck, stimulate conversation. The emergence of amenity / livability as one of several decision considerations in integrated urban water management (IUWM) is a key personal driver for this investigation and will be the exemplar for this post series.

So...our challenge in a nutshell: Develop a method to represent of amenity in an spatially integrated way that enables discovery, interrogation and visualization by IUWM planners.

Before we address this challenge a few key questions to consider:

Why do we care about amenity in IWUM?: Amenity is a desirable feature about a facility or place. Amenity speaks to our sense of "valuing" a location for goods, services or the sense of well being it provides. Amenity delivered outcomes of IUWM is seen as a value-add to the community and worthy goal of those charged with development of public infrastructure and spaces.

How will we address amenity in IUWM?: From evidence present in the anecdotal and serious research it seems reasonable to surmise that amenity is associated with "place" or locality. Additionally, amenity is seen as a multi-faceted concept - in other words, there are one of more features of a location that can contribute to amenity. As such it is reasonable to suggest that we can define, discuss, analyse and investigate amenity through the prism of spatial information (information associated with place). In this context we will be attempting to define a framework to articulate, integrate and investigate the many facets of amenity in order to provide an evidence-based environment for planning and decision making. This will involved defining our principles, selecting criteria/metrics that can be represented in space and articulating how these metrics relate to each other and contribute to the amenity of a location. We aim to do this using spatial information and associated technologies (GIS)

What will we produce that will assist IUWM planners?: We will not produce an amenity score, index or amalgamated evaluation - at least not yet! Rather we will be creating an integrated evidence-base of factors that contribute to amenity that planners can explore, ask planning questions and visualize how amenity and it's influencing factors change over our exemplar study area.

So...no mean challenge... Part 2 of this series introduces the definitions, assumptions and concepts that underpin the framework