Ian Bentley. Author of responsive environments.

Has practiced both as an architect and as an urban

designer, in Britain, Holland and the Middle East. He has also spent two years on the board of a property
company engaged in both residential and commercial development. He is at present a senior lecturer at
the joint Centre for Urban Design at Oxford Polytechnic, and is a partner in the urban design firm of
Bentley Murrain Samuels.

Responsive Environment creates an environment that offers comprehensive, friendly and controllable
places.

Interpretations can reinforce responsiveness by:

 Supporting the place’s legibility
 Supporting the place’s variety
 Supporting the place’s Robustness

The design of a place affects the choices people can make, at many levels:
1. Permeability. Where people can go and where they cannot. Designing the overall layout of
routes and development blocks.
2. Variety. The range of uses available to people. Locating uses of the site.
3. Legibility. How easily people can understand what opportunities it offers. Designing the massing
of the buildings, and the enclosure of public space.
4. Robustness. The degree to which people can use a given place for different purposes. Designing
the spatial and constructional arrangement of individual buildings and outdoor places.
5. Visual Appropriateness. The detailed appearances of the place make people aware of the
choices available.
6. Richness. People’s choice of sensory experiences. Designing the external image. Developing the
design for sensory choice.
7. Personalization. The extent to which people can put their own stamp on a place. Making the
design encourage people to put their own mark on the places where they live and work.
In practice, things are more complex than this implies: It is constantly necessary to modify the emerging
design as you think through the implications of each new step and make emerging implications support
all the qualities together in the context of a large inner city redevelopment.
Permeability. Only places which are accessible to people can offer them choice.
The quality of Permeability. The number of alternative ways through an environment is therefore central
to making responsive places.

Permeability: where people can go and where they cannot. Permeability has fundamental layout
implications. In the diagram, the upper layout offers a greater choice of routes than the lower one: It is
therefore more permeable. Because it so basic to achieving responsiveness, permeability must be
considered early in design. The designer must decide how many routes there should be, how they
should go and how to establish rough boundaries for blocks of develop land within the site as a whole.

Places must be accessible to people to offer them choice. Public and private access must be
complementary.

Permeability
 Places must be accessible to people to offer them choice.
 Public and private access must be complementary.
 Physical and visual permeability depends on how the network of public space divides the
environment into blocks.
 There is a decline in public permeability because of current design trends.
 Scale of development
 Hierarchical layout
 Segregation

Variety. Permeability is of little use by itself. Easily accessible places are irrelevant unless they offer a
choice of experience = variety.

Variety, particularly variety of uses, is therefore a second key quality. The object of this second stage in
design is to maximize the variety of uses in the project. The range of uses available to people.
Variety. First we assess the levels of demand for different types of uses on the site, and establish how
wide a mix of uses it is economically and functionally feasible to have. Then the tentative building
volumes already established as spatially desirable are tested to see whether they can feasibly house the
desired mix of uses, and the design is further developed as necessary.

Variety offers users a choice of experiences. Variety of experience implies places with varied forms, uses,
and meanings: Descriptive, Prescriptive, and Cognitive.

Developers and planners are more concerned with economic performance and easier management than
with variety.

Variety of uses depends on three main factors.

 Range of activities
 Possibility of supply
 Extent to which design encourages positive interactions

Variety also depends on feasibility

 Economic
 Political, and
 Functional
Variety of uses depends on three main factors: range of activities, possibility of supply, and extent to
which design encourages positive interactions.

Legibility. In practice, the degree of choice offered by a place depends partly on how legible it is: how
easily people can understand its layout.
Legibility: How people easily understand what opportunities it offers. Degree of choice depends on how
legible it is; how layout is understood.

The tentative networks of links and uses already established now takes on three dimensional forms, as
the elements which give perceptual structure to the place are brought into the process of design.

As part of this process, routes and their junctions are differentiated from one another by designing them
with differing qualities of spatial enclosure. By this stage, therefore, the designer is involved in making
tentative decisions about the volumes of the buildings which enclose the public spaces.

Degree of choice depends on how legible it is: how layout is understood. Legibility is important at two
levels:
 Physical form, and
 Activity Patterns

Legibility in the old days – Important buildings stood out. Legibility of form and use is reduced in the
modern environment, separating pedestrians from vehicles also reduces legibility. Legibility is
strengthened by Lynch’s physical elements of the city.

Robustness. Places which can be used for many different purposes offer their users more choice than
places whose design limits them to a single fixed use. Environments which offer them this choice have a
quality we call robustness.

Robustness. The degree to which people can use a given place for different purposes. We begin to focus
on individual buildings and outdoor places. Our objective is to make their spatial and constructional
organization suitable for the widest possible range of likely activities and future uses, both in the short
and the long term.

Robustness. Environments which can be used for many different purposes. There must be a distinction
between large scale and small scale robustness.
There are three key factors that support long term robustness:
 Building depth
 Access
 Building height

The design of small scale robustness depends on extra factors:

 Hard and soft spaces
 Active and passive spaces

Visual Appropriateness. The decisions we have already made determine the general appearance of the
scheme. Next we must focus on what it should look like in more detail. This is important because it
strongly affects the interpretations people put on places: whether designers want them to or not,
people do interpret places as having meanings.

A place has visual appropriateness when these meanings help to make people aware of the choices
offered by the qualities we have already discussed.

Visual Appropriateness. The detailed appearances of the place make people aware of the choices
available.

Designing for visual appropriateness:

 First a vocabulary of visual cues must be found, to communicate the levels of choice already
designed into the place.
 The appearance of the project is then developed in detail, using these cues as the basis for
design.

Visual Appropriateness decisions already made determine the general appearance of the scheme then
focus on details.
Visual appropriateness is concerned with designing the external image of place. Regardless of what
designers want, people interpret places as having meaning. A vocabulary of visual cues must be found to
communicate levels of choice. Visual appropriateness focuses on details.

Visual appropriateness focuses on details. A vocabulary of visual cues must be found to communicate
levels of choice.

Interpretations can reinforce responsiveness by:

 Supporting the places’s legibility
 Supporting the places’s variety
 Supporting the place’s robustness

Richness. The decisions about appearance already discussed still leave room for maneuver at the most
detailed level of design. We must make the remaining decisions in ways which increase the choice if
sense experiences which users can enjoy. This further level of choice is called richness.

Richness. People’s choice of sensory experiences. By this stage, we are dealing with the smallest details
of the project. We must decide where abouts in the scheme:
 To provide richness, both visual and non visual and
 Select appropriate materials and constructional techniques for achieving it.

Richness is the variety of sense experiences that users can enjoy. The basis of visual richness depends on
the presence of visual contrasts.

There are two ways for users to choose from different sense experiences:
 Focusing their attention on different sources of sense experiences.
 Moving away from one source to another.
Sensory. Aerial photography, sketching, visual surveys and other methods of direct observation to be
employed. Sensory elements such as noise, odors, smoke, and pollutants areas must be detected and
recorded.

UNSELECTIVE:

1. The sense of motion: Gained through movement.

2. The sense of smell: Can not be delivered.
3. The sense of hearing: User has limited control.
4. The sense of Touch: Voluntary and involuntary.
5. The sense of sight: Most dominant in terms of
information input and is the one easiest to control.

SELECTIVE:

Personalization. The stages of design already covered have been directed at achieving the qualities
which support the responsiveness of the environment itself, as distinct from the political and economic
processes by which it is produced. This is not because we do not value the “Public participation
approach”: it is highly desirable. But even with the highest level of public participation, most people will
still have to live and work in places designed by others.
 It is therefore especially important that we make it possible for users to personalize places.
 Personalization. The extent to which people can put their own stamp on a place.

Personalization. Here the designer is making the final decisions about the forms and materials of the
scheme:
 To support personalization, and
 To ensure that its results will not erode any public role the building may have.

Personalization makes a person’s pattern of activities more clear. Users personalize in two ways:
 To improve practical facilities, and
 To change the image of a place

Users personalize as an affirmation of their own tastes and values and because they perceive existing
image as inappropriate. Personalization comes in two levels:
 Private
 Public
Personalization is affected by three factors:
 Tenure
 Building type
 Technology

Allows people to achieve an environment that bears the stamp of their own tastes and values. Makes a
person’s pattern of activities more clear. Users personalize in two ways: to improve practical facilities
and to change the image of a place.