1 INFLUENCE OF SIDEWALKS CONDITION ON STATIC ACTIVITIES IN TROPICAL CLIMATE CITY Amirul Hakim Jamil* 1 and Sharifah Salwa Syed Mahdzar 2 1, 2 Department of Architecture, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, MALAYSIA. (E-mail: ahakim34@graduate.utm.my, ssmahdzar@utm.my) ABSTRACT The sidewalk spaces in tropical cities are one of the most unique environmental settings that are found in Malaysia. The unique walkways embrace the blends of usages of the general urban physical environment. The sidewalks are often referred to as the five-foot walkway of shophouses, which have been traditionally built in city centres such as in Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia. This paper addresses the pattern of stationary activities of people in connection to the physical condition along the sidewalk spaces and its effect to the liveability of the area. The paper reviews the hypothetical insights by many scholars who claimed that the stationary pattern of behaviour was mainly influenced by the specific designated environmental design, conforming to the general cue of environmental probabilism. Hence it is argued that people sitting and standing in the sidewalks can also be affected by the visual connection amongst the pedestrians in addition to the condition to the sidewalk itself. The theory of “environmental possibilism” is then adopted to prove the case. The distribution of static activities of people performing their daily necessary, optional and resultant activities, are measured in relation to the physical, building, landuse elements existing on the sidewalks. People standing and sitting were observed and mapped several times and at different times in a single daylight. Through the visual explanatory diagrams, which is based on space syntax visual graph analysis in several layouts of sidewalk spaces, more objective condition of use of the sidewalks could be explained. The results show an interesting diagrammatic pattern between the sidewalk condition and the presence of static activities of people in the walkway. It is further suggested that urban designers could able to design liveable spaces according to the environmental conditions and types of existing static activity Keywords: Static Activities, Five-foot Walkways, Environmental Possibilism, Space Syntax 1.0 INTRODUCTION Street is a lively river of the city (Whyte, 1981) and if a city street looks interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull (Jacobs, 1961). Mahdzar S.S (2008) addressed liveliness of a street should be sociable and accessible in the presence of static activities. In Malaysia (Shamsuddin, S. 2012), streets could be identified as public spaces for various activities (Moughtin & Mertens 2006; Krier 1979). People depend on streets for functional, social and leisure activities, for travel, shopping, play, meeting, and interaction with other people, and even relaxation (Jacobs, 1961; Jacobs, 1993;