Descifrando la forma urbana: un análisis de patrones de agrupamiento basado en SIG

This paper contributes to the classification of urban form on the basis of variables arising from its morphology–buildings, plots, blocks and streets–, taking the case of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona as a case study. New density attributes regarding street alignment and party walls are introduced together with the most common floor and ground surface indexes. The algorithm k-means is used to perform a cluster analysis. The results reveal a clear mosaic of urban fabrics, composed of 12 dissimilar groups. The combination of the outcomes with other non-physical parameters–socio-economic indicators, energy and equity, among others–is suggested with a view to evaluate urban form effects.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Classifying urban form at national scale : the British morphosignatures

In this paper, we use the recent spatial signatures framework to develop morphosignatures, a characterisation of space based on urban form, and we apply them to the whole of Great Britain. Identification of recurring patterns in the built environment is deeply embedded within all schools of urban morphology. A long-standing challenge in this context has been the ability to scale the analysis to cover large regions. In effect, advancing the systematic study of urban morphology has been limited to the ability to deploy granular methods to large portions of the urban landscape. The recent rise of morphometrics, and its ability to scale while retaining detail, has given urban morphology a fundamentally new toolkit to analyse the form of urban fabric at metropolitan or even national extents. In this tradition, morphosignatures are conceptually defined as an aggregation of granular elements into contiguous areas based on similar nature. We adopt the enclosed tessellation cell (ETC), the result of combining street networks and other urban "delimiters" with building footprints, as the core spatial unit. For each ETC, we calculate a wide range of characters that capture aspects of their spatial organisation, from dimension and shape of individual features to their spatial distribution, intensity or connectivity. We then group these ETCs using the K-Means algorithm, effectively deriving a comprehensive typology of urban form. We employ this approach on the case of Great Britain, illustrating both the potential and limits of the analysis of urban form at scale. Our resulting classification identifies 19 types of morphosignatures that can be organised into three macro groups: countryside, suburban low density development, and dense city centres. The main contribution of the proposed method, with respect to traditional morphological studies, resides in the scalability of the analysis while retaining granularity. We argue national-scale classification such as that of the British morphosignatures allows us to ask fundamentally new questions and provide complementary answers to those asked in smaller scale studies

Measuring urban form : overcoming terminological inconsistencies for a quantitative and comprehensive morphologic analysis of cities

Unprecedented urbanisation processes characterise the Great Acceleration, urging urban researchers to make sense of data analysis in support of evidence-based and large-scale deci- sion-making. Urban morphologists are no exception since the impact of urban form on funda- mental natural and social patterns (equity, prosperity and resource consumption’s efficiency) is now fully acknowledged. However, urban morphology is still far from offering a comprehensive and reliable framework for quantitative analysis. Despite remarkable progress since its emergence in the late 1950s, the discipline still exhibits significant terminological inconsistencies with regards to the definition of the fundamental components of urban form, which prevents the establishment of objective models for measuring it. In this article, we present a study of existing methods for measuring urban form, with a focus on terminological inconsistencies, and propose a systematic and comprehensive framework to classify urban form characters, where ‘urban form character’ stands for a characteristic (or feature) of one kind of urban form that distinguishes it from another kind. In particular, we introduce the Index of Elements that allows for a univocal and non-interpretive description of urban form characters. Based on such Index of Elements, we develop a systematic classification of urban form according to six categories (dimension, shape, spatial distribution, intensity, connectivity and diversity) and three conceptual scales (small, medium, large) based on two definitions of scale (extent and grain). This framework is then applied to identify and organise the urban form characters adopted in available literature to date. The resulting classification of urban form characters reveals clear gaps in existing research, in particular, in relation to the spatial distribution and diversity characters. The proposed framework reduces the current inconsistencies of urban morphology research, paving the way to enhanced methods of urban form systematic and quantitative analysis at a global scale

Perceptions and Profiles of Young People Regarding Spa Tourism: A Comparative Study of Students from Granada and Aachen Universities

The APC and translation into English was funded by Research Group "Socio-space dynamics territory planning in Andalusia" Ref: HUM355. University of Granada.Spa tourism has undergone important changes in recent decades, actively embracing wellness and wellbeing. However, this transition is taking place in different ways in Europe, and this has led to varying perceptions of thermalism that have little to do with its original conception. The main aim of this study was to analyse current perceptions of spa tourism amongst university students, so as to identify profiles and compare the differences between two study cases: Granada (Spain) and Aachen (Germany). For this purpose, we applied a methodology that combines artificial intelligence techniques with questionnaires containing both quantitative and qualitative variables. This enabled us to identify and characterize a series of profiles, so as to acquire detailed knowledge of the perceptions of these students regarding spa tourism in Granada and Aachen. On the basis of the results, the interviewees were grouped together into seven profiles from which we deduced that young Germans from Aachen visit spas more frequently and have a more realistic perception of the thermal sector than young Spanish people from Granada. This situation could limit present and future demand for spas in southern Spain. With this in mind, in this paper we present an updated assessment of the demand for spas amongst university students, in order to design effective geomarketing strategies in two cities with long spa traditions.Research Group "Socio-space dynamics territory planning in Andalusia", University of Granada HUM35

The identification of spatial patterns in city limits through Self-Organized maps of the centrality of the road network

The characterization of city limits is of especial interest since it may provide hints to understanding the urban growth taking place in peripheries, and it also makes it possible to identify the keys to the continuous and discontinuous relationships between cities and their surroundings. Within this context, many different approaches could be adopted to undertake this kind of analysis. This paper specifically explores the possibilities offered by the use of self-organized maps created from the results of the application of different centrality measures in the mixed road network, which is comprised of systems of streets, metropolitan roads and rural roads. The implementation of centrality measures to a mixed road network is already an innovative exercise, considering that centrality analyses are normally carried out in more purely intra-urban contexts. The spatial representation of the profiles obtained with the self-organized maps shows different structural characteristics throughout city limits, which can be used to interpret the nature of the boundary itself. The proposed methodology was tested in the city of Granada (Spain), specifically on the limit in contact with the area surrounding the Vega de Granada, a singular agricultural landscape linked to the Genil River.La caracterización morfológica del borde urbano es un ejercicio que reviste un interés especial porque, por una parte, ayuda a entender los crecimientos urbanos que tienen lugar en las zonas periféricas y, por otra, permite descifrar las claves de las relaciones de continuidad o discontinuidad que existen entre la ciudad y su entorno. En este contexto, son muchos los enfoques desde el análisis. En este artículo, se exploran en concreto las posibilidades que ofrece la utilización de mapas auto-organizados, elaborados a partir de los resultados de la aplicación de medidas de centralidad de la red viaria mixta que forman los sistemas de calles, los viarios metropolitanos y los caminos agrarios. La aplicación de diferentes medidas de centralidad en una red viaria mixta, supone en sí un ejercicio innovador, ya que, normalmente, los análisis de centralidad se aplican en el ámbito más puramente intraurbanos. La base espacial de los perfiles obtenidos en las series se puede comparar con la naturaleza del propio borde. La Metodología propuesta se ha testeado en la ciudad de Granada (España), específicamente, sobre el borde de contacto de la ciudad con el entorno de la Vega de Granada, un paisaje agrario singular ligado al Río Genil

Morphological tessellation as a way of partitioning space : improving consistency in urban morphology at the plot scale

Urban Morphometrics (UMM) is an expanding area of urban studies that aims at representing and measuring objectively the physical form of cities to support evidence-based research. An essential step in its development is the identification of a suitable spatial unit of analysis, where suitability is determined by its degree of reliability, universality, accessibility and significance in capturing essential urban form patterns. In Urban Morphology such unit is found in the plot, a fundamental component in the morphogenetic of urban settlements. However, the plot is a conceptually and analytically ambiguous concept and a kind of spatial information often unavailable or inconsistently represented across geographies, issues that limit its reliability and universality and hence its suitability for Urban Morphometric applications. This calls for alternative methods of deriving a spatial unit able to convey reliable plot-scale information, possibly comparable with that provided by plots. This paper presents Morphological Tessellation (MT), an objectively and universally applicable method that derives a spatial unit named Morphological Cell (MC) from widely available data on building footprint only and tests its informational value as proxy data in capturing plot-scale spatial properties of urban form. Using the city of Zurich (CH) as case study we compare MT to the cadastral layer on a selection of morphometric characters capturing different geometrical and configurational properties of urban form, to test the degree of informational similarity between MT and cadastral plots. Findings suggest that MT can be considered an efficient informational proxy for cadastral plots for many of the tested morphometric characters, that there are kinds of plot-scale information only plots can provide, as well as kinds only morphological tessellation can provide. Overall, there appears to be clear scope for application of MT as fundamental spatial unit of analysis in Urban Morphometrics, opening the way to large-scale urban morphometric analysis

Social and Physical Characterization of Urban Contexts: Techniques and Methods for Quantification, Classification and Purposive Sampling

Robust quantitative descriptions of the social and physical characteristics of urban contexts are essential for assessing the impacts of urban environments on other, potentially dependent variables. Common methodologies used for that purpose, however, are either coarse or suffer from biasing effects. At the social level, the use of indicators encoded into pre-defined areal units, makes results prone to the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem. At the physical level, the adopted morphological indicators are usually highly aggregated descriptors of urban form. Moreover, there is a lack of explicit methodologies for the purposive sampling of urban contexts with specific combinations of social and physical characteristics, which—we argue—may be more effective than probabilistic sampling, when exploring phenomena as elusive as the effects of urban contextual factors. This article presents a set of GIS-based methods for addressing these issues, based on: a) local indicators of spatial association; b) detailed quantitative morphological descriptions, coupled with unsupervised classification techniques; and c) purposive sampling strategies carried out on the data generated by the proposed context characterization methods (a and b). The methods are illustrated through the characterization of the urban contexts of the 77 state-sector secondary schools in Liverpool, but are generalizable across all categories of urban objects and are independent of the geographical context of implementation

Geographical characterisation of British urban form and function using the spatial signatures framework

The spatial arrangement of the building blocks that make up cities matters to understand the rules directing their dynamics. Our study outlines the development of the national open-source classification of space according to its form and function into a single typology. We create a bespoke granular spatial unit, the enclosed tessellation, and measure characters capturing its form and function within a relevant spatial context. Using K-Means clustering of individual enclosed tessellation cells, we generate a classification of space for the whole of Great Britain. Contiguous enclosed tessellation cells belonging to the same class are merged forming spatial signature geometries and their typology. We identify 16 distinct types of spatial signatures stretching from wild countryside, through various kinds of suburbia to types denoting urban centres according to their regional importance. The open data product presented here has the potential to serve as boundary delineation for other researchers interested in urban environments and policymakers looking for a unique perspective on cities and their structure

Evaluación comparativa del nivel de Desarrollo Orientado al Transporte (dot) en torno a nodos de transporte de grandes ciudades: métodos complementarios de ayuda a la decisión

El Desarrollo Orientado al Transporte (dot) es un enfoque de la planificación que promueve el desarrollo sostenible de un área urbana. Evaluar el nivel dot resulta interesante para determinar la idoneidad de los desarrollos urbanos al respecto, así como su potencial de mejora. El objeto del trabajo consiste en evaluar el nivel dot de importantes áreas urbanas mediante dos métodos diferentes: índice global y análisis multivariable mediante redes neuronales artificiales. Los métodos se contrastan entre sí, clarificando sus límites y grado de complementariedad. Adicionalmente, los resultados se verifican mediante el análisis espacial sig de un caso concreto. Según resultados: la evaluación mediante índice es limitada; el análisis multivariable determina perfiles de áreas semejantes, independientemente de sus índices globales; el análisis espacial pormenoriza los valores medios obtenidos. Estos métodos aportan conocimiento en sus respectivos campos. Si se usan complementariamente entre sí, mejoran su efectividad como herramientas de análisis útiles en planificación.Transit Oriented Development (tod) is a planning approach that promotes sustainable development of an urban area. Assessing the levels of tod may allow determining the appropriateness of urban development in this regard, as well as its potential for improvement. The purpose of this work is to assess the levels of tod using two different methods: Global Index and Multivariate Analysis based on Artificial Neural Networks. The methods contrast each other, clarifying both their limits and complementarity degree. Additionally, the results are verified through gis spatial analysis applied on a case study. According to the results, the Global Index Assessment is limited; the multivariable analysis shows profiles of similar urban areas, regardless of their global indexes; the spatial analysis details the average values obtained. These methods provide knowledge in their respective fields. If used in a complementary way, they improve their effectiveness as useful analysis tool for urban plannin