Strategies for integrated densification with urban qualities: Combining Space Syntax with building density, land usage, public transport and property rights in Bergen city

Bergen city in Norway is presently undergoing an enormous population growth. In this respect, Bergen municipality wanted to identify all the possibilities for densification in the current situation. Therefore, the following issues were evaluated: street network and public transport accessibility, building density, degree of functional diversity, restrictions on (private) properties and current land use plans. Our approach is to analyse the central areas in Bergen in the current situation to discover how the urban transformation takes place in a natural way. Firstly, we studied the relationship between street network accessibility (with the Space Syntax method), degrees of FSI and GSI on building density (with the Spacematrix method) and degrees of function mix (with the MXI method). Secondly, we wanted to reveal the legal issues that arise from the strong Norwegian property rights. Thirdly, we added the accessibility of public transport lines through the angular step depth in the Space Syntax analysis. We combined all these issues by using GIS. Unlike in earlier research (Ye and van Nes, 2013 and 2014), the buffer line function in GIS was used to correlate building density, function mix and degree of spatial integration. It turns out that the degree of street network integration affects the location of commercial activities and the degree of building density and function mix. When the street network accessibility increases on a local and global level, property owners start to submit plans that exploit their properties to the utmost. The same occurs around public transport stops with frequently running light rail trams. As follows from the theory of the natural urban transformation process, densification can thus be steered by improving the street network accessibility on multiple scale levels, combined with high public transport accessibility.