Urban Fieldwork

Fieldwork Aim

To investigate the changing land use and environmental quality in Guilford

Hypotheses

• The number of shops will increase in the CBD

• The environmental quality will decrease towards the CBD

• The number of people will increase towards the CBD

• The building height will increase towards the CBD

Why did we choose Guilford

• Small city → so easily accessible but still contains a wide variety of different land uses

• Popular shopping centre which attracts lots of people to shop and work

Why did we collect the SERVICE DATA TALLY

To see how shops increase towards CBD

How did we collect service tally

Made a tally of the different services we could see and repeated it 100 steps further into CBD

Limitations + Improvements of service tally

• It was raining which made it harder to write

• Reduce the number of service types to make it more accurate

Why did we collect LAND USE SURVEY

To see the land use patterns towards CBD

How did we collect land use data survey

Looked around and saw what the majority of land was being used for

Limitations + Improvements of land use survey

• It was raining so made it harder to write

• Have a reduced number of services on the sheet

Why did we collect EQI

To see how environmental quality changes towards CBD

How did we collect EQI data

At each transect we checked on a scale of 1-5 of noisiness, litter etc

Limitations and improvements of EQI

• Was raining so less people out also a Friday so people were at school

• Go at the weekend so more people out

Why did we collect building height and age

To see how they changed towards CBD

How did we collect building height + age?

• We counted the storey windows

• Compared age to sample pictures

Limitations + Improvements of building height + age

• People would have renovated older houses

• Measure height of buildings as ceiling height can change

Why did we collect pedestrian count

To see how busy it became towards the CBD

How did we collect pedestrian count

Counted the number of people walking by every 2 minutes at each transect

Limitations + Improvements of pedestrian count

• It was raining so there were less people about

• Go at the weekend

Why did we collect the photo log

To give visual 360 degree representation of the environmental quality

How did we collect photo log

At each transect we took a photo N, E, S + W

Limitations and improvements of photo log

• There may have been cars blocking photos

• Wait until there is clear view

Why did we collect questionnaire

To back up hypothesis of pedestrian count

How did we collect questionnaire

Randomly asked the public questions

Limitations and improvements of questionnaire

It was Friday so less busy, some people declined

Improvements - go out at the weekend

Random Sampling

where every point, location or person has an equal chance of being selected.

systematic sampling

measurements are taken at regular intervals

Stratified sampling

where the population or area is split in to sub-sets. Measurements are taken proportionally across the sub-sets

Risks

· Getting lost

· Public

· Traffic

Positives of Annotated Photographs

• Good visual resource

• Clear

• Easy to make

Negatives of Annotated Photographs

• Limited view

• Only reflects one day

Positives of bar graph

• Clear -visual

• Good to prove/ disprove hypothesis

• Easy to do

Negatives of bar graph

• Graph paper can be fiddly

Positives of located bars

Easy to identify the pattern

Negatives of located bars

• Spacing of bars are not accurate

• Hard to read

• Cannot tell which site is which

Example of random sampling

questionnaire

Example of stratified data

defining the area - clearly

Example of systematic sampling

Every 100 steps