Understanding Urban Form

Hierarchical Morphotope Classification

Martin Fleischmann and Krasen Samardzhiev

Charles University

Prague by Jay Dantine

Barcelona

Urban Morphometrics

A study of urban form through the means of quantitative assessment of its constituent elements.

Conzen M (1960) Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-Plan Analysis. London: George Philip & Son.

Araldi, A. and Fusco, G. (2025), Multi-Level Street-Based Analysis of the Urban Fabric: Developments for a Nationwide Taxonomy. Geographical Analysis, 57: 270-301.

Fleischmann, M., Feliciotti, A., Romice, O., & Porta, S. (2021). Methodological foundation of a numerical taxonomy of urban form. Environment and Planning B, 49(4), 1283-1299.

HiMoC Aims

• Results align with theory and qualitative work
• Detailed elements as fundamental units - buildings, streets and their configurations
• Scale - applicable to numerous countries

Study area - Central Europe*

Germany, Czechia, Austria, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania

Enclosed Tessellation Cells

Measured characteristics

Area of tessellation cells in Kraków, Poland

Shared walls ratio of buildings in Kraków, Poland

Width of street profile in Kraków, Poland

Street network meshedness in Kraków, Poland

Street network meshedness in Kraków, Poland

Two levels of aggregations

1. Regional ETCs to morphotopes
2. Morphotopes to a taxonomy of Morphotopes.

Regions

Region around Prague

Region around Krakow

Morphotope

“the smallest urban locality obtaining distinctive character among their neighbours from their particular combination of constituent morphological elements.”

Example morphotopes

Morphotope delineation in Kraków, Poland

Taxonomy of morphotopes

Full dendrogram

Results

https://uscuni.org/himoc/

Limitations

• Even cadastral data is of very different quality, there is no consistent definition of what is a building across neighbouring countries, regions or even cities within the same country.

• The morphometric characters are limited to 2d variables, since there is only aggregte height data available that is derived and not recorded.

• Adding a temporal dimension to the analysis is difficult due to data unavailability.

Conclusions

Multiple types of urban form in different countries and across the setttlement hierarchy are morphologically close to eachother.

Nevertheless the heterogeneity of urban form is present even at high levels of aggregation.

Linear development concentration

• The taxonomy extends existing regional and global classifications.

• The importance of elements and variables changes as we move through the taxonomy. Capturing and combining aspects of other urban form classifications.

Corine

Urban Atlas

Local climate zones

Open Source Software

• Main repository: https://github.com/uscuni/urban_taxonomy
• Slides: https://uscuni.org/talks/202504_taxonomy_gisruk.html
• Upstream packages : libpysal, neatnet, momepy, geoplanar, shapely, geopandas, spopt