Afshar Bakeshloo, Farbod; (2023) Mapping the Transition from the Pre-digital to the Digital City Change and continuity in the spatio-functional character of Oxford Street at the architectural and urban scales. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis addresses socio-historical change in Oxford Street, central London, during the transition from the post-war period to the contemporary city. This halfcentury period covers the full arc from the pre-digital to the contemporary city, where digital technologies have become pervasive in urban space. This is not simply about the rise of e-commerce. The digital intervention represented by social media has embedded new potentials in urban space to attract or repel movement flows and activities. However, providing a design-scale evidence-based for architects and urban designers to understand the impacts of this historical transition in this respect is not straightforward. This thesis is a contribution to this task. It brings a range of socio-economic theories of the digital city into dialogue with the space syntax literature concerned with the effects of the configuration of urban space on patterns of centrality and land use to explore whether evidence of changing ways of consuming urban space can be identified in historic shifts in the finegrained patterns of land use. The case study is Oxford Street, including a detailed study of two retail premises: Debenhams' London flagship store and Park House buildings. Oxford Street has been selected as central London's primary shopping street, but it is also theoretically interesting as being the most accessible (integrated) street in space syntax models of London. From these starting points, the thesis builds a theoretical and methodological framework for understanding the socio-spatial impacts of the transition from the pre-digital to the digital city at the architectural and urban design scales. It uses space syntax techniques to spatially profile land use data from historical business directories and contemporary Ordnance Survey Points of Interest data. It then analyses changes in the spatial layout and functions of space in both the street and building domains in 1970 and 2019, highlighting the transformation from the pre-digital to the digital city at each of these scales in detail. In particular, it innovates by employing social media datasets to explore how the socio-spatial character of Oxford Street is represented on social media platforms. It deploys the syntactical concept of "movement economy" longitudinally, to put these shifting land use patterns associated with contemporary social media in the context of historical changes in land use more generally. The research questions the proposition that social media is an entirely new functional generator in urban centres. Instead, it proposes that social media reflect and emphasises Oxford Street's historical configuration of socio-spatial generators. It is concluded that architects and urban designers should balance the short-term impact of new digital technology with the longer-term effects of urban spatial configuration at different urban scales.

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