TABLE OF CONTENTS - The Professional Green Building Council

Theme B: Creating a livable, healthy and environmentally viable cities2001) “policies of urban compaction involve the promotion of urban regeneration,the revitalisation of town centers, restraint on development in rural areas, higherdensities, mixed-use development, promotion of public transport and theconcentration of urban development at public transport nodes.” Researchers suchas Gordon and Richardson (1997) have renounced many of these policies as beinguneconomic, and against the wishes of the general population who havecharacterized the twentieth century by a rejection of inner city living, and theinvention of suburbia. The nature of intensification is also important; whiledevelopment in mixed-use town centers is usually perceived to have a positiveeffect, especially if landscaping and urban design improvements are subsequentlyimplemented. Infill housing developments in residential suburbs are frequentlyperceived as being of poor quality and therefore having a detrimental effect on theenvironment and sustainability in general. A model of an existing context is builtto a consistent quality, and developers/ architects are required to “plug-in” theirmodel of a proposed development and various alternatives at the same level ofdetail, accuracy, and visual quality as the existing contextual model. Besides, theso-called activity-based approach (Jones, 1990) is a useful conceptual frameworkfor the travel activities study. Nearly all travel activities are derived from the needor wish to fulfill physiological needs (eating, sleeping), institutional needs (work,education), personal obligations (child-care, shopping) and personal preferences(leisure activities) (Vilhemson, 1999). This may be true to some extent aboutholiday and leisure trips, but the activity-based approach is, in our opinion, stillfruitful in order to understand and analyze daily life travel behavior. In Bangkok,the road, rail and waterway networks provide full coverage of Bangkok. The‘solution’ to the unsustainable nature of cities throughout the world has beenfrequently referred to as making these cities more ‘compact’, to make better use ofthe resources currently available. The element of a mega city related totransportation and traffic pollution concurs with the idea that when a city grows insize, homes and workplaces become further apart and the shape of the city andland-use structure will change.242