Measuring Intensity - Describing and Analysing the "Urban Buzz"

Abstract

There is much debate about how to measure density-dwellings per hectare, bedrooms per hectare or people per hectare; including or excluding major highways, parks and open spaces; the permanent population only or the transient one too? While this gives urban planners something to disagree about it risks missing the point: great urban places are not created by density; they are created by intensity. And the difference matters. When people describe the buzz of a marketplace (figure 1.) they do not say, "Wow-it was so dense!". They are much more likely to say how intense it was. Density is a word used by planners. Intensity is a word that real people use, and perhaps because it describes the outcomes that people experience rather than the inputs that have gone in to creating them. It is the outcomes that are ultimately more important.