Abstract
Urban morphology affects the quality of the urban public realm in its physical, social
and environmental aspects. Currently, the government of Thailand is pursuing a policy to
integrate its various agencies into a single area, called provincial civic centres. These centres
are foreseen as the absolute solution to enhance the service and coordination among related
government agencies, to free up land previously occupied by the sprawling government
offices for efficient use of space, reducing traffic congestion, and creating a city landmark.
However, these developments have poor qualities of open space designs and
consequently their usages. Office workers and city dwellers experience difficulty and
discomfort in accessing these public places. In general, these developments fail as public
spaces which often lead to public indifference and even hostility toward civic institutions.
Therefore, these open spaces require alternative urban design approaches and characteristics.
This research aims to offer recommendations for urban design characteristics that
would make provincial civic centres in Thailand more permeable, walkable and legible. It
first investigates the existing practices relating to those developments and provides the key
theoretical dimensions of urban design, namely morphological, perceptual, social, visual,
functional, and temporal dimensions. It then identifies design issues related to morphological
and perceptual characteristics through a comparative analysis of the three selected case 03-Abstract.doc
studies which includes a Thai provincial civic centre, Suphan Buri provincial civic centre,
and two international capital cities, Brasilia and Canberra.
In addition to the documentary evidence referred to in this research, three sets of data
have been used: textual data, aerial photographs, and perspective photographs. Textual,
figure and ground based and visual analysis methods have been adopted for this research.
Then, the results from data analysis are categorised into two categories, morphological and
perceptual dimension with respect to each of the case studies. The first group consists of
streets, squares, building forms and permeability while the second consists of paths, edges,
nodes, districts and landmarks.
From this study it is observed that the key urban design issues for Thai provincial
civic centres are the enclosure of open spaces and their connectivity, the scale and density of
urban environments, and the arrangement of outdoor public amenities. Therefore, it can be
concluded that to make these centres more permeable, walkable and legible they should be
characterised mainly by a compact form, a pedestrian and bicycle friendly design, and a local
distinctiveness. Such public places can deliver not only comfort and joy to their users but
also create an impressive environmental footprint.