Understanding cross-regional patterns of urban form using hierarchical morphotope classification

Martin Fleischmann, Krasen Samardzhiev, Anna Brázdová, Daniela Dančejová, Lisa Winkler

Charles University

Let’s talk about urban morphometrics

excerpt from Larkham and Jones, 1991

What is urban morphometrics

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

Conceptually similar to historico-geographical school of urban morphology.

Methodologically embedded in spatial data science and geography.

Morphometrics in 2025

availability of data

evolution of software

performance

automatised pre-processing

all that pushes the limits of scalability

scalable urban morphometrics

How

Diagram illustrating a procedure to derive morphotopes using Spatial Adaptive Agglomerative Aggregation (\(SA^3\))

5 out of 54 morphometric characters illustrated on the Prague City Centre

Morphotope delineation illustrated on the Prague City Centre

Flexible definition of built-up fabric

Diagram illustrating a procedure to derive Hierarchical Morphotope Classification (HiMoC)

Geography and urban structure

Functional Urban Areas used to sample from the classification

Functional Urban Area of Prague

Projection of FUAs into 2 dimensions (PCA 1 x PCA 2) based on their morphological composition

Projection of FUAs into 2 dimensions (PCA 1 x PCA 3) based on their morphological composition

Spatial clustering

Strength of the synthetic boundary in distinguishing morphology of regions

Boundaries of impact

Strength of the historical boundary in distinguishing morphology of regions

Take home points

Urban morphometrics can unpack structure of built environment

Cities of today embed noticeable layers of the past

Even when they do not manifest in architectural style

Do you want to follow up

uscuni.org/talks

uscuni.org/himoc

github.com/uscuni/urban_taxonomy

martin.fleischmann@natur.cuni.cz

martinfleischmann.net

The authors kindly acknowledge funding by the Charles University’s Primus programme through the project “Influence of Socioeconomic and Cultural Factors on Urban Structure in Central Europe”, project reference PRIMUS/24/SCI/023.