Urban Street Environment Design for Quality of Urban Life

During the past decade, there has been an increasing interest in the link between urban street design principles and the built environment in the field of urban studies. This interest is motivated by the possibility that design principles associated with the built environment can be used to manage individual activities and improve the quality of urban life. This paper proposes an approach which can be used to generate and prioritize important social indicators for designing urban street environment. The proposed approach integrates both analytic network process and zero-one goal programming methods into a quality function deployment planning in order to translate end-user needs into technical design requirements. User needs and technical requirements are explored, and the modeling result uncovers five important urban street environment design principles on quality of life’s satisfaction: transportation planning and parking development, guidelines for public transit and bus stops, landscape and open space design guidelines, pedestrian network planning and facility design guide, and street landscape. Overall, these important principles (five quality of life indicators) show future directions for the street environment improvements in Taipei City, Taiwan.