The emergent structure of cities
Charles University
2024-09-12
A brief introduction into urban morphology
What is urban morphology?
The study of the city as human habitat.
(Moudon, 1997)
The study of human settlements, their structure and the process of their formation and transformation.
(Kropf, 2017)
The study of urban form.
Methods of analysis
typo-morphological (bottom-up)
historico-geographical (top-down)
…
urban morphometrics
Urban morphometrics
A study of urban form through the means of quantitative assessment of constituent elements.
Conceptually similar to historico-geographical approach.
Methodologically embedded in spatial data science and geography.
How to conceptualise urban form for data science?
Fundamental elements of urban form
buildings
Fundamental elements of urban form
buildings
streets
Fundamental elements of urban form
buildings
streets
plots
What can morphometrics tell about cities
What can we learn about a building
Sizes
Shapes
Spatial distribution
What can we learn about a street
That a street may not be a street
Spatial distribution
Shapes
What can we learn about streets
Connectivity
What can we learn about a plot
That it is not available as open data
That it does not represent morphology
We can use polygonal tessellation as an analytical unit sharing a subset of information with a plot
Morphological tessellation
Enclosed tessellation
What can we learn about a plot cell
Sizes & shapes
Contiguity
What can we learn about buildings
Spatial distribution
What if we combine it all together
Identification of a type of urban form
Prediction of urban phenomena
Prediction of impacts of planned development
A case of Great Britain
The emergent structure of urban form and function
A data driven overview of the British landscape
Spatial Signatures
Signature hierarchy and distribution
Settlement delineation
Settlement hierarchy
Open and reproducible
Takeaways
Urban morphometrics sees urban form as data.
We can scale the analysis to entire countries
and possibly beyond.
The information collected on individual elements
can explain the structure of neighborhoods, cities
but also the settlement hierarchy of entire regions.
All, within the open and reproducible context.
Do you want to follow up
martin.fleischmann@natur.cuni.cz
