Henri Debray

German Aerospace Center (DLR) | DLR · German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD)

The physical appearance of the built urban landscape is the result of multiple, intertwined processes. The relationship between the existing morphology and the diversity of planning processes, however, has been little studied empirically at a global scale. In this study, we develop an ontology of planning intensity: conceptualizing intemediate cate...

In this work, unsupervised clustering on Earth Observation (EO) data was applied to investigate cities' morphology across the globe. Based on 110 cities, we found seven city types of similar morphologic patterns whose geographical distribution underpins the influence of urbanistic culture on the built landscape.

This preprint is an earlier version of our paper "Planned, unplanned, or in-between: A concept of the intensity of plannedness and its empirical relation to the built urban landscape across the globe" published in Landscape and Urban Planning. Please refer to: DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104711

The spatial configuration of the built city is like DNA – it is unique to each city. And yet, it could be shown, that spatial configurations of cities are very similar in certain geographical regions on our globe and, in turn, very different from other regions. In this study, the classification scheme of local climate zones (LCZs) is applied to spa...

The world population is growing, and a majority of the population is and will be living in urban areas. Nearly 90 percent of this growth takes place in Asia and Africa. However, urbanisation processes are not distributed evenly. Mostly they are concentrated in prosperous regions, at infrastructural nodes, or along trade routes. The so-called New Si...

What we understand by the simple term ‘city’ is in fact describing highly diverse domains: different economies, demographics, ways of living, land uses, built-up morphologies, among other things. The built landscape alone ranges from low-density, one-storey suburban settlements to high-density accumulations of skyscrapers. Models have repeatedly at...