An overview of the scientific inquiry in built environment

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

Carl Sagan

Lecture 1Ismail SaidDept of Landscape ArchitectureFaculty of Built EnvironmentJune 2009

Systems of Inquiry

• Research is an inquiry. In social science, it is a process to understand logically why and how a phenomenon happens.

Systems of Inquiry

• The fundamental assumption of scientific inquiry is that “life is not totally chaotic or random but has logical and persistent patterns of regularity” .

• Positivism is a scientific inquiry that concerns with the study of patterns rather than exceptions.

• Studies on children experiencing with outdoor environment suggest that children participation to play is influenced by the functional properties (known as affordances) of the environment rather than its aesthetics (Whitehouse et al. 2001; Ismail, 2006).

Nor Zalina Harun & Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ismail Said, Faculty of Built Environment, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

ROLE AND FATE OF PADANG IN MALAYSIAN HISTORICAL CITIES

5th GASS Conference5-7 December 2008

Department of ArchitectureNational University of Singapore

Nor Zalina Harun & Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ismail Said, Faculty of Built Environment, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Role and fate of padang in Malaysian historical cities PADANG BANDAR HILIR, MELAKA

Development and changes:

•Excavation works in 2001•Diminished for vehicles parking•Transformed into commercial buildings and international sport club

1930’s 1970 2008

Vegetable vendors shill their colorful wares at the Oshodi Market in Lagos—Nigeria's largest city.

Frozen chicken is on offer at the colorful Dantokpa market in Cotonou, Benin.

Systems of Inquiry

• Constructivism is the predominant force in the field of environmental behaviour research (Moore, 2004). This is because it seeks to describe and analyse contextualised social phenomena (Hatch, 1995). In children’s cognitive development, constructivism means the children construct knowledge of the surrounding through interaction with objects and people rather than absorbing knowledge (McDevitt and Ormrod, 2002).

Discussion Questions

• State the nature of inquiry of the following papers.

1. Sustainable urban form for Chinese compact cities: Challenges of a rapid urbanized economy

2. Learning from tradition: the planning of residential neighborhoods in a changing world

3. Social housing estates and sustainable community development in South Korea

Scientific Theory

• Scientific inquires generally works within the framework of scientific theories, or frameworks.

• Scientific theories are used to derive research hypotheses, plan research, make observations, and explain generalizations and pattern of regularity in life.

• A theory becomes an underpinning of a research.

Discussion Question• Sense of place is a paradigm that guides study

on peoples’ perception to urban spaces. Why and how people develop the perceptual response to a town or city?

Traffic of the two- and three-wheeled variety dominates a Delhi street.

Two-wheeled traffic still takes priority in Hanoi, where cyclists glide past an architectural legacy of French colonialism.