Urban morphometrics

Martin Fleischmann

Charles University

What is urban morphometrics

Not anything new!

What is 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 approach.

Methodologically embedded in spatial data science and geography.

Not anything new!

But things have changed over time.

availability of data

evolution of software

performance

automatised pre-processing

all that pushes the limits of scalability

scalable urban morphometrics

How to conceptualise urban form for data science?

Fundamental elements of urban form

buildings

Building layer representing a portion of Prague.

Fundamental elements of urban form

buildings

streets

Street layer representing a portion of Prague.

Fundamental elements of urban form

buildings

streets

plots

Plot layer representing a portion of Prague.

We can measure potentially hundreds of morphometric characters

• dimension
• shape
• spatial distribution

• intensity
• diversity
• connectivity

based on Fleischmann, Romice and Porta (2020)

What can morphometrics tell about cities

What can we learn about a building

What can we learn about a building?

Sizes

Building area

Shapes

Equivalent rectangular index (a measure of shape complexity)

Spatial distribution

Building orientation

What can we learn about a street

That a street may not be a street

Transportation vs morphological representation of a street network

Spatial distribution

Street profile width

Street profile openness

Shapes

Linearity of street geometry

What can we learn about streets

Connectivity

Local closeness of street network

Square clustering of street network

What can we learn about a plot

That it is not often available as open data

That it does not represent morphology

We can use polygonal tessellation as an analytical unit sharing a subset of information with a plot

Morphological tessellation

Morphological tessellation

Enclosed tessellation

Enclosed tessellation

What can we learn about a plot cell

Sizes & shapes

Longest-axis length

Circular compactness

Contiguity

Queen contiguity decoding adjacency of geometries

Queen contiguity decoding adjacency of geometries

What can we learn about buildings

Spatial distribution

Shared walls ratio

Building adjacency

Mean interbuilding distance

What if we combine it all together

Idea of a morphotope

excerpt from Larkham and Jones, 1991

How to capture it

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)

Illustration of different levels of the hierarchy.

urbantaxonomy.org

Do you want to follow up

uscuni.org/talks

urbantaxonomy.org

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.