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The spatial distribution and frequency of street, plot and building types across five European cities
Abstract
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 comprehensive descriptions needed by those engaged in urban planning and design practice. To describe contemporary urban forms, which are more diffuse and often elude previous historic typologies, systematic quantita-tive methods can be useful but, until recently, these have played a limited role in typo-morphological studies. This paper contributes to recent developments in this field by integrating multi-variable geometric descriptions with inter-scalar relational descriptions of urban form. It presents typologies for three key elements of urban form (streets, plots and buildings) in five European cities, produced using statistical clustering methods. In a first instance, the resulting typologies contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of streets, plots and buildings. In particular, the results offer insight into patterns between the types (i.e. which types are found in combination and which not) and provide a new large scale comparative analysis across five European cities. To conclude, a link between quantitative analysis and theory is established, by testing two well-known theoretical propositions in urban morphology: the con-cept of the burgage cycle and the theory of natural movement.
... Quantitative approaches to street systems, based on both spatial analysis and space syntax approaches, have already been carried out as an attempt to classify streets by using a typomorphology character, pattern's type, hierarchy, among other features (Berghauser Pont et al. 2019;Han et al. 2020;Jiang and Claramunt 2004;Marshall 2005;Pafka, Dovey, and Aschwanden 2020;Serra et al. 2017). They particularly offer some enlightenment about the morphogenesis of the street systems: how they influence and are shaped by the generative urban process at the same time. ...
... There are also other studies that offer insights about plot system in conjunction with other elements of the urban form. Such investigations focus on analysing plots as key triggers in urban growth, or composing an analysis method to stablish urbanity aspects of a city (Berghauser Pont et al. 2019;Oliveira and Medeiros 2016). Classic morphological studies are often carried out at the plot scale. ...
... adding storeys), and horizontally, by covering more land with buildings. These relations can be measured through indexes, as the floor space index FSI (total amount of built floor space in an area) and ground space index GSI (describes the division between built and non-built land in an area (Berghauser Pont et al. 2019;Pont 2010). ...
Ongoing Ph.D. Research, Doctoral Program in Spatial Planning, Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto - FEUP - Research Centre for Territory, Transport and Environment - CITTA
... It is defined as a collection of urban villages that serve as hubs for locally deformed wheels and have strong centre-to-edge connections (Hillier and Vaughan, 2007). Amsterdam is a semi-planned city with a dispersed polycentric character (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). The canal system was a later addition to London's already existing urban layout (Essex-Lopresti, 1998), whereas the city structure of Amsterdam was designed to include its canals (Feddes, 2012). ...
... The street type analysis in the study yielded five street types: first is background streets, namely street segments with low choice values; the second type is called metropolitan streets, representing street segments with increasing choice values at higher scales (these can also be defined as highway networks); the third type is described as neighbourhood streets, which show high choice values at the local scale; the fourth type is called city streets, comprising street segments with high choice values at the global scales, which is closest to foreground network of the generic city concept; finally fifth, dead-end streets, represents the street segments with zero choice value at all scales. Amsterdam and London share some similarities in terms of street network analysis as having more foreground networks and fewer dead-end streets (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). ...
... Another distinction between Amsterdam and London is the spatial distribution of building types in the city centres. The most dominant building type in London's city centre is the mid-rise building type, but the low-rise type predominates in Amsterdam's city centre (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). In terms of plot types, Amsterdam and London have a significant percentage of compact and fine-grain plots in common. ...
Constructed waterways have played a major transportation role since the earliest days of cities’ recorded history, connecting cities and enhancing commerce. There does seem a possibility that canal networks are associated with the growth of the world’s first cities and their spatial structure. Therefore, the aim of the study is to investigate the canal structure in shaping the urban form through the city-growing process and its spatio-cultural outcomes in the city environment. It intends to perform a comparative analysis of Amsterdam and London, two diverse structures within their urban configurations and represent a different paradigm of the canal-street structure relationship. The study analyses the main spatial effect of differences in the canal structure overtime on the street configurations of the two cities. Diachronic spatial analysis has been undertaken for three periods for both cities: the 1850s, the 1950s, and the contemporary period. The study uses space syntax techniques as the main methodology; further, the spatial analysis results are geographically projected in GIS, and the statistical analysis is performed on the analysis results of historical maps to measure the physical effects of canal systems on the potential mobility in both cities. The Amsterdam and London analysis results show different examples in terms of street interconnections with canals in the formation of urban structures. While the urban form has been shaped with a top-down planning process in the form of a regular grid structure designed with canals in Amsterdam, the urban form of London is a dominant land-based spatial structure with regard to its movement potentials. Hence, Amsterdam shows an intermediate spatial structure between water- and land-based networks. On the other hand, places are locally and globally more accessible with land-based transportation systems in London.
... London, Amsterdam and Stockholm are capital cities with certain socio-economic and historical similarities, but which also vary in their regional structures and planning traditions. Stockholm represents the highly planned city with a dispersed finger structure, intertwined with green and blue wedges; London represents the less planned city, that has grown incrementally from its centre and absorbed nearby villages; and Amsterdam represents a city in a dispersed semi-planned poly-centric conurbation (Randstad) (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). ...
... 22. To control for built density and street centrality we used built and street types developed within the Spatial Morphology Lab research project (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019. For clarifications, see Paper 4 ( Bobkova et al., 2019b). ...
... Firstly, only one case study, Stockholm, has been chosen instead of three cities 23 . Secondly, the performance of plots was analysed within several density and street types in combination, as introduced by Berghauser Pont et al. (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). Two building types with the highest built density ('Dense mid-rise' and 'Compact mid-rise') and two street centrality types ('City' and 'Neighbourhood') with the highest betweenness centrality across 23. ...
Plot systems (or ‘plots’, ‘lots’, ‘parcels’, ‘land divisions’) is a commonly recognised structural component of urban form along with streets and buildings. They play a critical role in understanding urban processes in cities, not least of all because they link directly between the physical world and institutions, such as property rights.
The role of plots and plot systems in urban processes is addressed in this thesis as the theory of natural occupation. The theory argues that the structure of plot systems is the driver of a process of economic concentration and diversification of economic activity in cities, as described in the burgage cycle concept (temporal evolution of built form) and the spatial capacity concept (link between plot shape and urban diversity).
However, plot systems remain the least studied component of urban form, which this thesis contributes to on two levels. Firstly, by developing more precise quantitative descriptions of plots and plot systems by way of morphological measures and plot types. Secondly, by making use of these descriptions and empirically testing some central ideas in urban morphology, such as urban diversity. The thesis thus contributes to methodological and theoretical development in the field of urban morphology. However, it also demonstrates how these ideas on urban morphology can be a central contribution to theories in other fields addressing urban processes, such as urban planning and especially urban economics.
The research design of the thesis involves the development of a generic method to spatially represent plot systems, the identification of three key morphological variables of plots based on extensive literature review in the field of urban morphology, the development of analytical plot types using statistical methods of data-driven classifications and finally, empirical testing of the theory of natural occupation (by correlating the morphological variables and plot types with the concentration and diversification of economic activity in five European cities).
The empirical studies provide support for a direct relation between the shape and structure of plot systems and economic processes in cities and are an important contribution to urban design and planning practice.
... Such combinations can be done before classification (Fusco and Araldi, 2017) or after (Berghauser Pont et al., 2017). In the first, the combined set of features is described at the outset, while in the second the design components are kept apart allowing for the testing of combinations later, which can yield insights about which combinations can and do exist (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). It could be argued that the first might be more effective for descriptive purposes, but for generative or urban design purposes, it can be important to keep the design components apart to allow for exploration of already known, but also new combinations (Marshall and Caliskan, 2011). ...
... London, Amsterdam and Stockholm are chosen because they carry certain socio-economic and historical similarities, but at the same time vary in their regional structure and planning tradition. In Sweden, two additional cities are included because they, in turn, have been developed within the same institutional planning tradition, but largely differ in size (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). The proposed selection of cities allows to make both cross-European comparisons, where compared cities vary in the planning structure, as well as study the effect of city size, while planning tradition is kept constant. ...
... For instance, the relation between fine-grain compact patterns and urban diversity and the theory of burgage cycle can be further tested. The latter has been partly supported by Berghauser Pont et al. (2019), where more dense and compact plot patterns demonstrated to be aligned with building types of higher density and land coverage. Although an interesting and necessary next step, the empirical validation of plot patterns is beyond the scope of this paper. ...
The importance of the plot (also referred to as ‘property’) as one of the fundamental elements of urban form is well recognized within the field of urban morphology. Despite the fact that it is often described as the basic element in the pattern of land divisions, which are essential as organizational frameworks for urban form, studies offering comprehensive descriptions and classifications of plot systems are quite scant. The aim of the paper is to introduce a classification of plot systems into typologies based on five European cities, in order to distinguish particular spatial differences and similarities in terms of their plot structure. The proposed typologies are developed using unsupervised k-means cluster analysis based on numeric attributes derived from central theories in urban morphology. The introduced typologies are essentially configurational, allowing collective systematic properties of plot systems to be captured. Numeric attributes include plot differentiation (or plot size), plot frontage and compactness ratio, corresponding to essential qualities of plot systems such as the capacity to carry differences in space, the ability to operate as interface between street and building and providing a framework for evolution of built form over time. All three attributes are translated into configurational measures in order to capture the context of the plot system, rather than the parameters of individual plots. The combination of these deductively defined variables with algorithmically defined classification methods results in seven plot types that can be used to scale up traditional urban morphological analysis to whole city regions and conduct substantial comparison of patterns within, but also between these regions. Further, it also makes it possible to describe commonly recognized plot patterns and discover new ones.
... The aim of this paper is to test a few of the assumptions in Webster and Lai's theory, relating to plot systems as delineations of property rights in cities. More specifically, we will test the correlation between the shape and structure of the plot systems, being classified as types that are based on three plot metrics that were defined in earlier studies (size, compactness, and frontage ratio) [14,15] and economic activity, being measured as the concentration of retail and food services per plot. ...
... We developed plot types, using clustering analysis, which allows for the recognition of urban patterns to test the combined effect of the three variables [61]. Subsequently, we compared the differences between these patterns in different cities and reduced the number of variables that were included in the statistical model [15,42,62]. ...
... The general methodological steps include: (1) selecting study areas, (2) measuring the dependent variable of economic activity concentration, (3) measuring the independent variable using plot types, (4) constructing statistical models by controlling for variables of street centrality and built density, and, finally, (5) analysing whether there are any statistical differences in terms of the distribution of the dependent variable between the plot types (Table 1). Steps 1-3 were developed in earlier research [14,15,57,63] and they will be briefly described below. Steps 4-5 are the particular focus of this paper and are described below in detail. ...
Plot systems (also referred to as "property", "parcel", or "lot") are generally recognised as the organisational framework of urban form that contributes to the economic performance of cities. However, studies that link the spatial form of plots to economic data are limited. The paper builds on the theory of Webster and Lai, which argues that the process of urbanisation is aligned with increased subdivision of property rights (increased division of land into plots, for example) due to the process of economic specialisation that is typical of cities. The aim of the paper is to test this theory by analysing whether there is a correlation between: (a) the shape and structure of plot systems, which are classified as types based on three plot metrics (size, compactness, and frontage index) and (b) economic activity, measured as the concentration of retail and food activities per plot. The paper will use statistical analysis to relate plot types to economic activity in three European cities (London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm). The results provide empirical support for our initial hypothesis and Webster and Lai's theory, which states that plots of smaller size, more regular shape, and smaller frontage generally correspond to a higher concentration of economic activity in cities.
... Clustering algorithms in most studies are the k-means (Gil et al., 2012;Berghauser Pont et al., 2019;Schirmer and Axhausen, 2016) and hierarchical clustering (Song et al., 2013;Asami and Niwa, 2008). Other studies adopted other clustering algorithms, such as the k-medoids (Schirmer and Axhausen, 2016), fuzzy c-means (Berghauser Pont and Olsson, 2017), latent class analysis (Schirmer and Axhausen, 2019), Bayesian clustering (Araldi and Fusco, 2019), and the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) . ...
... The structure was developed following studies in urban morphology (Moudon, 1997(Moudon, , 2019Kropf, 2018). Twelve attributes were selected to measure those elements (Table 1) based on previous studies (Schirmer and Axhausen, 2019;Berghauser Pont et al., 2019;Gil et al., 2012;Berghauser Pont and Olsson, 2017;Kropf, 2018). For simplicity and consistency, attributes values for each grid cell were estimated in ArcGIS based on the whole or parts of urban form elements in the grid cell, the latter being applied when the grid boundary cuts across the form elements. (Kim, 2003;SDI, 2009). ...
Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, has diverse urban forms developed through its complex history. Previous studies show limitations of strong subjectivity and difficulty in scalability in identifying typical Seoul urban forms with expert knowledge. Data-driven approach offers an opportunity to address those challenges, but previous studies often focused on direct applications of clustering algorithms to a given area with diverse methods and workflows, lacking a systematic framework. This study addressed these issues by developing a new form clustering framework to systematically identify form typologies at a large scale and demonstrated its application in Seoul. With a 500 m × 500 m grid as the basic spatial unit and twelve urban form attributes as learning features, 14 clusters were identified using the Gaussian mixture model. These clusters were further translated into form typologies following a semantic typology naming system, with representative form samples identified. The resulting typologies were then verified and validated through comparisons with previous studies. Their relationships with zoning classes were also examined, emphasizing their role in urban planning and design. Results suggest this new framework is an effective and promising way to identify urban form typologies in complex urban environments to better support urban planning and management.
... For example, some studies focus on a specific object, mainly for population groups [122,123] or particular transport modes [21,117,124]. Other studies vary in the element on which the accessibility analysis is based, such as buildings, roads, plots, etc. [125][126][127][128]. Accessibility studies vary in the scale and size of analysis, starting from a limited area of a neighborhood or urban area, moving to a city, metropolitan, or region, and even reaching the national scale [7, [15][16][17][18]117,[129][130][131][132][133]. ...
... Several recent studies have shown that the emergent centrality across scales in the road network may categorize roads by different functions [125,161,[186][187][188]. These new perspectives have begun to link the two aspects of size and scale, as the emergence of spatial scales through the road network is also related to spatial units. ...
Spatial accessibility is fundamentally related to the functional, economic and social performances of cities and geographical systems and, therefore, constitutes an essential aspect for spatial planning. Despite the significant progress made in accessibility research, little attention is given to the central role of accessibility in space organization and structuration. This study aimed to fill this gap. Based on an intensive literature review, our work shows the critical role of accessibility in space organization at different scales and sizes, starting from the basic concept of accessibility and its foundations in the classical locational theories and further to the methods and theories at the forefront of research. These processes also point to a unique contribution of multiscale accessibility in space structuration. Accordingly, we offer a conceptual framework to describe the multiscale process of space structuration with respect to local-urban, regional and national scales. We believe this framework may help in studying space and, more importantly, in understanding space. We hope this perspective forms an additional tier at the conceptual and methodological levels concerning accessibility and spatial organization and will encourage empirical studies in light of the suggested view.
... However, the most relevant -to our research-body of work has been done by Berghauser Pont, et al (Berghauser Pont, et al., 2019a;Berghauser Pont, et al., 2019b). In their publications, they utilize advanced spatial analysis to examine the urban types of buildings, streets and plots for five European cities (Amsterdam, London, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Eskilstuna), while they also link the identified urban types with human activity, and specifically pedestrian movement (Berghauser Pont, et al., 2017;Berghauser Pont, et al., 2019a;Berghauser Pont, et al., 2019b;Stavroulaki, et al., 2019;Bolin, et al., 2021). ...
... However, the most relevant -to our research-body of work has been done by Berghauser Pont, et al (Berghauser Pont, et al., 2019a;Berghauser Pont, et al., 2019b). In their publications, they utilize advanced spatial analysis to examine the urban types of buildings, streets and plots for five European cities (Amsterdam, London, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Eskilstuna), while they also link the identified urban types with human activity, and specifically pedestrian movement (Berghauser Pont, et al., 2017;Berghauser Pont, et al., 2019a;Berghauser Pont, et al., 2019b;Stavroulaki, et al., 2019;Bolin, et al., 2021). It is worth mentioning that our paper, also draws inspiration from the relevant work of van Nes, Ye, et al (van Nes, et al., 2012;Ye & van Nes, 2014;Ye & van Nes, 2013). ...
Patterns and urban typologies have a longstanding tradition as tools for understanding, discussing, and planning the city. However, the last decade advanced spatial analysis is increasingly employed for identifying urban types since it provides a quantitative/analytical approach to describe the patterns of urban form. In this context, we explore the types of urban form in Athens, as identified by an open-data methodological framework. Specifically, we examine the geography and interconnection of the types of buildings, streets and land-uses/functions as quantitatively defined by build density, network centrality, and functional mixture, respectively. What is more, the results of the methodology for Athens, are examined and evaluated by local experts in the fields of urban planning, participatory planning, sustainable mobility, and urbanism in general, during two expert focus groups. A key element of this research is that it exclusively uses open data sources, and datasets readily available for European urban space, thus, offering the possibility of replicating this methodology in another European city. Another substantial contribution of this paper is the development of urban types for functional mixture-meaning the combination of land uses and economic activities describing the function of the city-an important element of urban form, which is currently missing from the relevant literature. The results-as evaluated by the expert focus groups-demonstrate that the applied methodology yields very interesting results for Athens, since the emergent types of build density, network centrality, and functional mixture are successful in describing the diverse character of Athens in city-level or neighbourhood-level.
... More recently, however, the increased availability of detailed datasets has facilitated a finer scale of analysis while retaining the ability to process larger areal extents (Araldi and Fusco, 2019), thus prompting the adoption of multi-variable and multi-scalar workflows. The ensuing large and high-dimensional datasets can be combined with unsupervised exploratory meth-ods and have engendered interest in how urban morphological analysis can be applied not only to the exposition of existing cities but also in the capacity of a rigorous design-aid for newly planned forms of development (Serra, Gil, and Pinho, 2016;Gil et al., 2009;Berghauser Pont, Stavroulaki, Gil, et al., 2017;Berghauser Pont, Stavroulaki, Bobkova, et al., 2019). ...
... Gil et al. (2009) applies K-medoids in the comparison of two Lisbon neighbourhoods, allowing for their classification according to multiple selected attributes; K-medoids is likewise applied by Berghauser Pont, Stavroulaki, Gil, et al. (2017) in the analysis of betweenness centralities and population densities. K-means, which scales better to larger datasets, has been applied to the comparison of street, plot and building types across five cities (Berghauser Pont, Stavroulaki, Bobkova, et al., 2019) and to the identification of street-network archetypes (Serra, Gil, and Pinho, 2016). Araldi and Fusco (2019), on the other hand, argue for a two-step process, where the first step incorporates an explicitly spatial method in the form of Local ...
Granular, dense, and mixed-use urban morphologies are hallmarks of walkable and vibrant streets. However, urban systems are notoriously complex and planned urban development, which grapples with varied interdependent and oft conflicting criteria, may — despite best intentions — yield aberrant morphologies fundamentally at odds with the needs of pedestrians and the resiliency of neighbourhoods. This work addresses the measurement, detection, and prediction of pedestrian-friendly urban archetypes by developing techniques for high-resolution urban analytics at the pedestrian scale. A spatial-analytic computational toolset, the cityseer-api Python package, is created to assess localised centrality, land-use, and statistical metrics using contextually sensitive workflows applied directly over the street network. cityseer-api subsequently facilitates a review of mixed-use and street network centrality methods to improve their utility concerning granular urban analysis. Unsupervised machine learning methods are applied to recover ‘signatures’ — urban archetypes — using Principal Component Analysis, Variational Autoencoders, and clustering methods from a high-resolution multi-variable and multi-scalar dataset consisting of centralities, land-uses, and population densities for Greater London. Supervised deep-learning methods applied to a similar dataset developed for 931 towns and cities in Great Britain demonstrate how, with the aid of domain knowledge, machine-learning classifiers can learn to discriminate between ‘artificial’ and ‘historical’ urban archetypes. These methods use complex systems thinking as a departure point and illustrate how high-resolution spatial-analytic quantitative methods can be combined with machine learning to extrapolate benchmarks in keeping with more qualitatively framed urban morphological conceptions. Such tools may aid urban design professionals in better anticipating the outcomes of varied design scenarios as part of iterative and scalable workflows. These techniques may likewise provide robust and demonstrable feedback as part of planning review and approvals processes.
... In particular, the typo-morphology body of research-traditionally interested in identifying qualitative comparable physical characteristics (Vernez Moudon, 1997)-is increasingly showing applications of quantitative methods for measuring (Berghauser Pont & Haupt, 2010) and classifying urban forms (Serra et al., 2017). This recent typology-driven approach aims to overcome the use of traditional administrative units in the description of cities' physical context through morphological indicators (Serra et al., 2018), to support the application of typo-morphology to planning practice (Gil et al., 2012) and to facilitate the description of contemporary types that do not fall into standard classifications (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). ...
... Particularly relevant are the contributions of authors that have integrated geometrical multivariables and inter-scalar descriptions of urban form (Bobkova, 2019;Hausleitner & Berghauser Pont, 2017;Serra et al., 2018) and have developed methodological strategies to identify potential links between contextual factors and other variables, generating context-informed samples of urban areas. A part of these multi-variables and inter-scalar studies has a strong focus on defining typologies to investigate the geographical distribution of types of urban fabric (Araldi & Fusco, 2019) and to allow comparisons between cities (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). ...
Morphological characteristics of cities significantly influence urban heat island intensities and thermal responses to heat waves. Form attributes such as density, compactness, and vegetation cover are commonly used to analyse the impact of urban morphology on overheating processes. However, the use of abstract large-scale classifications hinders a full understanding of the thermal trade-off between single buildings and their immediate surrounding microclimate. Without analytical tools able to capture the complexity of cities with a high resolution, the microspatial dimension of urban climate phenomena cannot be properly addressed. Therefore, this study develops a new method for numerical identification of types, based on geometrical characteristics of buildings and climate-related form attributes of their surroundings in a 25m and 50m radius. The method, applied to the city of Rotterdam, combines quantitative descriptors of urban form, mapping GIS procedures, and clustering techniques. The resulting typo-morphological classification is assessed by modelling temperature, wind, and humidity during a hot summer period, in ENVI-met. Significant correlations are found between the morphotypes’ characteristics and local climate phenomena, highlighting the differences in performative potential between the classified urban patterns. The study suggests that the method can be used to provide insight into the systemic relations between buildings, their context, and the risk of overheating in different urban settings. Finally, the study highlights the relevance of advanced mapping and modelling tools to inform spatial planning and mitigation strategies to reduce the risk of urban overheating.
... More recently, however, the increased availability of detailed datasets has facilitated a finer scale of analysis while retaining the ability to process larger areal extents (Araldi and Fusco 2019), thus prompting the adoption of multi-variable and multi-scalar workflows. The ensuing large and high-dimensional datasets can be combined with unsupervised exploratory methods and have engendered interest in how urban morphological analysis can be applied not only to the exposition of existing cities but also in the capacity of a rigorous design-aid for newly planned forms of development (Serra, Gil, and Pinho 2016;Gil et al. 2009;Berghauser Pont, Stavroulaki, Gil, et al. 2017;Berghauser Pont, Stavroulaki, Bobkova, et al. 2019). ...
... Gil et al. (2009) applies K-medoids in the comparison of two Lisbon neighbourhoods, allowing for their classification according to multiple selected attributes; K-medoids is likewise applied by Berghauser Pont, Stavroulaki, Gil, et al. (2017) in the analysis of betweenness centralities and population densities. K-means, which scales better to larger datasets, has been applied to the comparison of street, plot and building types across five cities (Berghauser Pont, Stavroulaki, Bobkova, et al. 2019) and to the identification of street-network archetypes (Serra, Gil, and Pinho 2016). Araldi and Fusco (2019), on the other hand, argue for a two-step process, where the first step incorporates an explicitly spatial method in the form of Local Indicators of Network Constrained Clusters (ILINCS) (Yamada and Thill 2010), a network-based implementation of Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA) (Anselin 1995). ...
Urban morphological measures applied at a high-resolution of analysis may yield a wealth of data describing varied characteristics of the urban environment in a substantial degree of detail; however, these forms of high-dimensional datasets are not immediately relatable to broader constructs rooted in conventional conceptions of urbanism. Data science and machine learning methods provide an opportunity to explore such forms of data by applying unsupervised machine learning methods. The dimensionality of the data can thereby be reduced while recovering latent themes and identifying characteristic patterns which may resonate with urbanist discourse more generally. Dimensionality reduction and clustering methods, including Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Variational Autoencoders, and an Autoencoder based Gaussian Mixture Model, are discussed and demonstrated for purposes of `untangling' urban datasets, revealing themes bridging quantitative and qualitative descriptions of urbanism. The methods are applied to a morphological dataset for Greater London. The spatial aggregations and morphological measures are computed at pedestrian walking tolerances at a 20m network resolution using the cityseer-api Python package, which utilises a local windowing-methodology with distances computed directly over the network and with aggregations performed dynamically and with respect to the direction of approach, thus preserving the relationships between the variables and retaining contextual precision. Whereas the demonstrated methods hold tremendous potential, their power is difficult to convey or fully exploit using conventional lower-dimensional visualisation methods, thus underscoring the need for subsequent research into how such methods may be coupled to interactive visualisation methods to elucidate further the richness of the data and its potential implications.
... The literature review we performed on topics concerning building age, building shape and urban morphology highlights a recurring number of machine learning methods employed: Random Forest (Biljecki & Sindram, 2017;Droin et al., 2020;Tooke et al., 2014), clustering (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019;Gil et al., 2012), linear discriminant analysis (Wurm et al., 2016) and Convolutional Neural Networks (Li et al., 2018;Zeppelzauer et al., 2018). ...
... Streets represent city connectivity and are increasingly used to characterize the urban form. Connectivity can be expressed by street length, number of intersections or ratio of intersections to street length (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). Complex centrality metrics describe the position of a street node in the overall city street network (Boeing, 2017). ...
Urban energy consumption is expected to continuously increase alongside rapid urbanization. The building sector represents a key area for curbing the consumption trend and reducing energy-related emissions by adopting energy efficiency strategies. Building age acts as a proxy for building insulation properties and is an important parameter for energy models that facilitate decision making. The present study explores the potential of predicting residential building age at a large geographical scale from open spatial data sources in eight municipalities in the German federal state of North-Rhine Westphalia. The proposed framework combines building attributes with street and block metrics as classification features in a Random Forest model. Results show that the addition of urban fabric metrics improves the accuracy of building age prediction in specific training scenarios. Furthermore, the findings highlight the way in which the spatial disposition of training and test samples influences classification accuracy. Additionally, the paper investigates the impact of age misclassification on residential building heat demand estimation. The age classification model leads to reasonable errors in energy estimates, in various scenarios of training, which suggests that the proposed method is a promising addition to the urban energy modelling toolkit.
... A city's urban form may, in turn, respond to both environmental conditions such as topography and landscape setting, as well as cultural drivers such as military defense (e.g., road widths, medieval moats and walls), political and economic control (e.g., the grid), periodic trends (e.g., baroque street diagonals, freeways-to-greenways), public policy (e.g., urban renewal), and technological and socio-demographic change (e.g., automobile infrastructure, suburban expansion) (Kostof, 1991;Birch, 2009;Horte and Eisenman, 2020). Because of this, urban form varies widely across geography and culture (Huang et al., 2007;Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). This suggests a need to understand cities as distinct biomes that can be classified by typology to better inform urban greening aspirations (Pincetl, 2015). ...
... Each of the selected cities is situated in a larger metropolitan region. Central zones were identified in each city and are characterized as medium-to high-density with high frequency of street use and diverse land use (Hillier et al., 1993;Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). The entire municipal boundaries of Buenos Aires (Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), Paris (Paris Intra-Muros/Département 75), and Washington, DC (District of Columbia) were designated as central zones while in Ottawa, the central zone was defined by the urban wards and in Stockholm the central zone was defined by the innerstan (inner-city). ...
Municipal leaders around the world are demonstrating significant interest in urban greening to realize a range of socioecological benefits. The urban greening toolkit often includes street trees, an essential component of urban design informed by historic legacies of both human and environmental factors. To date, there has been little comparative analysis of street tree density and distribution across international and intercontinental settings, and associated research has not been situated within the broader discussion of historical legacies. This study focuses on five capital cities (Ottawa, Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Washington, DC) situated in two climate zones and it addresses two research questions: (1) What are the density and distribution of street trees across a given city and its street hierarchy? and (2) How do these metrics compare within and between cities by climate zone? The analysis draws upon up-to-date datasets from local authorities and includes geospatial analysis of street trees across hierarchical street classes within the central zones of each city. The results show clear differences in street tree density in cities within and between climate zones as well as differences in street tree distribution in cities within the same climate zone. Substantial differences within climate zones further suggest that cultural factors-including but not limited to urban form, aesthetic norms, and governance regimes-may play a pivotal role in the distribution and density of street trees. This illustrates the importance of place-specific cultural and environmental legacies as determinants of street tree density and distribution and supports further comparative research on the topic.
... "Land" refers to urban morphology research, which provides a quantitative understanding of the morphology of buildings, plots, and urban blocks [64,65]. Relevant spatial parameters from this perspective are building size and height, plot size, street frontage, plot diversity, and land use restrictions. ...
Implementing a circular economy in cities has been proposed by policy makers as a potential solution for achieving sustainability in the construction sector. One strategy that has gained interest by both policy makers and companies is to develop “circular construction hubs”: locations that collect, store, and redistribute waste as secondary resources. However, there is limited literature taking a spatially explicit view, identifying the spatial parameters that could affect the locations of hubs both for now and in the future. This study therefore aims to categorize different types of circular hubs for the construction industry, collect spatial parameters required for finding suitable locations for each type of circular hub, and translate the spatial parameters into a list of data and spatial analysis methods that could be used to identify potential future locations. The study used the Netherlands as a case study, extracting spatial parameters from two sources: Dutch governmental policy documents on circular economy and spatial development and interviews with companies operating circular hubs. Four types of circular construction hubs were identified: urban mining hubs, industry hubs, local material banks, and craft centers. The spatial parameters were extracted for each type of hub from four perspectives: resources (such as material type, business model), accessibility (such as mode and scale of transportation), land use (such as plot size, land use), and socio-economic (such as labor availability). The parameters were then translated into a list of spatial data and analysis methods required to identify future locations of circular construction hubs.
... Estudo em Jerusalém considerou o limite municipal com um bu er de 5 km excluindo áreas passando do muro de segurança (Rokem & Vaughan, 2017). Uma investigação sobre cidades na Holanda, Inglaterra e Suécia menciona desenvolver análises de centralidade de 500 m a 60 km, mas não menciona os tamanhos dos modelos (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). ...
... It has been well established that the visit frequency to attractions in cities follows a ubiquitous distribution, where only a few places attract the most visits (Alessandretti et al., 2020;Schläpfer et al., 2021). The heterogeneity of place attractions is also an external force that drives pedestrian movement, particularly in low-density areas such as suburbs, and has been applied to Space Syntax's scope through the related 'Place Syntax' concept (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). The walkability affordance, on the other hand, depends on the composition of land covers directly perceived by pedestrians without reference to superior reasoning models (Lee, 2015;Savary et al., 2021;Turner and Penn, 2002). ...
In well-planned open and semi-open urban areas, it is common to observe desire paths on the ground, which shows how pedestrians themselves enhance the walkability and affordance of road systems. To better understand how these paths are formed, we present an agent-based modelling approach that simulates real pedestrian movement to generate complex path systems. By using heterogeneous ground affordance and visit frequency of hotspots as environmental settings and by modelling pedestrians as agents, path systems emerge from collective interactions between agents and their environment. Our model employs two visual parameters, angle and depth of vision, and two guiding principles, global conception and local adaptation. To examine the model's visual parameters and their effects on the cost-efficiency of the emergent path systems, we conducted a randomly generated simulation and validated the model using desire paths observed in real scenarios. The results show that (1) the angle (found to be limited to a narrow range of 90-120°) has a more significant impact on path patterns than the depth of vision, which aligns with Space Syntax theories that also emphasize the importance of angle for modelling pedestrian movement; (2) the depth of vision is closely related to the scale-invariance of path patterns on different map scales; and (3) the angle has a negative exponential correlation with path efficiency and a positive correlation with path costs. Our proposed model can help urban planners predict or generate cost-efficient Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article path installations in well-and poorly designed urban areas and may inspire further approaches rooted in generative science for future cities.
... As has been mentioned, the traditional framework of morphological regions is centred in the combination of typomorphologies, which yield the delimitation of homogeneous areas. We perceive this underlying premise as a link with other quantitative approaches in urban morphology, developing typological descriptions of the urban environment using computational methods (such as spatial analysis and statistical modelling), to characterize individual urban form elements into typomorphologies (Berghauser Pont and Haupt, 2005;Gil et al., 2012;Serra et al., 2017;Berghauser Pont et al., 2019;Bobkova, 2019). ...
... The identification and characterization of France's urban fabrics and morphological regionalization of French cities remained for long a complex task, traditionally based on in-depth but qualitative assessments, and restricted to specific, mainly historical, geographical and cultural contexts. Recent advancements in urban morphometric analysis propose innovative computer-aided protocols to analyse different aspects of urban form which could be used to regionalize urban space (Hillier 1996, Gil et al. 2012, Berghauser Pont et al. 2019, Fleischmann et al. 2021. Among them, Multiple Fabric Assessment (MFA, Araldi and Fusco 2019) is a computer-aided streetscape-XXIX International Seminar on Urban Form ISUF2022: Urban Redevelopment and Revitalisation. ...
... Road network analysis of extensive geographical regions has been used in previous research to identify the key structural characteristics of large cities and regions (Porta, et al., 2012;Wang, et al., 2011;Serra & Hillier, 2019;Berghauser Pont, et al., 2019a;Berghauser Pont, et al., 2019b). These studies have established a strong correlation between various variables such as vehicular movement, land use distribution, centre hierarchies with various measures of spatial network analysis, such as space syntax 'Choice' (or betweenness in graph network analysis) and 'Integration' (or closeness in graph network analysis). ...
Transport is one of the most important factors which influence and largely determine an urban society's spatial relations and interactions. Urban societies as socio-spatial systems are typically formed out of densely populated, well developed, productive and prosperous central areas and smaller settlements usually depended from one or more of the closest of the former. In terms of development and growth dynamics, road network lines are the basic arteries for the flow of people, economic resources and goods as well as information among places delineating to a large extent, the arrangement of transport relations and thus monocentric or polycentric organization of spatial systems. To this end, transport network quality and connectivity can generate a competitive advantage for specific locations/nodes i.e. settlements of the system. In this paper we utilize the space syntax method in order to explore the impact of transport network configuration and structure on population growth. We apply our methodology in order to describe, analyze and evaluate population dynamics of the settlements of Naxos Island, Greece for which their direct and significant correlation with accessibility is demonstrated.
... A high correlation between space syntax indicators is found in two areas of Seoul, ultimately leading to using integration alone to predict office location (Kim and Sohn, 2002). This high correlation between space syntax measures has also been noted by other researchers (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019;Scoppa and Peponis, 2015). In Barcelona (Mora, 2003) and Mexico City (Ortiz-Chao and Hillier, 2007), both integration and connectivity are found to be significant predictors of the presence of economic activity. ...
Although location theory is now almost two centuries old, the firms' location choice processes are yet to be fully understood. And while accessibility, in some form, has long been used as an explanatory factor, spatial configuration measures (space syntax) have hardly been used in location models, and longitudinal analyses have also been infrequent. Therefore, a panel multinomial logit model is implemented in Lisbon to explore the role of these specific type of accessibility measures in shaping firm location, throughout a 15-year period, using data from 1995, 2002 and 2010. The analysis is focused on retail activity (five retail categories), restaurants and cafes. The results show that firm location can persistently be related to Local Integration and Choice, although the magnitude of the relationship changes depending on the commercial category. These results reinforce the general idea that good urban design can potentially counteract information costs and help commerce locate in new areas of the city while allowing it to continue to succeed in the city's older, more central areas.
... They highlighted the importance of Blocks, Plots, or both in facilitating the connection between the streets and the buildings. Bobkova et al. (2019) argue that we must study urban form to develop and sustain life in the urban environment. They consider both Streets and Buildings as the main layers of urban form. ...
Wind comfort plays a central role in improving the safety, livability, and resilience of
urban environments. The modification of wind patterns by buildings can cause physical
discomfort to pedestrians and danger to vulnerable populations. The height, size, location
and shape of buildings and urban features have a significant effect on wind acceleration
or mitigation. A study was performed on the potential for small-scale elements of
enhancing wind comfort within three pedestrian areas in Tallinn’s Ülemiste district,
which suffers from high urban wind discomfort. The investigation combined parametric
design and CFD simulations to test a variety of wind shelter types and sizes and urban
layout design to incorporate them into open spaces. A Lawson wind comfort criterion was used to evaluate wind discomfort in the actual situation and the possibility of improving comfort with the shelters. Based on initial results, the area in the state of comfort improved from 40% to 83 %. The methods and results are presented in detail in the paper
... The concept of typomorphology (also known as typologies of urban surface properties) was proposed to describe the diversity of urban form characteristics and describe urban form in an integrative way that can effectively inform urban planning and design practices (Eldesoky et al., 2022;Berghauser Pont et al., 2019). Creating spatial representations of neighbourhood typologies can be used as a basis to plan or formulate design interventions, as design interventions require easily applicable knowledge that works beyond a specific case to a more generalisable set of situations (Lenzholzer & Brown, 2016;Prominski, 2016;Hidalgo et al., 2018). ...
Outdoor microclimates vary among different urban neighbourhoods depending on their morphological variations. The Local Climate Zone (LCZ) framework is a well-developed typomorphological classification used to capture the variation that characterises neighbourhood microclimates. However, it does not include detailed morphological parameters within neighbourhoods that have synergistic effects on microclimates. It is thus essential to develop neighbourhood typologies with detailed spatial descriptions. This study first identifies the LCZ in Amsterdam, London and Paris with the highest Land Surface Temperature (hereinafter referred to as the most heat-prone areas). Subsequently, parameters which are not covered by the LCZs were analysed, including building block's floor area ratio and shape factor, street canyon's orientation and Height-to-Width ratio, street total length, green space area, and tree cover ratio. The results show that LCZ 2-compact mid-rise areas are the most heat-prone. Employing K-means cluster analysis, four neighbourhood typologies are distinguished within the LCZ 2: mainly wide streets with N-S and E-W orientations, mainly narrow streets with N-S and E-W orientations, mainly narrow streets with NE-SW and NW-SE orientations, mainly wide streets with four orientations divided by 45°. These generalised neighbourhood typologies can be used as the basis for design interventions aiming at climate adaptation in heat-prone urban areas.
... Currently, many space syntax studies worldwide adopt RCL models for analysing potential movement, and ASA for urban space syntax analysis focusing mainly on betweenness centrality. Betweenness centrality facilitated building types comparison between cities in different European countries (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019), correlation with types of movement on nationwide road systems in England (Serra & Hillier, 2019) and understanding of inter-scale movement dynamics at Tuscany region (Italy), the latter focusing on normalized betweenness centrality measure (Altafini & Cutini, 2020). RCL was considered a rapid way to update models and analyse centralities to orient post-disaster decisions: normalized ASA was compared with axial, CTR (Carta Tecnica Regionale) and OSM RCL for Italian urban settlements (Pezzica et al., 2019). ...
Axial and RCL (Road Centre Lines) models are street network representations used as base for space syntax Angular Segment Analysis (ASA) studies of centralities in cities. Although RCL is widely adopted for ASA, steps to treat RCL seem uncompleted. On the other hand, in Brazil many studies maintain axial models for ASA, despite standardization and updating limitations. Understanding models’ importance as it affects results, and in order to advance more confidently in studies, this paper compares axial and different modes of Open Street Map RCL ASA for two medium-to-large sized north-eastern Brazilian cities (Joao Pessoa and Natal). Closeness and betweenness centralities (i.e., measures of integration and choice) are studied for the city and their old city centres, as well as interrelations between centralities for different scales. Although all models work differently, they capture city centralities and scale dynamics, pointing towards natural urban voids in both cities accentuating routes movement hierarchies. Understanding some limitations in RCL simplifications proposed so far, a further procedure is presented that yielded good results in terms of route depiction and highlighting city centralities reading, while allowing more standardized and easily updated city models, especially relevant for rapidly changing Brazilian cities.
... For the method of selection, see BerghauserPont et al.2019a. For the detailed methodology of the generation of density and street types, see BerghauserPont et al. 2019b. ...
Modelling pedestrian flows has been one of the main directions of Space Syntax since its introduction, but what we see in the last years is that it has also become a central interdisciplinary objective within the Sustainable Development research agenda. The agenda calls for promotion of sustainable mobility (i.e. walking, cycling, public transport) and a clear shift from car-oriented development. There is an acknowledged need in the broader fields of urban development to model pedestrian flows: to explain and assess the functioning of existing built environments, to predict future situations and assist scenario analysis when planning new areas and infrastructural changes and support decision-making.
The keynote argues that Space Syntax can claim expertise for this emerging interdisciplinary field of study, having built a relevant and comprehensive theoretical and methodological framework and having provided sufficient and solid empirical evidence that it is an appropriate methodology to model pedestrian flows. What is more, it is perfectly aligned with the main tenets of Sustainable Development.
The keynote continues to lay out the opportunities created for Space Syntax research by
the Sustainable Development research agenda, but also the needs for further development. Using recent and current projects from the Spatial Morphology Group (SMoG) at Chalmers University of Technology, three research priorities are identified and exemplified further.
... The aim was to combine a number of syntactic measures of integration, choice, and reach to find common and different characteristics of streets. K-means clustering(Berghauser Pont et al., 2019;Tan et al., 2005) is used to classify into types based on the syntactic measures. Descriptive statistics are extracted for each cluster and compared, in order to create a meaningful description of each cluster. ...
In Greater Cairo, the street patterns of informal settlements can be influenced by the underlying presence of agricultural subdivision or the absence of underlying urban structure. Furthermore, the presence of a well-developed highway system impacts the connectivity between neighbourhoods and their edge conditions. By classifying the streets in the urban fabric of Cairo. this study contributes to a more nuanced classification of informal settlements as a whole and can be used to develop urban interventions based on the spatial form and social needs of neighbourhoods. The study uses a sample of 13 neighbourhoods in Cairo, Egypt, consisting of planned, informal, and mixed neighbourhoods. This study primarily uses unsupervised clustering (k-means) to classify streets (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019) based on space syntax measures such as Angular Integration (Hillier and Iida, 2005) Normalised Angular Choice (Hillier et al., 2012) and Reach (Peponis et al., 2008). The cluster analysis results in eight clusters, which are then assimilated to three existing classes; locally important routes, intra-block access, and super-grid (Karimi et al., 2007; Soliman, 2012). Another group was added from the analysis-the socially integrated core. Moreover, two street clusters seem to be unique to informal settlements and linked to the emergence of the settlement. The classification highlights the distinctiveness of street types only found in informal settlements and general role of the highway super-grid as providing important routes both locally and globally. As such, these clusters can be used to aid in classification and be preserved in any urban intervention.
... The latter step operates on large scale datasets of multiple urban form measures simultaneously and systematically, thus allowing the typomorphological description of urban form in multiple dimensions, as well as enabling the discovery of urban form types that are not yet known or are hard to identify by manual means that were used, for instance, to derive the 17 standard LCZ types. Examples of previous studies that have combined GIS-and ML-based methods to develop typomorphological classifications for different applications include (Barthelemy, 2017;Berghauser Pont et al., 2019a, 2019bBobkova et al., 2019bBobkova et al., , 2019aColaninno et al., 2011;Fleischmann et al., 2021;Fusco and Araldi, 2018;Gil et al., 2012;Hausleitner and Berghauser Pont, 2017;Lee et al., 2019;Maiullari et al., 2021;Song and Knaap, 2007;Steiniger et al., 2008). ...
Over the past years, cities have become more prone to extreme and frequent heatwaves. In this regard, urban form plays an important role and several typomorphological classifications have been developed to describe the urban form characteristics that can exacerbate heat stress and influence people's health and comfort negatively (i.e. the environmental dimension of heat-stress resilience). Nevertheless, evidence from past heatwave disasters indicates that other urban form characteristics, not included in existing typomorphological classifications, can significantly affect heat-stress resilience by influencing the conditions of social interaction and the state of social ties and solidarities in urban neighborhoods (i.e. the social dimension). Therefore, this paper proposes a broader approach combining the aforementioned environmental and social dimensions in the classification of urban form types; and demonstrates its application in a real-world case by developing a data-driven typomorphological classification that complements existing ones with the missing social dimension. The results showed the possibility of numerically identifying neighborhood types that, through distinct urban form characteristics, have different potentials for enhancing the social dimension of heat-stress resilience. This has direct planning and design relevance as the quantifiable characteristics of these types can be translated into guidelines/rules and incorporated into local regulations/codes.
... Plot area and depth-to-frontage ratio measurements were mapped for the plots' quantitative description for each time. While the surface area captures the plot's potential to drive various strategies of inhabitants and owners, the depth-tofrontage ratio reveals its geometry and the potential contact with public space (Pont et al. 2019). Plot area ranges were defined according to these criteria: (1) less than 500 m 2 : represent single-family housing subdivisions, very common in the neighborhoods' original composition; (2) 1000 m 2 : as a general threshold for verticalization (more than five stories), (3) 2500 m 2 : a threshold that provides legal benefits to increase buildability, and (4) more than 5000 m 2 : to identify large-scale plots. ...
Verticalization reconfigures plot patterns and private space's relationship with public space at the street level. This paper analyzes eight verticalized neighborhoods in the Santiago Metropolitan Area (SMA) to understand what plot patterns emerge from verticalization and how plot transformation processes affect public space. The empirical research was based on the analysis of plot surface and plot geometry transformations, and of spatial planning urban codes. The study develops quantitative measures and qualitative analysis identifying and presenting four plot transformation categories: (1) Homogenous verticalization through regular plot transformation, (2) Incomplete verticalization through diverse plot configuration, (3) Scattered and intense verticalization, with a partial plot reconfiguration, and (4) Scattered verticalization with changes in plot pattern. The evidence suggests that the plot structure's initial configuration contributes to the urban fabric's consistency and adaptability to verticalization and that urban codes are inconsistent with pre-existing urban form. Plot pattern transformations derived from verticalization unleash significant scale changes in the urban fabric that reconfigure the public–private interface, with greater degrees of enclosure between the plot and the street.
... Exploring the Barcelona superblock strategy in different cities is promising as many cities are facing similar challenges. Although the urban morphology varies between cities [25][26][27] , an often common element is the presence of dense urban structure surrounded by higher-order, exterior streets, such as the sikkak system in Arab countries 28 or the hutongs in China 29 . The spatial dimension of the area surrounded by the superblock can differ, and typologies have been proposed to characterize internal street layouts 30 . ...
The Barcelona superblock has been proposed as a sustainable urban neighbourhood transformation strategy in cities. Superblock design reduces space assigned to cars to enable alternative uses for improving liveability and sustainability. Here, the potential for superblock transformation is systematically quantified and evaluated for cities with varying urban forms and densities. A superblock consists of nine (3 × 3) urban city blocks, including interior and exterior streets. Miniblocks, consisting of four (2 × 2) blocks, are proposed as a less-disruptive strategy to initiate urban transformation on which superblocks can build. A geospatial network-based approach is developed to find locations for introducing multifunctional streets. For possible site prioritization, the identified locations are evaluated concerning the potential disruption to traffic. The analysis reveals that the potential for superblocks and miniblocks, as well as their disruption effect, varies considerably across cities and is affected by the urban layout. For some cities, over 40% of the street network is potentially suitable for integrating superblock or miniblock design, providing opportunities for city-scale transition towards more sustainable and liveable cities. A grid-like layout in cities is not a sufficient condition for high superblock potential, and cities with irregular street layouts can show high transformation potential as well. Superblocks have captivated the sustainability community since they were pioneered in Barcelona, but research has been limited. This study looks at the potential for superblocks and miniblocks across various urban centres and types
... Alonso's Bid Rent Model, setting Ricardo's residual value theory of land into an explicitly spatial context, has an abiding appeal as a powerful abstraction for understanding the spatial structure of land uses and their relations with the urban center. Many empirical studies have revealed the association of street centrality with population density [18], employment density [19], building density [20], the location of economic activities [21][22][23], and land use allocations [24][25][26][27][28][29]. This kind of research concentrates on commercial land use, and the logic behind it is that the more central the land, the more expensive the land; therefore, the land use density is higher near the urban center to balance the profit. ...
Physical inactivity has been identified as the fourth leading risk factor for global mortality, and has been shown to be related to the built environment. To fill the literature gap from a non-Western setting, we examined: (1) the associations between the built environment and physical activity (PA) behaviors, (2) how the association of street centrality with PA is mediated by public leisure facilities, and (3) whether the association of the built environment with PA differs among people with different perceived PA barriers in Hong Kong. Cross-sectional survey data on 1977 adults were used. Exposure to the built environment was assessed in terms of the density of four types of public leisure facilities (gyms, parks, recreational facilities, and sports facilities) and street centrality. Street centrality was a composite index calculated by gathering four related indicators (reach, be-tweenness, straightness, and intersection density). Covariates, including socio-demographic variables , perceived neighborhood environment, and perceived PA barriers, were considered. Gym density was significantly associated with vigorous physical activity, but the association became non-significant after controlling for covariates. Sports facility density was associated with a greater probability of moderate physical activity (MPA) and was greater in those who had perceived PA barriers. Additionally, sports facilities partially mediated the association of street centrality with MPA, and fully mediated the association of street centrality with prolonged sitting. Higher park density was associated with lower odds of prolonged sitting. It is important for governments to provide more sports facilities and parks to promote active PA, and to reduce sitting time in adults by creating an active built environment.
... More complex classifications involve hierarchical methods (taxonomies), which organise classes based on their mutual relationships like Serra et al. (2018)'s hierarchical taxonomy of neighbourhoods built according to 12 morphological characters of street network, blocks and buildings, and the work by Dibble et al. (2019) who hierarchically classify portions of urban area enclosed by main streets. More granular approaches include the work by Araldi and Fusco (2019), who classify street segments using 21 morphometric characters derived from street networks, building footprints and digital terrain model and research by Spatial Morphology Group at Chalmers University (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019a, 2019bBobkova et al., 2019) that classifies morphological elements of plots, streets and buildings through a handful of morphometric characters. ...
Cities are complex products of human culture, characterised by a startling diversity of visible traits. Their form is constantly evolving, reflecting changing human needs and local contingencies, manifested in space by many urban patterns. Urban morphology laid the foundation for understanding many such patterns, largely relying on qualitative research methods to extract distinct spatial identities of urban areas. However, the manual, labour-intensive and subjective nature of such approaches represents an impediment to the development of a scalable, replicable and data-driven urban form characterisation. Recently, advances in geographic data science and the availability of digital mapping products open the opportunity to overcome such limitations. And yet, our current capacity to systematically capture the heterogeneity of spatial patterns remains limited in terms of spatial parameters included in the analysis and hardly scalable due to the highly labour-intensive nature of the task. In this paper, we present a method for numerical taxonomy of urban form derived from biological systematics, which allows the rigorous detection and classification of urban types. Initially, we produce a rich numerical characterisation of urban space from minimal data input, minimising limitations due to inconsistent data quality and availability. These are street network, building footprint and morphological tessellation, a spatial unit derivative of Voronoi tessellation, obtained from building footprints. Hence, we derive homogeneous urban tissue types and, by determining overall morphological similarity between them, generate a hierarchical classification of urban form. After framing and presenting the method, we test it on two cities – Prague and Amsterdam – and discuss potential applications and further developments. The proposed classification method represents a step towards the development of an extensive, scalable numerical taxonomy of urban form and opens the way to more rigorous comparative morphological studies and explorations into the relationship between urban space and phenomena as diverse as environmental performance, health and place attractiveness.
... Such approaches build on the long tradition of utilising visual approaches in the study of urban change (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019), tourism gentrification and place making studies (Cocola-Gant, 2018a, 2018bDupre, 2019). This tradition of classifying, recording, and mapping morphology and urban fabric is associated with temporal and spatial change (Conzen, 1960), alongside processes of place making and identity (Li et al., 2020). ...
Framed within the context of contemporary place making and the urban tourism destination, a novel trans-disciplinary approach to mapping and interpreting gentrification and cityscape change is presented. A combination of multi-scalar cartographic and visual techniques, including Google Street View (GSV) and geo-tagged images (Photo Sphere), is applied within the setting of Valletta, Malta, to convey cartographically the dynamism of urban transformations and detect tourism-led gentrification in a rapid way through the identification of the visual and aesthetic markers of gentrification. Utilising a critical approach, such map-making can inform and transform the understanding of the processes underpinning urban change and their cartographic and visual representation. It identifies and highlights issues of image and street-level ‘realities’ for both (re)imagining and marketing place. Individual tourists are able to access and utilise GSV and other mobile digital imaging and cartographic tools, as well as social media, to create their own, potentially counter, place-imaginaries and interpretations of urban change, thereby encouraging and/or discouraging visiting the city.
... In addition, correlations between pedestrian flows and the characteristics of urban functional density and local network centrality are strongly positive. There is extensive literature highlighting the strong relation of network centrality and pedestrian movement (Hillier, et al., 1993;Berghauser Pont et al., 2019), and the emergence of central areas (Scoppa & Peponis, 2015;Porta, et al., 2012;Penn & Turner, 2004) which also appear within the Athenian urban environment in areas such as Koukaki. ...
Everyday human activity is crucially defined by walkability at neighbourhood level, and accordingly, this paper sets a dual focus: to map basic pedestrian accessibility infrastructure and to investigate the factors influencing walking patterns in such areas. The study area is Koukaki, a neighborhood in Athens’ municipality. The methodological framework consists of four steps: a) Evaluating neighbourhood-level pedestrian accessibility with emphasis on vulnerable users, b) Selecting a centrality cluster, as an area of dense human activity (high density of non-residential uses), c) data collection of pedestrian flow and d) interpretation of the results. The results showed that human flows have substantial positive correlation with commercial activities, but negative with residential uses. In addition, they appear to have strong positive correlation with local network centrality (space syntax), sidewalk width and functional density. Finally, the evaluation of pedestrian infrastructure demonstrated that pedestrian movement cannot be adequately sustained in Koukaki, thus needing serious interventions.
... As Behnisch, Hecht, and Herold have observed, these new datasets set up the potential for developing new metrics to study urban forms and the ways in which they change (Behnisch et al., 2019). Quantitative approaches to classifying urban forms and identifying building typologies in cities have typically involved the use of GIS datasets and have been defined in terms of geometrical relationships like scale, distance, convexity or elongation (Berghauser Pont et al., 2019;Colaninno et al., 2011;Perez et al., 2018). Recently, Araldi and Fusco proposed a method for studying the urban fabric quantitatively using data from the pedestrian standpoint (Araldi and Fusco, 2017). ...
The ever-growing online corpus of images of the built environment, on social media and mapping platforms, offers a new kind of archive of the built environment. Recent advances in computer vision, specifically convolutional neural networks, offer new ways of querying and analyzing large image corpuses. In this paper, we propose a new method by which historians of the built environment can use these vast image corpuses in their study, enabling new research questions. To demonstrate proof of need, we report on an ongoing case study in Tel Aviv that attempts to show the feasibility of our proposed method for enabling a Historic Urban Landscapes (HUL)-based approach to the study of the built environment. In so doing, we show how such image corpuses could potentially form a new type of archive for architectural and urban history.
... Existing literature within this research approach has been significant and covered many urban cores and suburbs across the world, but particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. However, similar research has not yet been conducted on Middle Eastern cities. Boffet and Serra described the organization within urban blocks by using orientation, proximity, and angularity principles. ...
Due to their essential role in forming good quality urban life, urban structures need to be comprehensively understood. The use of quantitative methods and measures to analyze the urban fabric metrics is crucial to understand the physical and spatial properties at multiple scales. This research aims to study the structures of urban blocks by using computational and metric methods. Three essential variables of urban blocks - perimeter, size, and dimension - are selected to measure the blocks’ features and differences formed in Baghdad, Iraq. The analysis used various statistical methods combined with computation techniques and a geographical information system (GIS) to measure and compare the correlations between the block properties of four selected urban areas. The results revealed a differentiation among the geometric potentials found in urban block structures; moreover, this helped to provide a precise basis and principal guidelines for urban design models and planning practices. The research concluded that a better understanding of the block’s role in urban fabric helps to improve the formation and transformation processes within the built environment.
... (Conzen, 1960;Moudon, 1997;Caniggia et al., 2001;Oliveira, 2016). A total of ten attributes were selected to measure the three types of fundamental elements: buildings, streets, and plots, with reference to previous studies (Frank et al., 2008;Schirmer et al., 2019;Berghauser et al., 2019). Four attributes were used to quantify buildings: building footprint area, the number of buildings, and average building height. ...
Seoul has a very diverse urban form due to its complex urban development history. Previous studies that identified typical Seoul urban forms showed a lot of limitations because of subjectivity in their expert knowledge-based methods. An alternative approach in this field is data-driven clustering, but the widely used k-means method in the literature has strong cluster assumptions that rarely hold in the urban environment. This study addresses those issues by applying the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) method to identify urban form typologies in Seoul. The GMM method estimates the statistical probability of cluster memberships and is considered to be able to better capture the underlying structure of a complex problem such as urban form clustering in Seoul. This study used a 500 m x 500 m grid to cover the entire Seoul, and calculated ten urban form attributes in each cell as learning features in GMM. Through clustering processes implemented in R, nine urban form typologies were finally identified to represent the complex urban form in Seoul. For each typology, a representative area was identified and further analyzed. A further comparison of these findings with a previous study in Seoul suggested better typology identification results from this study.
... These streets are divided into different patterns based on their physical characteristics, including organic, modern, and a mixture of the two. Each of these patterns shape the spatial network that is considered a platform to link other components of the urban form, such as buildings, plots, and open spaces [16][17][18][19][20]. The street network transfers people, vehicles, and goods from one point to another. ...
This paper provides an understanding of the quality of urban form by studying the spatial properties of street networks concerning human density in Baghdad, Iraq. By adopting the Multiple Centrality Assessment (MCA) as an analytical approach, the study examines 12 streets at two different urban patterns formed in Rusafa District. Among many key measures of MCA, betweenness centrality (CB), which is a metric representation of street qualities, has been employed to identify streets with high values in the network system. Then, the human density based on people flow – denoted the quality of urban life – was measured by site observations which focused on movement and activity. Following that, a correlation between street centrality and human density for the two examined areas was conducted and compared. Results showed that urban life was found on organic streets, where vitality, activity, and density existed with high values of betweenness; this contrasted with modern streets, which recorded low values. Furthermore, research that explored the relationship between street network systems and urban form potential can involve other key MCA measures, including Closeness (CC) and Straightness (CS), when examining the walkability, sustainability, territory, and history.
City road networks evolve from the fundamental need to connect various locations and to subdivide available space, especially in large urban areas. No two cities are exactly the same, however, and the differences manifest themselves in the layout of roads across their geographical regions. In this work, the fractal dimensions of urban roads from the three major metropolitan regions of the Philippines were investigated, along with the distributions of dimensionless spatial metrics for characterizing roads and road-bounded blocks. The dimensionless metrics reveal the commonalities, particularly the road and block motifs found in the urban road network tapestry. On the other hand, the fractal dimensions hint at the difference in levels of urbanization of the various cities and municipalities, which are considered subject to geographical constraints. This research adds to the growing literature with a complexity perspective on urban systems by reporting on an archipelagic road network data set. From a practical perspective, this work is deemed to be a useful first step towards an even deeper quantitative analysis of these regional economic centers and its insights may be used for drafting effective policy measures for management and further development.
A superblock is a core unit of the built form of an old city in China, in which various morphological elements are organized and related through a hierarchical structure. Existing quantitative studies are generally limited to a single perspective or object and do not support the classification of morphological types through comprehensive analysis methods. In this study, a new cognitive framework, the hierarchy matrix, is presented to bridge this knowledge gap. It consists of four dimensions: configuration of network, geometry of network, configuration of area, and geometry of area. These dimensions are formed by the intersection of the two coordinates of perspective and object. Based on their measurement, the overall characteristics of the superblocks are represented and compared through matrix diagrams. Subsequently, the validity and adaptability of this quantitative approach are verified through an empirical analysis of Nanjing’s old city superblocks. The results reveal the morphological type of superblocks, and their causes are analyzed through the correlation with the urban environmental background. hierarchy matrix is potentially a useful method for studying the complex emerging built form of rapidly changing cities, especially in developing countries, such as China. The hierarchical matrix method is not only an analysis tool but also has the potential to develop an evaluation method to provide scientific support for the practice of urban renewal.
This paper presents a method for organising urban data inside the CAD environment into a hierarchical structure, which promotes the ease of transferring information between all available urban elements, from streets to buildings passing by the plots and blocks. This is done using parametric methods that map the urban data using the available CAD and GIS records. Finally, the paper presents a couple of example scenarios where such methods are most needed and how much they could facilitate more detailed and complex data to be accessed, compared, and analysed.
Providing a durable and sustainable approach based on urban resilience is essential for solving many spatial challenges in neighborhoods with sudden refugee influxes. As refugees settle in different locations in host cities, many of these neighborhoods have high urbanization, poor infrastructure, and over-population and their conditions impact their urban stability, livability, and quality of life. Hence, this study will review the urban resilience literature focusing on a set of resilient spatial elements of a neighborhood to support the design and planning of refugee settings. First, the theories of urban resilience are reviewed to identify the characteristics of resilience and classify the reviewed literature by different focused categories of spatial resilience. Second, the resiliency of spatial structure are explored focusing on the links between resilient characteristics and urban form attributes at the neighborhood scale. The review summarizes a set of resilient spatial measurements that use urban form indicators of resilient characteristics facilitated by geospatial technologies. Further, a framework of resilient spatial structure for refugee neighborhoods is proposed using existing urban resilience frameworks. The proposed framework includes factors of urban form attributes at the neighborhood scales (e.g., blocks, plots, and building scale), resilience in refugee contexts, and urban resilience mechanisms. The study is not limited to providing an operative resilience knowledge. It provides spatial strategies for humanitarian organizations and inter-governmental agencies to improve the vulnerable spatial structures of refugee settings and to broaden opportunities for the assessment, profiling, communication, monitoring, and planning of resilient refugee neighborhoods.
While previous chapters focused on urban forms, the sixth chapter focuses on those studying these forms. The chapter is in three parts. The first part addresses some classics in urban morphology and urban studies. The first of these books was written in the late 1950s, five books were prepared in the 1960s, two were written in the late 1970s, one was prepared in the early 1980s, and the last one in the early 1990s. The second part of this chapter presents the main morphological approaches that have been developed over the last decades, from the historico-geographical approach (promoted by the Conzenian School) to the process typological approach (promoted by the Muratorian School), from space syntax to the various forms of spatial analysis (including cellular automata, agent-based models, and fractals). This part is complemented by an overview of some emerging approaches. Finally, the last part of this chapter introduces a key topic—against a background of different theories, concepts, and methods—the need to develop comparative studies. The knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of each approach will certainly enable those who want to develop a morphological study, to select the most appropriate options given the specific nature of the object under analysis.
Urban Heat Islands (UHIs) impact the quality of life in many urban centres. Metropolitan areas of Australian cities and urbanised regional centres, in particular, show vulnerability towards UHIs due to challenging climatic conditions and the model of greater subdivision of established properties whereby backyards and mature trees are replaced with more residential dwellings and sealed areas. The measurements for the UHI mitigation, such as imposing reforestation, employing sustainable and medium density housing build form typology must be quantified. Simulation-based identification and mitigation of UHIs can be used for planning decisions. There are several advantages to use simulations. For instance, alternative subdivision design, building design and the placement of trees and other measures is only required in the digital twin. Experimenting with the digital twin saves resources and maximises the outcome by being able to quantify the heat reduction. The aim of this work is to quantify the impact of the current urban infill methods on UHI. We focus on an area that has gone through a process of re-subdivision that is bounded by roads within Perth, Western Australia. For the same area we propose an alternative design with an urban infill model based on a medium density housing guidelines with an improved green space allocation. While the current model shows significant effects of UHIs we could mitigate those effects in the alternative proposed model. In our simulation the hottest surfaces are roads with a temperature of approximately 45 °C at 2PM in the afternoon. In the current model close to 100% of the road surfaces reach this temperature. In contrast, in the alternative model only 45% of all road surfaces reach this temperature, significantly reducing the impact of UHI for pedestrian walking close by to those roads. At 2PM, the most frequent temperature of all surfaces for the current model is around 44 °C while the alternative’s model the most frequent temperature is approximately 28 °C – a difference of 16 °C.
Although densification of urban areas is being proposed as a sustainable urbanisation strategy, frameworks for detailed large-scale analysis of densification potentials and their evaluation are lacking. A geospatial simulation framework is presented to assess and evaluate densification potentials at the neighbourhood level of already built-up residential areas. The focus is on post-war neighbourhoods, which are particularly promising for sustainable densification. Neighbourhoods are localised using geospatial analysis and based on literature and architectural designs, potentials are estimated for different neighbourhood archetypes and densification strategies. Potentials are simulated at a national scale using supervised archetype classification. The embeddedness into current mobility infrastructure is used as a proxy for evaluating the sustainability of neighbourhood densification. The developed framework is tested for Switzerland. Depending on the densification strategy, the simulated additional inhabitants for populating post-war urban neighbourhoods range between 4–15% of the current population. More than half of this potential is located in central areas and is well connected by public transportation. The presented approach is suitable for assessing spatially explicit densification potential and for prioritising densification locations. We show that in countries with a high number of post-war neighbourhoods in well-connected locations, considerable densification opportunities could be realised in already built-up residential areas.
Although various hierarchical structures have been investigated with respect to the different elements of urban form, the hierarchical spatial order of access from streets to plots and buildings has not been adequately explicated and objectively assessed. In this article, a new method, access structure, is presented to bridge this knowledge gap. Based on Krop's generic multilevel diagram of urban form, different types of access structure are developed and symbolically represented. They are then quantitatively measured and compared using three metrics and an associated ternary diagram. Subsequently, the new method is tested first in analysing the internal structure of an individual urban block and then in distinguishing urban blocks with different structural characteristics. Eight urban blocks across the city of Nanjing, China, are selected as case examples. The results show that access structure is capable of accurately describing and evaluating complex spatial relationships between streets, plots and buildings. Access structure is potentially a useful method for studying the complex emerging built form of rapidly changing cities, especially in developing countries such as China.
The relation between pedestrian flows, the structure of the city and the street network is of central interest in urban research. However, studies of this have traditionally been based on small data sets and simplistic statistical methods. Because of a recent large‐scale cross‐country pedestrian survey, there is now enough data available to study this in greater detail than before, using modern statistical methods. We propose a functional ANOVA model to explain how the pedestrian flow for a street varies over the day based on its density type, describing the nearby buildings, and street type, describing its role in the city’s overall street network. The model is formulated and estimated in a Bayesian framework using hour‐by‐hour pedestrian counts from the three European cities, Amsterdam, London and Stockholm. To assess the predictive power of the model, which could be of interest when building new neighbourhoods, it is compared with four common methods from machine learning, including neural networks and random forests. The results indicate that this model works well but that there is room for improvement in capturing the variability in the data, especially between cities.
Urban areas are the biggest consumers of electricity and energy consumption is only likely to increase with rapid urbanization. Out of the urban building stock residential buildings require continuous supply of energy for space heating and appliances. To answer to this demand in a sustainable way policy maker need to design energy efficiency strategies that must rely on accurate and traceable models. These models estimate energy demand based on a series of building features, out of which building age is of prime importance because it predicts the insulation properties of the building. To support the energy modelling process, we propose a method of automatically identifying building age from spatial data at a large scale. We identify features of buildings that are significant for age prediction and determine which set of features has best prediction power at national scale, in Germany. It is expected that the accuracy of classification will be strongly related to sampling design and data availability. The final results will be used to identify the impact of misclassification errors on estimating energy use in urban energy models, providing in this manner a measure of the reliability of such models.
Planning practice in the Global South often defines a border between formal and informal developments ignoring the complex and nuanced reality of urban practices and, consequently, worsening segregation. This article proposes an alternative view of socio-spatial segregation that shifts the distinction between formal/informal towards one that emphasises access to opportunities and their relationship with the spatial structure of the city. Under this alternative framework, applied to the case of the Valle Amauta neighbourhood in Lima, Peru, we reflect on how socioeconomic activities, shaped by spatial conditions and social practices, increase or reduce socio-spatial segregation. Our findings suggest that a shift towards strategies aimed at increasing accessibility to centrality, provided by the density of social and economic activities, could offer new opportunities for planning practice and theory in the Global South.
Urban form at the district scale is defined as a unique combination of the following basic spatial objects: road networks, plot patterns and building configurations. In particular, a plot represents one of the most important basic spatial objects of urban form. In recent theoretical and empirical work from downtown districts in Tokyo, it was found that (1) plot sizes and frontages approximately follow a log-normal distribution and (2) the parameters can be primarily estimated by building density (the number of buildings per unit area) and road network density (total length of road networks per unit area). High demand for housing and commerce in a district requires as many buildings and their plots as possible. However, this may generate many small and narrow plots, which makes the residential environment worse in terms of ventilation, sunlight and accessibility to a road. Hence, the ratio of the number of plots that cannot satisfy minimum criteria regarding their sizes and frontages should be as small as possible, taking into consideration the variation in plot sizes and frontages. Therefore, the rationale for the building and road network densities presented here will be discussed by considering the variation in plot sizes and frontages through a stochastic approach. Allowing for plot sizes that are smaller than the minimum plot size regulation as well as for plot frontages that are narrower than the minimum plot frontage regulation (these minimum criteria being determined by Japanese building codes), the maximum building density and optimal road network density will be obtained. These findings are expected to provide urban planners with a theoretical basis to discuss the validity of these two density values (based on the deterministic approach that assumes uniform urban form) in terms of evaluating the policy effect, such as minimum plot size and frontage regulation.
Around the world, cultural and societal differences have a non-negligible impact on the way cities are built and especially on building's physical shapes. In a transnational context, detailed expert knowledge is not always available, hence the need of identifying typologies of buildings. This paper presents the application of a Bayesian clustering protocol to buildings from two metropolitan areas located in countries with marked cultural and societal differences: Osaka-Kobe in Japan and Marseille-Provence in France. Six indicators related to building characteristics are calculated and used to perform the clustering: Footprint surface, Elongation, Convexity, Number of Adjoining Neighbors, Height and Specialization. Cluster results are then extracted, detailed and analyzed. The building families obtained through clustering show these two coastal metropolitan areas are made up of apparently similar "ingredients" (very similar typologies are found at the relatively coarse level of detail of our study), but with different weights. Small low-rise and massive high-rise as well as low-rise buildings are more common in Osaka-Kobe. Mid-sized and mid-rise buildings are more important in Marseille-Provence, where a distinctive class of adjoining mid-sized buildings is a common mark of traditional European cities. These preliminary results are a good entry point to lead to a better understanding of the link between building families, urban development periods and urban functions.
The Nine Forms of the French Riviera: Classifying Urban Fabrics from the Pedestrian Perspective. Giovanni Fusco, Alessandro Araldi ¹Université Côte-Azur, CNRS, ESPACE - Bd. Eduard Herriot 98. 06200 Nice E-mail: giovanni.fusco@unice.fr, alessandro.araldi@unice.fr Keywords: French Riviera, Urban Fabrics, Urban Form Recognition, Geoprocessing Conference topics and scale: Tools of analysis in urban morphology Recent metropolitan growth produces new kinds of urban fabric, revealing different logics in the organization of urban space, but coexisting with more traditional urban fabrics in central cities and older suburbs. Having an overall view of the spatial patterns of urban fabrics in a vast metropolitan area is paramount for understanding the emerging spatial organization of the contemporary metropolis. The French Riviera is a polycentric metropolitan area of more than 1200 km2 structured around the old coastal cities of Nice, Cannes, Antibes and Monaco. XIX century and early XX century urban growth is now complemented by modern developments and more recent suburban areas. A large-scale analysis of urban fabrics can only be carried out through a new geoprocessing protocol, combining indicators of spatial relations within urban fabrics, geo-statistical analysis and Bayesian data-mining. Applied to the French Riviera, nine families of urban fabrics are identified and correlated to the historical periods of their production. Central cities are thus characterized by the combination of different families of pre-modern, dense, continuous built-up fabrics, as well as by modern discontinuous forms. More interestingly, fringe-belts in Nice and Cannes, as well as the techno-park of Sophia-Antipolis, combine a spinal cord of connective artificial fabrics having sparse specialized buildings, with the already mentioned discontinuous fabrics of modern urbanism. Further forms are identified in the suburban and “rurban” spaces around central cities. The proposed geoprocessing procedure is not intended to supersede traditional expert-base analysis of urban fabric. Rather, it should be considered as a complementary tool for large urban space analysis and as an input for studying urban form relation to socioeconomic phenomena. References Conzen, M.R.G (1960) Alnwick, Northumberland : A Study in Town-Planning Analysis. (London, George Philip). Conzen, M.P. (2009) “How cities internalize their former urban fringe. A cross-cultural comparison”. Urban Morphology, 13, 29-54. Graff, P. (2014) Une ville d’exception. Nice, dans l'effervescence du 20° siècle. (Serre, Nice). Yamada I., Thill J.C. (2010) “Local indicators of network-constrained clusters in spatial patterns represented by a link attribute.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100(2), 269-285. Levy, A. (1999) “Urban morphology and the problem of modern urban fabric : some questions for research”, Urban Morphology, 3(2), 79-85. Okabe, A. Sugihara, K. (2012) Spatial Analysis along Networks: Statistical and Computational Methods. (John Wiley and sons, UK).
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 within a coherent framework for metropolitan morphological analysis. It approaches metropolitan form at the macro-scale, through the conjoint use of space syntax and data mining techniques; and at the micro-scale, proposing a method based on quantitative morphological descriptions and unsupervised classification techniques. It makes wide use of GIS technologies, for integrating these methods into a common platform for data gathering, analysis and visualization. Using Oporto’s metropolitan region as study area, the work studies its morphological evolution along the last sixty years, in order to demonstrate how the proposed analytical framework is capable of probing, describing and systematizing the complex spatial structure of contemporary metropolitan form.
Since the publication of the book 'Spacematrix. Space, density and urban form' (Berghauser Pont and Haupt, 2010), the Spacematrix method has been linked back to its theoretical foundations by Steadman (2013), is further developed using the measure of accessible density to arrive at a density measure that more closely relates to the environment as experienced by people moving through the city (Berghauser Pont and Marcus, 2014) which then is used to arrive at a multi-scalar density typology (Berghauser Pont et al. 2017). This paper will take yet another step in the development of the Spacematrix method by including the measure of network density in the classification which until now was not used to its full potential. Important for successful classification is the ability to ascertain the fundamental characteristics on which the classification is to be based where the work of Berghauser Pont and Haupt (2010) will be followed addressing three key variables: Floor Space Index (FSI), Ground Space Index (GSI) and Network density (N) where especially the last was not fully included in the earlier work. Besides a typology based on these three variables, this paper will also result in a robust statistical method that can later be used on larger samples for city-scale comparisons. Two statistical methods are tested: hierarchical clustering and centroid-based clustering and besides a general discussion about their strong and weak points, the paper shows that the hierarchical method is more convincing in distinguishing differences in both building type and street pattern that is especially captured with Network density (N). As this method is not useful for large datasets we propose a combination of the two clustering methods as the way forward.
What are the drivers of urban transformation, including microeconomic diversity and growth? And what could refrain transformation? The city of Rio de Janeiro received 218 developments of the Brazilian Public Housing Programme “Minha Casa Minha Vida” (PMCMV) in the last five years, mostly located in peripheral areas. Recurring criticism has been made to the programme in relation to size and locations of projects, along with a lack of urban diversity and infrastructure. Verifying the assumptions latent in such criticism, this paper develops a methodology to assess (1) the degree of microeconomic support that the built environment offers to residents; (2) the morphological and functional interfaces of new housing complexes and their neighbourhood; and (3) the impacts these complexes have on the economic diversity of their surroundings. In a first empirical study, social and spatial attributes of areas around twelve housing complex in areas of different levels of topological accessibility and building density were compared, including pedestrian movement, distribution of retail and services, and an index of diversity in urban activities based on Shannon’s entropy. A second empirical study analyses variations in land use and land parcelling in West Rio, from 2011 to 2015. Assessing the impact of housing complexes on the microeconomic diversity, this approach identifies divergences between patterns of accessibility, and patterns of location of housing compounds and activities. Results indicate (i) substantial differences in topological and absolute distances to the CBD; (ii) strong influences of accessibility in the morphological and microeconomic integration between housing complexes and their neighbourhoods; and (iii) significant influence of land subdivision on the rate of change of land uses in areas of sprawl.
In cities manifold actors are continuously taking decisions and proposing interventions, which are driven by, but also change, spatial conditions and their performance on a variety of scales. Understanding how this interplay works is crucial for urban designers and planners. However, this complexity asks for new methods of analysis or combinations of existing methods that better inform urban designers which is exactly what this paper is aiming at. The use of typologies to describe a complex reality has been both attractive to practice and an important research branch within urban morphology. This paper presents a configurational typology that is not simply representing the physical environment, but rather its affordances (Gibson,1979) where we use as example the conditions needed for various kinds of micro-businesses. It combines properties that describe the position of a specific urban block within the street network of a city, characteristics of the direct surrounding of a block as well as characteristics describing the plot configuration within a block. The spatial characteristics most often associated with the spatial organisation of activities were selected from literature. The statistical method of two-step-clustering was used to distinguish clusters and thereby the different types of configurations. The clustering was tested in an explorative process to understand which characteristics were relevant to distinguish the main urban configurations of the urban system. The results are presented for the city of Amsterdam. The same method can be applied to other phenomena such as co-presence as well as other cities and thereby allows understanding the variety of such types, but also the existence of generic types. In a next step this typology could be tested for applicability in practise.
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 underlying spatial complexity. Recent publications define morphological typologies based on quantitative variables (e.g. Barthelemy, 2015; Serra, 2013a; Gil et al., 2012; Berghauser Pont and Haupt, 2010) and solve some of these shortcomings. These approaches contribute to the discussion of types in two ways: firstly, they allow for the definition of types based on multiple variables in a precise and repeattable manner, enabling the study of large samples and the comparison between both cities and regions; secondly, they frame design choices in terms of types without being fixed and so open up for design explorations where the relation between the variables can be challenged to propose new types. This paper explores the typologies defined by Serra (2013a) and Berghauser Pont and Haupt (2010) further, as these target two of the most important morphological entities of urban form, namely the street network and the building structure. The purpose is to gain a better understanding of how types are composed and distributed within and across different cities. The method is based on GIS and statistical modeling of four cities to allow for a comparative analysis of four cities: Amsterdam, London, Stockholm and Gothenburg. For the street network, we process the Road-Centre-line maps to obtain a clean network model, then run segment angular analysis to calculate the space syntax measures of betweenness at different metric radii, defining the " centrality palimpsest " (Serra, 2013a). For the building structure, we process elevation data to obtain building height, then run accessible density analysis for all building density metrics (FSI, GSI, OSR, L) using the Place Syntax Tool (Berghauser Pont and Marcus, 2014). The street and building types are defined using cluster analysis (unsupervised classification), following a similar approach to Serra (2013a). The result is a typology of street (´paths´) and building types (´places´), with different profiles of centrality and density across scales. The spatial distribution and frequency of these types across the four cities gives an objective summary of their spatial structure, identifying common as well as unique traits.
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 systems. The paper starts by acknowledging the technical difficulties that the analysis of such systems implies, by exploring a series of possible conditions to deal with met-ropolitan and urban-regional form, and then demonstrates that space syntax analysis is globally capable of addressing them all, by applying it to a concrete case, namely Oporto’s metropolitan region. When extended to metropolitan and regional scales, the space syntax model is also pushed to new limits, where the usual methods of interpretation of its results may no longer apply or be relevant, and a new method to address this problem, based on principal components analysis, is then proposed. Through the application of this method to the region under study, we show that its basic centrality structure may be summarised under just three basic modes of variation, greatly simplifying the understanding of its organisation. The paper concludes with a final discussion of the contributions that space syntax, supported by data analysis methods, can provide to the study of metropolitan and urban-regional morphologies and to the planning of such enlarged urban territories.
Although space syntax is often presented as a configurational theory of architecture, this tends to hide
the more fundamental claim that it is also an analytical theory, a theory based on analytical science
rather than on the normative or ideological claims normally found in architectural theory. This article
proposes an extension of such an analytical theory in the context of urbanism by using space syntax
areas in urban morphology that earlier have not been directly part of space syntax analysis. If one
allows for some simplification, one can say that the main variable of urban form analysed in space
syntax is accessibility. This article introduces two other variables: density and diversity. Density, the
dominating variable in geographic analysis of urban space, is fundamental for the development of
knowledge about urban space and in the practice of urban planning. Diversity, at least since Jane
Jacob's writing of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, has been another focus for urban
analysis and urban planners, yet one that has proven to be more difficult to address.
A study of an urban area in Stockholm identified three convincing correlations: 1.) a correlation
between integration and movement; 2.) a correlation between accessible building density and population;
and 3.) a correlation between accessible plots and diversity indices such as number of age
groups and lines of businesses. Whereas the first correlation is not very surprising in the context of
space syntax research and the second correlation is interesting mostly because of its original measuring
technique, the third correlation must be considered surprising and an original finding.
The present study proposes that the three ways to measure the three variables accessibility, density
and diversity could be combined into a more general analytical theory of urban form, directly stemming
from space syntax analysis, significantly widening the scope of space syntax into a more general
urban morphology. In addition, it is proposed that these measurements capture something that
can be called spatial capital, that also can engage adjacent scientific disciplines.
The diversity and complexity of human settlements is reflected in the range of ways we try to understand them. The richness of subject matter presented by cities has given rise to an equal richness in methods of investigation. Even within a single field such as urban morphology, there are different approaches with different terms of reference. The challenge raised by the diversity is not how to select between the different views but how to combine and co-ordinate them. The purpose of this paper is to undertake an initial critical analysis of different approaches to urban morphology in an effort to meet that challenge. The first aim is to identify the range of different phenomena taken as the object of urban morphological enquiry. The second is to identify an aspect that is common to all the approaches and that can be used as a reference key to co-ordinate different views in a rigorous way. The ultimate goal is a composite view in which the different approaches support each other to provide a better understanding of human settlements.
The street network is an important aspect of cities and contains crucial information about their organization and evolution. Characterizing and comparing various street networks could then be helpful for a better understanding of the mechanisms governing the formation and evolution of these systems. Their characterization is however not easy: there are no simple tools to classify planar networks and most of the measures developed for complex networks are not useful when space is relevant. Here, we describe recent efforts in this direction and new methods adapted to spatial networks. We will first discuss measures based on the structure of shortest paths, among which the betweenness centrality. In particular for time-evolving road networks, we will show that the spatial distribution of the betweenness centrality is able to reveal the impact of important structural transformations. Shortest paths are however not the only relevant ones. In particular, they can be very different from those with the smallest number of turns—the simplest paths. The statistical comparison of the lengths of the shortest and simplest paths provides a nontrivial and nonlocal information about the spatial organization of planar graphs. We define the simplicity index as the average ratio of these lengths and the simplicity profile characterizes the simplicity at different scales. Measuring these quantities on artificial (roads, highways, railways) and natural networks (leaves, insect wings) show that there are fundamental differences—probably related to their different function—in the organization of urban and biological systems: there is a clear hierarchy of the lengths of straight lines in biological cases, but they are randomly distributed in urban systems. The paths are however not enough to fully characterize the spatial pattern of planar networks such as streets and roads. Another promising direction is to analyze the statistics of blocks of the planar network. More precisely, we can use the conditional probability distribution of the shape factor of blocks with a given area, and define what could constitute the fingerprint of a city. These fingerprints can then serve as a basis for a classification of cities based on their street patterns. This method applied on more than 130 cities in the world leads to four broad families of cities characterized by different abundances of blocks of a certain area and shape. This classification will be helpful for identifying dominant mechanisms governing the formation and evolution of street patterns.
The `Spacemate' diagram of Berghauser Pont and Haupt [2004 Spacemate: The Spatial Logic of Urban Density (Delft University Press, Delft); 2005 Nordisk Arkitekturforskning 4 55-68] relates together three geometrical properties of buildings: density expressed as a floor space index (FSI), ground coverage, and number of storeys. The authors measured these variables in a sample of Dutch residential estates and showed how Spacemate segregates the buildings into distinct morphological types. Martin and March [1972 Urban Space and Structures (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)] showed how three generic built forms-freestanding ` pavilions', parallel ` streets', and inward-looking ` courts'-make use of land in distinctively different ways, again measuring density in terms of FSI. This paper brings the two pieces of work together and shows how Martin and March's analysis can provide further theoretical explanation for Berghauser Pont and Haupt's empirical findings. Two additional variables are introduced: depth of buildings in plan, and cut-off angles describing the distances by which buildings are separated. A more precise morphological categorisation is then possible.
The use of typomorphology as a means of understanding urban areas has a long tradition amongst academics but the reach of these methods into urban design practice has been limited. In this paper we present a method to support the description and prescription of urban form that is context- sensitive, multi-dimensional, systematic, exploratory, and quantitative, thus facilitating the application of urban typomorphology to planning practice. At the core of the proposed method is the k-means statistical clustering technique to produce objective classifications from the large complex data sets typical of urban environments. Block and street types were studied as a test case and a context-sensitive sample of types that correspond to two different neighbourhoods were identified. This method is suitable to support the identification, understanding and description of emerging urban forms that do not fall into standard classifications. The method can support larger urban form studies through consistent application of the procedures to different sites. The quantitative nature of its output lends itself to integration with other systematic procedures related to the research, analysis, planning and design of urban areas.
Posing the concept of ‘metropolitan form’ as a question, as in the call for papers for this issue of Footprint, is an absolute necessity at this stage of development of urbanised areas. Many of the papers in this issue begin with the straw-man notion of a formless agglomeration of activities and spaces, the – for lack of a better phrase – postmodern urban experience.[1] There is a persistent theme in the related literatures of architecture, urban design and urban and regional planning that the physical form of the contemporary metropolis is un-describable. Soja’s six metaphors (post-Fordist industrial, cosmopolis, expolis, fractal city, carceral archipelago, simcities) are being indicative of the wide range of possible images.[2] The eight papers in this issue of Footprint take an opposite approach. They begin to trace the contours of the debate around how the noun ‘metropolitan form’ might be understood, how it might be studied, and how it might be possible to move from an empirical understanding of its structure to more intuitive design solutions.
Existing theories relating patterns of pedestrian and vehicular movement to urban form characterise the problem in terms of flows to and from 'attractor' land uses. This paper contains evidence in support of a new 'configurational' paradigm in which a primary property of the form of the urban grid is to privilege certain spaces over others for through movement. In this way it is suggested that the configuration of the urban grid itself is the main generator of patterns of movement. Retail land uses are then located to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the passing trade and may well act as multipliers on the basic pattern of 'natural movement' generated by the grid configuration. The configurational correlates of movement patterns are found to be measures of global properties of the grid with the 'space syntax' measure of 'integration' consistently found to be the most important. This has clear implications for urban design suggesting that if we wish to design for well used urban space, then it is not the local properties of a space that are important in the main but its configurational relations to the larger urban system.
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 ignores actual physical lengths. Theoretically, these two distance concepts imply quite different assumptions. Analytically, they produce also
different results.
In this paper we assess the differences between these two network distance concepts, using a model of the UK's complete road network (2,031,971 nodes) and a
very large dataset of vehicular movement counts (20,752 locations). We describe the statistical associations between observed vehicular flows and the betweenness
centrality of the road-network nodes where such flows were measured, the latter calculated with metric and angular distance functions, across a number of increasing
radii. Relations to road capacity are also discussed in principal roads where this is known.
The geographical comprehensiveness of our model and the size of our movement sample allow us to state, with unprecedented statistical validity, the clear
outperformance of angular distance over metric distance, in what concerns the strength of the studied correlations. This is true for all types of roads (urban and nonurban)
and for all motorized vehicles, representing 99.05% of the total traffic; the remaining 0.05% correspond to pedal cycles, which yielded inconclusive results.
We also demonstrate the existence of two distinct regimes of association between movement and centrality, conspicuous in cities but altogether absent in non-urban
areas, which represent new evidence supporting space syntax's dual model of urban form.
Since The social logic of space was published in 1984, Bill Hillier and his colleagues at University College London have been conducting research on how space features in the form and functioning of buildings and cities. A key outcome is the concept of ‘spatial configuration’ — meaning relations which take account of other relations in a complex. New techniques have been developed and applied to a wide range of architectural and urban problems. The aim of this book is to assemble some of this work and show how it leads the way to a new type of theory of architecture: an ‘analytic’ theory in which understanding and design advance together. The success of configurational ideas in bringing to light the spatial logic of buildings and cities suggests that it might be possible to extend these ideas to other areas of the human sciences where problems of configuration and pattern are critical.
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 typomorphologies, which may then be statistically associated with the numerical outputs of street-network analysis. We apply the method to the case of Oporto Metropolitan Area, whose development we observed over 60 years. We isolate each increment of development entailing the creation of new streets (4208 objects), we quantify the morphology of their street-layouts, and we classify them into typomorphologies with clustering techniques. Through the investigation of the temporal and spatial frequencies of those typomorphologies, we assess their impacts on the street-networks of a set of selected civil-parishes of the metropolitan region, demonstrating that different typomorphological frequencies result in also different global street-network properties. We conclude by summarising the advantages of the method to generic urban morphological research and by suggesting that it may also contribute to inform bottom-up metropolitan spatial planning.
Supervised and unsupervised learning methods are widely used to classify and cluster multivariate geochemical data. Supervised learning methods incorporate training functions to classify the geochemical data, whereas unsupervised learning methods extract hidden structures of the data and assign them to various clusters. A semi-supervised learning method is a hybrid learning method that simultaneously extracts the hidden structure of non-training data and uses training data to improve the clustering analysis. In this research, initially eleven soil geochemical variables associated with the Dalli Cu-Au porphyry deposit, located in the central part of Iran, were selected by using hieratical clustering analysis and expert knowledge. Then, the semi-supervised fuzzy c-means clustering method (ssFCM) was used to separate multivariate soil geochemical anomalies from background for further drilling. The results were compared with the fuzzy c-mean clustering (FCM) analysis applied to the same samples. The fundamental concept of the ssFCM method is similar to the widely used FCM method with the exception that the training data, in this case trenching data, were used as an objective function in the clustering analysis. The soil classification results were validated by using cluster validity indices, cross-validation and the uncertainty measurement. The validation results demonstrated that the ssFCM method was superior in classifying the multivariate soil geochemical data compared to the FCM method. For further validation, the membership values of the favorable classes identified by both FCM and ssFCM methods were converted to grid maps and compared with the spatial distribution of copper anomalies along the trenches and surface projection of the boreholes. This comparison suggests that the favorable multivariate soil geochemical anomalies identified by the ssFCM analysis correlate well with copper mineralization in rock channel and drill core samples.
Cluster analysis is a generic name for a large set of statistical methods that all aim at the detection of groups in a sample of objects, these groups usually being called clusters. Essential to cluster analysis is that, in contrast to discriminant analysis, a group structure need not be known a priori. This makes cluster analysis attractive as an exploratory tool. However, the naive user of cluster analysis (defined as someone who has some data and by running an available computer program hopes to find a group structure underlying his data) may well be compared with one who sets off for a foreign country hoping to find Fortune: without some idea about what type of fortune in which country our hero may well end up his life on a desert island or relapse in melancholy. Similarly, some reflection on the nature of cluster analysis may result in more fruitful application than can be expected from our naive user. We shall follow him first and try to learn from his experiences.
The chosen trail of the first French edition - Paris, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt - is one of continuously evolving modernity. It outlines a history, which, in one century (1860-1960), completely changed the aspect of our towns and cities and transformed our way of life. The shock has been such that we are still looking for answers, still attempting to find urban forms that can accommodate present day ways of life and at the same time maintain the qualities of the traditional town.
The validation of the results obtained by clustering algorithms is a fundamental part of the clustering process. The most used approaches for cluster validation are based on internal cluster validity indices. Although many indices have been proposed, there is no recent extensive comparative study of their performance. In this paper we show the results of an experimental work that compares 30 cluster validity indices in many different environments with different characteristics. These results can serve as a guideline for selecting the most suitable index for each possible application and provide a deep insight into the performance differences between the currently available indices.
This paper describes the origins, development and characteristics of the school of urban morphological thought that is grounded in the work of M.R.G. Conzen. After considering the early influences of Schlüter and Geisler, attention is given to the concepts Conzen developed, such as the burgage cycle, the fringe belt, the morphological frame and the morphological region. In the second half of the paper three examples of current research that builds on foundations laid by Conzen are illustrated: namely, micromorphology, the relationship between morphological periods and the typological process, and the link between decision-taking and urban form.
The paper describes a comparative study of block size and form in twelve North American and Australian city centres. The purpose of the study was to analyse the effect of different initial block sizes and forms on the nature of subsequent urban development, in terms of land parcelling, building forms, circulation patterns, and partly also of land use. The study considered the evolution of the block and layout pattern since the initial layout was established, and its present form and performance. The findings demonstrate that certain block forms and dimensions perform better than others, in particular aspects and circumstances, and that the choice of initial block forms and sizes leads to predictable consequences and processes in subsequent development. The method used offers a systematic basis for other comparative studies of the influence of differing block forms and sizes in both historical and contemporary urban fabrics.
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 the confirmation of space syntax as a particularly relevant tool for the analysis and planning of peripheral urban areas, the study clarifies the configurational differences between rural and urban grids, provides evidence of different suburban growth patterns, and demonstrates strong relationships between such patterns and the evolution of the system’s syntactic intelligibility.
Correlations are regularly found in space syntax studies between
graph-based configurational measures of street networks, represented as
lines, and observed movement patterns. This suggests that topological
and geometric complexity are critically involved in how people navigate
urban grids. This has caused difficulties with orthodox urban
modelling, since it has always been assumed that insofar as spatial
factors play a role in navigation, it will be on the basis of metric
distance. In spite of much experimental evidence from cognitive science
that geometric and topological factors are involved in navigation, and
that metric distance is unlikely to be the best criterion for
navigational choices, the matter has not been convincingly resolved
since no method has existed for extracting cognitive information from
aggregate flows. Within the space syntax literature it has also
remained unclear how far the correlations that are found with syntactic
variables at the level of aggregate flows are due to cognitive factors
operating at the level of individual movers, or they are simply
mathematically probable network effects, that is emergent statistical
effects from the structure of line networks, independent of the
psychology of navigational choices. Here we suggest how both problems
can be resolved, by showing three things: first, how cognitive
inferences can be made from aggregate urban flow data and distinguished
from network effects; second by showing that urban movement, both
vehicular and pedestrian, are shaped far more by the geometrical and
topological properties of the grid than by its metric properties; and
third by demonstrating that the influence of these factors on movement
is a cognitive, not network, effect.
The concentration of humans – in some cases judged as too high, in others not high enough – and the problems connected to this, have resulted in discussions on density. Prior to the 20th century, density in European cities was merely an outcome of complex circumstances. During the second half of the 19th century, high densities in industrializing cities were argued to be one of the major causes of fires, diseases and social turmoil. In this period, density was introduced as a tool to analyse and diagnose the quickly growing and often overcrowded cities. In a following period of increased state intervention, the concept expanded into an instrument used to propagate alternatives and prescribe maximum densities in order to guarantee certain physiological and social qualities of urban environments (such as air, light and privacy). We can observe a shift from urban density as a mere result of city development and migration to a tool used to analyse problems; and, later on, to an instrument applied to offer improved solutions. More recently, minimum densities are argued for to support amenities and public transport, and as part of the solution to produce more sustainable urban environments with potential for vital human interaction (‘urbanity’). In spite of the practical advantages of the concept of urban density in urban planning, critics have argued that the use of density for anything but statistical purposes is questionable, as it is perceived as a too elastic concept. Many professionals, as well as researchers, hold the opinion that measured density and other physical properties are independent of each other. Besides the argued lack of relationship between density and form, density is also considered with suspicion because of the confusion regarding the definition of plan boundaries and the scale at which these are measured. There is no one accepted measure of density in or shared by different countries. This research takes off with a critical review of the origin, content and practical usefulness of the concept of urban density, and aims at revising and reviving the concept to the benefit of both the planning and design process, and scientific research. This doesn’t mean that an old instrument is just taken out of the basement, dusted off and reignited. No, the shortcomings of the existing density measurements methods in conveying information about urban form and performance are certainly very real, as others have pointed out. Those shortcomings, however, have led many to the conclusion that the concept as such is flawed and even dangerous. We insist, though, that the problem with the most commonly used density measurements methods is one of representation and resolution, and not of the concept itself. The development of the Spacematrix method to measure density and identify a series of associated properties is the main result of this research. We have redefined density as a multivariable and multi-scalar phenomenon to counter the existing Babel-like confusion in the terminology currently being used by those working in the urban field. Further, through the use of this multivariable and multi-scalar approach, density can be related to potential urban form and other performances. This makes it possible to reposition the concept of density in the field of urban planning and design, and research. From an instrument to prescribe the programme of a given area, density can become a tool to guide both quantitative and qualitative ambitions, and thus fuse urban planning and design into true urbanism.
Since The social logic of space was published in 1984, Bill Hillier and his colleagues at University College London have been conducting research on how space features in the form and functioning of buildings and cities. A key outcome is the concept of ‘spatial configuration’ — meaning relations which take account of other relations in a complex. New techniques have been developed and applied to a wide range of architectural and urban problems. The aim of this book is to assemble some of this work and show how it leads the way to a new type of theory of architecture: an ‘analytic’ theory in which understanding and design advance together. The success of configurational ideas in bringing to light the spatial logic of buildings and cities suggests that it might be possible to extend these ideas to other areas of the human sciences where problems of configuration and pattern are critical.
This article presents an experiment in which route choice decisions made at road junctions are recorded. Such routes can be expressed as the sum of individual decisions made or potential decisions available throughout a journey. Relationships between these aggregate values are assessed statistically, indicating that participants’ decisions correlate more strongly with maximum angles of incidence of road center lines (leading from a junction) than to mean or minimum angles. One interpretation is that participants appear to be attempting to conserve linearity throughout their journey. However, informal observations of participants traversing urban grids cast doubt on the proposed theories of the conservation of angular linearity, requiring the theory’s modification. The resultant hypothesis combines principles of a conservation of linearity while also minimizing the angular difference between pairs of bearings; the key bearings are the directions of potential route choices and a perceived bearing of the wayfinding goal as judged from sequential instances of the observer’s location.
During the late 16th century, and even more so in the 17th century, when Sweden was a great power, the extent of Swedish town-planning activity was unparalleled in Europe. Most of the older towns in Sweden and Finland can be said to take their character from this period. The thesis covers all Swedish town-planning in the areas under Swedish rule 1521–1721, and areas of Swedish interest outside this, including today’s Estonia and parts of Russia, Latvia, Poland, Germany, and USA. 175 sites are studied and in total 338 projects and just above 600 town plans. Part I consists of thematic studies, part II a synthesis, and part III studies of the individual towns.
The study aims at the broader picture of Swedish town-planning of this period, based on a re-assessment of existing knowledge of individual towns, but adding new
material and asking new questions. It seeks to assist the conservation and the future planning and design of the urban environment. Major questions raised concern
different kinds of planning measures, the design of plans and how they were devised, functional demands and aesthetic considerations, the impact of great fires and the
significant figures of the time.
The town-planning illustrates the political and economical development of the kingdom and played a fundamental role in the radical change of society that took place in this era. Intensive town-planning activity starts in the mid-1500s but the major rise begins in the early 17th century and reaches its peak in the 1640s and ‘50s. Three main categories of town-planning measures can be distinguished: new construction, which includes relocation of older towns and new foundations (100 all told), town plan changes in existing towns, including redevelopment, extension and separate suburbs (about 170), and measures relating to fortifications (some 65 fortifications only and another 90 included in combined measures). The right-angular gridiron plans dominate completely. They can be divided into three main groups: ‘simple, regular’, ‘pragmatic’, and ‘elaborate’.
Axial analysis is one of the fundamental components of space syntax. The space syntax community has suggested that it picks up qualities of configurational relationships between spaces not illuminated by other representations. However, critics have questioned the absolute necessity of axial lines to space syntax, as well as the exact definition of axial lines. Why not another representation? In particular, why not road-centre lines, which are easily available in many countries for use within geographical information systems? Here I propose that a recently introduced method of analysis, angular segment analysis, can marry axial and road-centre line representations, and in doing so reflect a cognitive model of how route choice decisions may be made. I show that angular segment analysis can be applied generally to road-centre line segments or axial segments, through a simple length-weighted normalisation procedure that makes values between the two maps comparable. I make comparative quantitative assessments for a real urban system, not just investigating angular analysis between axial and road-centre line networks, but also including more intuitive measures based on metric (or block) distances between locations. I show that the new angular segment analysis algorithm produces better correlation with observed vehicular flow than both standard axial analysis and metric distance measures. The results imply that there is no reason why space syntax inspired measures cannot be combined with transportation network analysis representations in order to create a new, cognitively coherent, model of movement in the city.
Also known as the contour measure or isochrone measure
- Bhat
Also known as the contour measure or isochrone measure (Bhat et al., 2000).
Stadsgrundningar och planf€ or€ andringar: Svensk stadsplanering 1521-1721
- N Ahlberg
Ahlberg N (2005) Stadsgrundningar och planf€ or€ andringar: Svensk stadsplanering 1521-1721.
PhD Thesis, SLU, Uppsala, Sweden.
Spatial capacity: Introducing multivariable measures of urban form that influences urban diversity
- J Bobkova
- Berghauser Pont
Bobkova J, Marcus L and Berghauser Pont M (2017) Spatial capacity: Introducing multivariable
measures of urban form that influences urban diversity. In: Proceedings of the 11th Space Syntax
Symposium, pp. 47.1-47.15. Lisbon: Instituto Superior Te´cnico.
Spatial sustainability in cities: Organic patterns and sustainable forms
- B Hillier
Hillier B (2009) Spatial sustainability in cities: Organic patterns and sustainable forms. In: Proceedings
to the seventh international Space Syntax Symposium, pp.K01:1-K01:20. Stockholm: KTH.
Architectural knowledge and urban form. The functional performance of architectural urbanity
- L Marcus
Marcus L (2000) Architectural knowledge and urban form. The functional performance of architectural
urbanity. PhD Thesis, KTH University, Sweden.
Getting to know the built landscape: Typomorphology
- A V Moudon
Moudon AV (1994) Getting to know the built landscape: Typomorphology. In: Franck K and
Schneekloth L (eds) Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design. New York: Van
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The Plot: Designing Diversity in the Built Environment: A Manual for Architects and Urban Designers
- J Tarbatt
Tarbatt J (2012) The Plot: Designing Diversity in the Built Environment: A Manual for Architects and
Urban Designers. London: RIBA Publications.
Measures of the fit between street network, urban blocks and building footprints
- A Vialard
Vialard A (2012) Measures of the fit between street network, urban blocks and building footprints.
Santiago de Chile, 8th International Space Syntax Symposium, pp. 8101:1-8101:17.
Building density of parcels and block-faces from a syntactical, morphological and planning perspective
- A Vialard
- A Carpenter
Vialard A and Carpenter A (2015) Building density of parcels and block-faces from a syntactical,
morphological and planning perspective. In: Proceedings of the 10th international Space Syntax
Symposium, pp.100:1-100:17. London: UCL Bartlett.
Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-Plan Analysis, series: The Institute of British Geographers
- M R G Conzen
Conzen, M.R.G. (1960) Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-Plan Analysis,
series: The Institute of British Geographers, publication 27, London: Philip.
Introduction to data mining. First edn
- P-N Tan
- M Steinbach
- V Kumar
Tan, P-N., M. Steinbach, and V. Kumar (2005) Introduction to data mining. First edn.
Boston, MA, USA: Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc.
An automatic classification of urban texture: Form and compactness of morphological homogeneous structures in Barcelona
- N Colaninno
- K Pfeffer
- J Roca
Colaninno N, Pfeffer K and Roca J (2011) An automatic classification of urban texture: Form and
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