DESIGN THESIS

By Kang-Hsin Fan

What’s urban design? “It is an interdisciplinary practice that is concerned with defining the form of human settlement. It’s a creative process, a collaborative, interdisciplinary process, and a place-making process that involves creating three-dimensional urban forms and space, which enhance the experience of town and cities”(Wall & Waterman, 2010). What is the new settlement for using the community network of convenience store as case within urban design? Employing the concept of community network for the development of urban design hopes to yield a more effective life-place. The community network of convenience stores in Taiwan provides a successful example for the new development of urban design. In Taipei, it’s not unusual to see two convenience stores across the street or several of them with a few hundreds of meter of each other. Modern convenience stores cannot satisfy requirements by only selling products. They promote additionally to the community service center concept, which has to allow customers to satisfy many essential living needs. There are more than 9,100 convenience stores in an area of 35,980km2 with the population of 23 million. In other words, one store offers services to approximate 2,500 people on average. Taiwan has the Asian Pacific and perhaps the world’s highest density of convenience stores per person.


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Why can they develop so successfully in Taiwan? The community service center concept is the central key. By either population percentage or life style habits, convenience stores in Taiwan contribute to the society by providing a wide and ever changing scope of services depending on the local environment and market trends. Through a systemized distribution plan, all goods, from more than 100 suppliers are handled by the distribution center centrally. The store’s task has been simplified to ordering all necessary products on a PDA or smart cell phone. With the combination of financial service and information, the community service center hopes to simplify people’s daily routines through the stores around the province or district. 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 local’s requirements.

Urban design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities. The network of community services concept by convenience store can help urban design to deal primarily with the design, management of pubic space, and life style habits. It will rearrange these infrastructures with strategies as a base for a new urban settlement, including energy exchange, waste management, water treatment, and electric car stations. With the e-system, it quickly collects and analyses customers’ purchase behaviors to offer a higher value-added services. How to translate the network of community services from convenience store to urban design is the main issue for the design thesis. The network e-system also creates an invisible city network to piece people’s life together. A city is a composition of solid and void elements. In other word, a city is the physical environment in which is consisted the natural world and the built world. These void elements include landscape, garden, park, and so on. With the community network, the void elements will be rearranged to a new green urban settlement.