Abstract
Urban planning and design require new ways of interpreting urban form that allows for the understanding of multidisciplinary approaches and cooperative outcomes. This innovative study brings together the disciplines of Human Factors with Urban Design to investigate the form and design of urban transport corridors (Stevens and Buksh, 2013). These connectors of people and place go beyond the roadway and consider the dynamics of adjacent urban form. They are defined by the disparate demands of engineering, urban planning, urban design, property development and community expectation. Using Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) this study investigates and identifies the interdependencies and ability of these urban corridors to operationalize best practice road user hierarchies that give highest priority to walking and cycling. CWA (Vicente, 1999) is a systems analysis and design framework that identifies the constraints imposed on activities and designs new systems that better support the activities of interest. CWA has been used in a variety of design activities in several domains, including defence, disaster management, process control, and road safety (Salmon et al., 2010). This research is the first to apply CWA as a tool to interpret the interdependencies of urban form and its component elements. The application and extension of sociotechnical systems theory in an urban setting has allowed for unique insights. A key aspect of the framework is that it is formative in nature describing what could happen if design modifications are undertaken, rather than provide normative analyses of what should happen. The results of this study allow for a clearer interpretation of the relationships between all of the physical elements of the corridor and its intended functional purposes. Through the analysis of case study urban corridors, this research provides a means to understand the multidisciplinary requirements for establishing urban form which supports safe and accessible use by pedestrians and cyclists.