Miguel Serra

Miguel Serra
University of Porto | UP · CITTA - Research Centre for Territory, Transports and Environment

PhD MSc DipArch

About

21
Publications
17,635
Reads
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356
Citations
Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
September 2013 - June 2016
University College London
Position
  • Senior Research Associate
Education
April 2010 - July 2014
Faculty of Engineering University of Porto
Field of study
  • Urban Planning
September 2006 - September 2008
Faculty of Engineering University of Porto
Field of study
  • Planning and Design of the Built Environment
September 1993 - September 1999
Faculty of Architecture University of Porto
Field of study
  • Architecture

Publications

Publications (21)
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper we take a step towards extending space syntax analysis into the countrywide scale, through the study of three very-large spatial systems in the UK, namely the top-tier road network of the entire country (170,007 nodes), the complete road network (1,208,674 nodes) of three contiguous NUTS1 regions (the East of England, South East of En...
Article
We propose a GIS-based method to enable the understanding of how global street-network properties emerge from the temporal accumulation of individual street-network increments. The method entails the adoption of quantitative descriptions of individual street-patterns and of classification algorithms, in order to obtain numerically defined typomorph...
Article
Full-text available
Contemporary city-regional and metropolitan forms are today still grey areas of morphological under-standing, in large part due to the apparent lack of analytical methods available to deal with them. In this paper we argue that space syntax can fulfil that task with ease, while revealing unsuspected structural characteristics of large-scale spatial...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We provide the most comprehensive study to date on the correlation between network centrality measures and vehicular movement flows, using a model of the UK's entire road network (2,031,971 nodes) and a very large dataset of vehicular movement counts (20,752 instances, evenly distributed over the UK's territory). We describe the statistical associa...
Article
Full-text available
Robust quantitative descriptions of the social and physical characteristics of urban contexts are essential for assessing the impacts of urban environments on other, potentially dependent variables. Common methodologies used for that purpose, however, are either coarse or suffer from biasing effects. At the social level, the use of indicators encod...
Article
Full-text available
A personal viewpoint on the scientific importance of Bill Hillier's lifework.
Article
Typologies have always played an important role in urban planning and design practice and formal studies have been central to the field of urban morphology. These studies have predominantly been of a historical-qualitative nature and do not support quantitative comparisons between urban areas and between different cities, nor offer the precise and...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Current housing design guidelines in Bahrain focus on purely functional and energy efficiency factors. The Ministry of Housing in Bahrain (MOH) has been providing subsidized houses to its citizens since 1970’s. In 2010, according to the MOH, the demand for new housing units had reached the 50,000 mark and the numbers kept rising with every passing...
Preprint
Typologies have always played an important role in urban planning and design practice and formal studies have been central to the field of urban morphology. These studies have predominantly been of a historical-qualitative nature and do not support quantitative comparisons between urban areas and between different cities, nor offer the precise and...
Article
There is an epistemological divide in the field of road network analysis, concerning the way network distance should be conceptualized. On one hand, the generality of studies in the field adopt metric distance as a self-evident choice. On the other, space syntax studies adopt a different distance concept, namely that of angular distance, which igno...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
It has been argued that different urban configurations-planned vs. organic, treelike vs. grid like-perform differently when it comes to the intensity and distribution of pedestrian flows, built density and land uses. However, definitions of urban configurations are often rather abstract, ill-defined and at worse end in fixed stereotypes hiding unde...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Societies change and with it the buildings that host them. Space is therefore, a carrier of culture and meaning, and thus, fundamental for our understanding of architecture. Vernacular architecture is said to be a direct reflection of the society who build it and its surrounding natural context. However, the Industrial and Technological Revolutions...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we outline the methodological development of current research into urban community formations based on combinations of qualitative (volunteered) and quantitative (spatial analytical and geo-statistical) data. We outline a research design that addresses problems of data quality relating to credibility in volunteered geographic informat...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we describe a technique to observe, record and encode the evolution of street networks through time in GIS, when represented as systems of axial lines. We show how this technique avoids some of the limitations of traditional diachronic axial modelling and how it allows for the creation of queriable diachronic axial databases, incorpor...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The definition of urban typomorphologies is fundamental both for the description as well as for the prescription of urban form. However, urban typomorphologies are traditionally defined through time-consuming analytical procedures, which are based mainly on the personal knowledge and ability of the analyst and on ad-hoc generalizations. Such genera...
Chapter
Full-text available
We investigate the formation processes of suburban street networks, through the analysis of five study areas at Oporto’s urban fringe, over a period of 55 years. We start by recreating their street grids on four different time periods through the common technique of map regression, extending it in order to make possible the identification of indivi...
Thesis
Full-text available
This work addresses contemporary metropolitan regions as morphological problems. It identifies in the methodological and analytical fragmentation of urban morphology as a discipline, one of the main causes for the current paucity of knowledge on metropolitan form. Drawing on this conjecture, the work proposes a set of analytical methods, integrated...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The basic idea behind urban planning is to produce some kind of explicit rationality driven by collective purposes, capable of regulating the multitude of individual decisions that build the city over time. How this rationality is constructed, that is, which are the underlying criteria and analytical interpretations, is one of the most critical iss...
Article
In this paper we describe the evolution of the urban grids of five case studies from the urban fringe of the Oporto Metropolitan Area throughout the last fifty years. We use a cartographic redrawing technique to recreate their street networks at four different historical moments and space syntax to explore their configurational evolution. Besides t...

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