The spatial distribution and frequency of street, plot and building types across five European cities

The spatial distribution and frequency of street, plot and building types across five European cities

Berghauser Pont, Meta (Chalmers University of Technology)
Stavroulaki, Gianna (Chalmers University of Technology)
Gil, Jorge (Chalmers University of Technology)
Marcus, Lars (Chalmers University of Technology)
Olsson, Jesper (University of Gothenburg)
Sun, Kailun (Chalmers University of Technology)
Serra, Miguel (Universidade do Porto)
Hausleitner, B. (TU Delft OLD Urban Compositions)
Dhanani, Ashley (UCL Bartlett School of Planning)
Legeby, Ann (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

2019

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 quantitative 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 concept of the burgage cycle and the theory of natural movement.

built density
cluster analysis
land division
network centrality
Typo-morphology

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a51238d7-bc34-43f8-b6a1-a76869c59e95

https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808319857450

2399-8083

Environment and Planning B: Urban Cities and City Science, 46 (7), 1226-1242

Accepted Author Manuscript

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2019 Meta Berghauser Pont, Gianna Stavroulaki, Jorge Gil, Lars Marcus, Jesper Olsson, Kailun Sun, Miguel Serra, B. Hausleitner, Ashley Dhanani, Ann Legeby