Urbanism and Geographic Crises: A Micro-Simulation Lens on Beirut

At a geographical and strategic confluence, the ancient city of Beirut, Lebanon, has witnessed crises from natural and human causes over the centuries. The modern urban and peri-urban development is a result of neo-classical economics, laissez-faire regulations, and complex socio-political structures. This article considers the contemporary...

Multiscale Measures of Population: Within- and between-City Variation in Exposure to the Sociospatial Context

Appreciating spatial scale is crucial for our understanding of the sociospatial context. Multiscale measures of population have been developed in the segregation and neighborhood effects literatures, which have acknowledged the role of a variety of spatial contexts for individual outcomes and intergroup contacts. Although existing studies...

Iran’s Global Petroleumscape: The Role of Oil in Shaping Khuzestan and Tehran

Various constellations of oil actors—including corporations and nations—have shaped seemingly disconnected and geographically distant landscapes, cities, and buildings around the world over the last 150 years. Corporate, public, and popular media have publicized these cycles of spatializing oil. Together, construction and representation have...

Beyond the typological discourse: The creation of the architectural language and the type as a project in the western modern city

This thesis considers the city and its architecture the extreme condition under which the endless discussion around the human being way of thinking takes place. More precisely, the research assumes the city as the place where the displacement of mindset principles, categories and catalogue of objects is materialized into Form, becoming...

Finding structural parameters for energy efficient cities

Europe is going through a great social, economic and environmental period of transition. The changes the EU is currently undergoing have been causing increased awareness about sustainable development, natural resources use and energy efficiency on the agenda at the European level of policy making. However after more than forty years of the...

Framing questions of sustainability

Sustainability sits at the top of the policy agendas of the EU and other governmental bodies. But sustainability is complex and not one thing, it relates to different sectors and multiple systems, and also to different zones, scales, ‘levels’ those systems occupy. Theoretically and practically we are involved with different questions depending...

Urban form and fitness: Towards a space-morphological approach to general urban resilience

Assessment is one of the greatest challenges of urban resilience research. The difficulty of this task arises from the increasing complexity of urban environments and from the unpredictability of external changes, two trends that have raised environmental awareness and, consequently, led to a growing debate on the relationship between city and...

Central places and modality environments: An historical architecture of urban places

Where, how and why to intensify the city: Applying regression modelling to estimate intensification potentials

Space metrics modeling to analyse correlations between urban form and surface water drainage performance

Cities exhibit unique spatial patterns, and thus a distinctive heterogeneity. At different scales of influence, they introduce changes in the physical properties of the natural environment, as the diffusion of impervious surfaces. While climate change is expected to increase the frequency of hazards, patterns of urbanization might be critical in...

Spatial metrics modeling to analyse correlations between urban form and surface water drainage performance.

Cities exhibit unique spatial patterns, and thus a distinctive heterogeneity. At different scales of influence, they introduce changes in the physical properties of the natural environment, as the diffusion of impervious surfaces. While climate change is expected to increase the frequency of hazards, patterns of urbanization might be critical in...

A Research on the Transformation of Urban Form And Dynamics of Xiguan Area, Guangzhou

This paper mainly uses the method of Urban Morphology to study the transformation process of urban form of Xiguan historical district in Guangzhou, P.R.China. The paper tries to analyze the transformation process through studying the background of politics, economy, society, culture and natural condition of Xiguan area. It further discusses the...

Mapping Urban Form: Morphology studies in the contemporary urban landscape

This dissertation discusses the importance to study the form of the contemporary urban landscape. It shows how mapping is the tool by which the formal logic of the contemporary city can be uncovered. Through mapping, the urban landscape can be understood as systems of overlapping layers. This observation in terms of overlapping layers allows...

Acting across scales: Describing urban surfaces as technical 'fields of action'

The relation between the global and the local is the traditional concern of space syntax. A ‘form’ and a ‘structure’ of urban fabrics can be represented in images and graph measures using space syntax techniques and these images and measures correlate with observations of how people use and organize those urban fabrics. The implication is that...