The role of urban space design characteristics in influencing social life of Swahili streets: the case of old town Mombasa
Abstract
This paper is based on a study carried out in Old Town Mombasa, a Swahili city in Kenya, situated along the East African Coast. Its focus is on social life of the town’s street system as a correlate of urban space design characteristics. Urban design elements within the streets have been disregarded resulting in spaces that do not adequately support human activities. The city has rich historical, architectural and cultural attributes that make it one of the significant civilizations of the world. Broadly, this paper seeks to establish urban design characteristics that have a relation with human activities in the streets. The study embraces both quantitative and qualitative research methods to investigate urban design elements along the streets. Multiple regression is used in data analysis whereas ANOVA at 99 percent confidence level has been used in testing the significance of the relationship between dependent and independent variables. Results of the study indicate that physical characteristics of the street space influence human activities at different levels. The characteristics are an indispensable consideration in the design of streets that support a vibrant social life in the city.
Key words: Urban space, characteristics, Mombasa, human activities, social life
Open access articles published in the Journal of Agriculture, Science and Technology are under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The CC BY license permits commercial and non-commercial re-use of an open-access article, as long as the author is properly attributed.
Copyright on any research article published in the Journal of Agriculture, Science and Technology is retained by the author(s). The authors grant the Journal of Agriculture, Science and Technology with a license to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher. Authors also grant any third party the right to use the article freely as long as its original authors, citation details and publisher are identified.
Use of the article in whole or in part in any medium requires proper citation as follows:
Title of Article, Names of the Author, Year of Publication, Journal Title, Volume (Issue) and page. Links to the final article on the JSRE website are encouraged.
The Creative Commons Attribution License does not affect any other rights held by authors or third parties in the article, including without limitation the rights of privacy and publicity. Use of the article must not assert or imply, whether implicitly or explicitly, any connection with, endorsement or sponsorship of such use by the author, publisher or any other party associated with the article.
For any reuse or distribution, users must include the copyright notice and make clear to others that the article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, linking to the relevant Creative Commons web page. Users may impose no restrictions on the use of the article other than those imposed by the Creative Commons Attribution license.
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the article is made available as is and without representation or warranties of any kind whether express, implied, statutory or otherwise and including, without limitation, warranties of title, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, absence of defects, accuracy, or the presence or absence of errors.
