The City Stack

A Morphology-Based City Analysis and Generation Framework

Master thesis (2024)

Authors

O.J. Post Architecture and the Built Environment

Contributors

H. Ledoux Urban Data Science - Architecture and the Built Environment (mentor)
A. Patil Urban Data Science - Architecture and the Built Environment (mentor)
C. Forgaci Urban Design - Architecture and the Built Environment (graduation committee member)
Faculty
Architecture and the Built Environment
More Info
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Published Date

01-11-2024

Language

English

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Faculty

Architecture and the Built Environment

Abstract

This thesis introduces the “city stack” framework and the concept of the “typology grid” to analyze and procedurally generate cities using publicly available geospatial data. It builds upon existing urban morphology research and combines existing metrics with new metrics to examine road networks and building footprints across 43 cities worldwide. The resulting unsupervised clustering of road patterns produced mixed outcomes: some global road typologies were consistently identified, while others lacked clarity or validity. Supervised classification of building typologies showed potential for city generation applications but faced challenges related to data quality and validation methods.
To encode the captured urban form, the typology grid was introduced, which allows for straightforward comparison between cities and links the analysis phase with the generation phase. While this approach simplifies complex urban patterns for better understanding, it may oversimplify details needed for effective city regeneration, needing future research into parameterizing the grid.
The simulated annealing optimization technique was applied to generate new city models to produce typology grids resembling those of actual cities. It proved a promising method, with relatively plausible results from just a few shape-based rules in the objective function. Computation time and grid size were a limiting factor, ruling out real-time use. The road and building generation methods based on the typology grid and city stack framework demonstrated the approach’s feasibility but indicated that further refinement is necessary.
Further contributions by this thesis are an open source command line tool for analyzing the urban form real-life cities based on publicly available geospatial data, a proof of concept tool for generating cities, and a publicly available dataset of the analyzed cities.
In conclusion, the city stack framework and typology grids offer a viable method for captur- ing and generating urban form and can be used as a starting point for future research.