Human Fieldwork - How successful has the regeneration of Technology Drive in Rugby been?

Why did you look into this particular issue?

The Alstom site along Technology Drive has recently been regenerated on the north side of Rugby. This area is not part of the town centre and could contribute to urban sprawl, as well as being of a higher price range to the high street, as being part of the suburbia.

Why were the methods used appropriate?

The use of an EQS (Environmental Quality Survey) is important to find out the key characteristics of an area, which helps to identify the causes of other problems. and is an easy way to compare locations based on their overall scores Conducting a traffic survey has a similar aim, as it helped us to understand how many people were going through the area and the effects this may have, and as this was measured for a set period of time, it can be multiplied for an hour approximation, for example. A land use survey helps to identify the most used land uses and explain why this may be the case, which is especially important for a regeneration, as it highlights what developers found to be in need in that area.

Why was it better to present the data the way it was?

All of the data was in easy to analyse tables, which meant that it was easy to compare the data with others who conducted the fieldwork, to try and complete a set of results which were accurate and reflected the whole area in that time.

What did your results tell you about your investigation?

By doing this investigation, I was able to conclude that the regeneration project had been largely successful, as it had brought higher numbers of vehicle and pedestrian visitors, as well as helping the area to be more visually attractive. This area has however suffered as a result of this development, such as the pollution from this increased vehicle number, which will cause the buildings to have black splodges from carbon emissions, which will eventually decrease its aestheticism, and subsequently lower the EQS.

If you were to make changes to the investigation, how would these changes have an impact on your general conclusion?

Although the investigation was helpful for finding the success of the regeneration project, there was some issues in correctly classifying land usage, the use of subjective judgements and only taking data at one time in the day, once. Also asking a range of residents for their input for an EQS would have helped to give a more realistic set of data. The data collected was very narrow due to the small amount of time used to conduct this investigation, so to improve, I would want to get a wider range of EQS responses and collect data across a larger time period to give a more realistic and reflective set of data.