A SIRN View on Urban Design: The Case of Almere Hout

One challenge for the urban designer is to avoid the tendency to design from an ‘airplane perspective’, leaving out the eye-level perspective and the human scale. The starting point of this chapter is the design process of a masterplan for Almere Hout in which the designer tried to develop an antidote for this common problem by using space syntax in the design process. This led to the subsequent realization that implicit in the design was a process of an on-going interaction between internal and external representations that is very much in line with SIRN (Synergetic inter-representation network). This chapter explicates the SIRN view of urban design by complementing it with design thinking, on the one hand, and space syntax on the other. We illustrate the usefulness of the SIRN view on urban design by re-visiting the design process of the masterplan of Almere Hout.

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