The Concept of Community Network's within Urban Design

By Kang-Hsin Fan

Employing the concept of community networks for the development of Urban Design will build an effective living life. The community networks of convenient stores in Taiwan provide a successful example for the new development of Urban Design. In Taipei, Taiwan, it’s not unusual to see two convenient stores across the street or to see several of them within a few hundreds of meter from one another. Modern convenient stores cannot satisfy requirements by only selling products; they develop to promote the Community Service Centers concept. This is when they have to allow customers to satisfy all of their living needs. There are more than 9,100 convenient stores in an area of 35,980km2 in a population of 23 million. In other words, one store offers per 2,500 people. Taiwan and Asia, along with the Pacific’s, are perhaps the world’s highest density of convenient stores per person. Why can they develop so successfully in Taiwan? The Community Service Centers concept is the central key. Either by population percentage or life style habits, convenient stores in Taiwan contribute to the society by providing a wide and ever changing scope of services that depend on the environment and marketing trends. Through a systemized distribution plan, all goods from more than one hundred suppliers are handled by the distribution center centrally. The stores task has been simplified to ordering all necessary products on the PDA. With the combination of financial service and information, the Community Service Center hopes to simplify people’s daily routines throughout the stores and around the Province. In addition, it hopes that the stores can advertise many community messages, product information and banking services to customers. It offers various services, catering to different suburbs and their requirements.

Urban Design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities. The networks of the Community Service Centers concept for convenient stores can help urban design to deal primarily with the design, management of pubic space, and life style habits. With the e-system, it quickly collects and analysis customers’ purchase behavior to offer a higher value-added service. How to translate the network of community service from convenient stores to urban design is the main issue for design thesis. These network e-systems also create an invisible city network to piece people’s life together.



Reference:
Dobbins, M. (2009). Urban Design and People. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc., p. 35