The Nine Forms of the French Riviera: Classifying Urban Fabrics from the Pedestrian Perspective

[EN] Recent metropolitan growth produces new kinds of urban fabric, revealing different logics in the organization of urban space, but coexisting with more traditional urban fabrics in central cities and older suburbs. Having an overall view of the spatial patterns of urban fabrics in a vast metropolitan area is paramount for understanding the emerging spatial organization of the contemporary metropolis. The French Riviera is a polycentric metropolitan area of more than 1200 km2 structured around the old coastal cities of Nice, Cannes, Antibes and Monaco. XIX century and early XX century urban growth is now complemented by modern developments and more recent suburban areas. A large-scale analysis of urban fabrics can only be carried out through a new geoprocessing protocol, combining indicators of spatial relations within urban fabrics, geo-statistical analysis and Bayesian data-mining. Applied to the French Riviera, nine families of urban fabrics are identified and correlated to the historical periods of their production. Central cities are thus characterized by the combination of different families of pre-modern, dense, continuous built-up fabrics, as well as by modern discontinuous forms. More interestingly, fringe-belts in Nice and Cannes, as well as the techno-park of Sophia-Antipolis, combine a spinal cord of connective artificial fabrics having sparse specialized buildings, with the already mentioned discontinuous fabrics of modern urbanism. Further forms are identified in the suburban and “rurban” spaces around central cities. The proposed geoprocessing procedure is not intended to supersede traditional expert-base analysis of urban fabric. Rather, it should be considered as a complementary tool for large urban space analysis and as an input for studying urban form relation to socioeconomic phenomena.This research was carried out thanks to a research grant of the Nice-Côte d’Azur Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CIFRE agreement with UMR ESPACE).Fusco, G.; Araldi, A. (2018). The Nine Forms of the French Riviera: Classifying Urban Fabrics from the Pedestrian Perspective. En 24th ISUF International Conference. Book of Papers. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1313-1325. https://doi.org/10.4995/ISUF2017.2017.52191313132

Quantitative Methods of Urban Morphology in Urban Design and Environmental Psychology

[EN] Urban morphology investigates the physical form of the city and the historical processes behind its formation. Together with the qualitative analysis, the founding fathers of urban morphology also proposed quantitative measures of urban form. Urban morphologists have traditionally resisted computer-based geoprocessing of urban form and their calculations were mainly carried out manually. Thanks to technological developments, the number of quantitative studies in urban morphology has increased and fully integrated geoprocessing. More sophisticated computer-aided analyses enhance the potential applications in urban design and in environmental psychology research. Space Syntax (Hillier 1998) and Multiple Centrality Assessment (Porta et al. 2006) are configurational, multi-scale approaches to the analysis of the urban street networks, but miss the interplay between streets, building and parcels composing urban fabric. Space Matrix (Berghauser Pont and Haupt 2010) and, more recently, Multiple Fabric Assessment (Araldi and Fusco 2017) are geoprocessing quantitative approaches to the analysis of urban fabric morphology. This study has two aims; (1) classify quantitative urban morphology methods and (2) discuss how these methods could be applied in urban design and environmental psychology. First, we will present the evolution of these methods along with the theories in urban morphology from qualitative to quantitative approaches. Then, we will discuss how these methods could be combined and used in two related areas: urban design and environmental psychology.Erin, I.; Fusco, G.; Cubukcu, E.; Araldi, A. (2018). Quantitative Methods of Urban Morphology in Urban Design and Environmental Psychology. En 24th ISUF International Conference. Book of Papers. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1391-1400. https://doi.org/10.4995/ISUF2017.2017.5732OCS1391140

The city and the metropolis : urban form through multiple fabric assessment in Marseille, France

This paper presents a multi-scale detection of urban fabric types through Multiple Fabric Assessment in Marseille, France's second city. MFA is a computer-aided streetscape-based urban morphometric protocol for morphological regionalization of large urban areas. First presented at ISUF 2017, MFA has already been successfully applied to the metropolitan areas of the French Riviera, Osaka and Brussels. The protocol is first applied to the central city, and then to the much larger metropolitan area around Marseille and Aix-en-Provence, stretching over 7000 km2 and home to 2.6 million inhabitants. In both cases, MFA detects eight well-defined families of urban fabrics with clear morphological specificities. The change of spatial extent has nevertheless consequences on the analysis results. On the one hand, urban fabric types detected at the two scales show a precise pattern of correspondences. On the other, each scale allows a finer description of its most preponderant morphological regions, detecting more specific types which are bundled together at the other scale. This is the case for the traditional urban fabrics of the compact city at the municipal scale, and for the suburban fabrics at the metropolitan scale. Accepting some generalisation, the urban fabric types detected by MFA are able to account for the variety of urban forms identified in 36 urban fragments by Marseille's metropolitan planning agency through classical morphological analysis. Beyond the different grain of the analyses (streetscapes vs urban blocks), expert-based and computer-aided classifications are in good agreement. Allowing comprehensive multiscale analyses of urban fabrics for the whole metropolitan area of Marseille, MFA showed the patchwork nature of its 20th century developments and put in perspective the overstated fragmentation of the 19th century urbanisation. Participating to the emerging field of urban morphometrics, MFA opens the way to wider comparative analysis at the national and international levels

Frontages and setbacks: a comparison of English and North American suburban houses

This paper is interested in the physical form of frontage and in the elements of urban form that may influence it. Studying its morphology involves looking at all the scales to provide a comprehensive image of how it is taking shape. This work presents a survey of different type of suburban houses to show alternative models of frontage with a focus on North American models and their British counterparts. It then questions the meaning and value of transition space at the scale of a neighbourhood, highlighting the role of main thoroughfares and back alleys creating a hierarchy in the street frontages. It finally explores how the building and the plot respond to the street hierarchy by use of yards, room layout and architectural features

Miscellanea Herpetologica Gabonica XVI

peer reviewe

Ageing and urban form in Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis

The world population is ageing. In France, this phenomenon is particularly pronounced with 19.6% of the population being over 65-year-old in 2018. While it has been recognized that urban form plays an important role in ensuring a sustainable future for urban areas, ageing dynamics are challenging the core concept of urban sustainability. Maintaining or improving the quality of life of an ageing population through urban built form will become as much important, and as much recognized, as ensuring urban environmental sustainability in the future. Today, the well-being of the elderly is still reduced to the economic aspects of the silver economy or to ergonomic aspects in building design. While socio-demographic micro-data on the elderly are available, a comprehensive metropolitan-wide and fine-scale description of the urban forms where seniors live must rely on the latest developments of urban morphometrics. From historic city centres to suburban residential areas, passing through modernist apartment blocks, none of these typical forms seems particularly suited to the needs posed by ageing, which must accommodate accessibility to housing itself and to local shops, health care and services in general. The question of the role of different urban forms over the spatial distribution of the seniors thus arises, as well as the capacity of spatial arrangements to suit the needs and specificities of an ageing population. The case study is a metropolitan area that offers a great heterogeneity of urban forms: Aix- Marseille-Provence, in Southern France. Some areas show over or under-representation of seniors, while others are better at ensuring a generational mix. In most cases, the spatial distribution of the seniors can be linked to specific building hull forms. The spatial distribution of these hull types, and their close relationships to ageing and accessibility are presented in this paper

Long-Lasting Efficacy of Radio Electric Asymmetric Conveyer Neuromodulation Treatment on Functional Dysmetria, an Adaptive Motor Behavior

BackgroundFluctuating asymmetry (FA) is widely defined as the deviation from perfect bilateral symmetry and is considered an epigenetic measure of environmental stress. Rinaldi and Fontani hypothesized that the FA morpho-functional changes originate from an adaptive motor behavior determined by functional alterations in the cerebellum and neural circuits, not caused by a lesion, but induced by environmental stress. They called this phenomenon functional dysmetria (FD). On this premise, they developed the radio electric asymmetric conveyer (REAC) technology, a neuromodulation technology aimed at optimizing the best neuro-psycho-motor strategies in relation to environmental interaction.AimsPrevious studies showed that specific REAC neuro postural optimization (NPO) treatment can induce stable FD recovery. This study aimed to verify the duration of the NPO effect in inducing the stable FD recovery over timeMaterials and methodsData were retrospectively collected from a population of 29,794 subjects who underwent a specific semiological FD assessment and received the NPO treatment, regardless of the pathology referred.ResultsThe analysis of the data collected by the various participants in the study led us to ascertain the disappearance of FD in 100% of the cases treated, with a stability of the result detected up to 18 years after the single administration of the REAC NPO treatment.ConclusionsThe REAC NPO neurobiological modulation treatment consisting of a single administration surprisingly maintains a very long efficacy in the correction of FD. This effect can be explained as the long-lasting capacity of the NPO treatment to induce greater functional efficiency of the brain dynamics as proven in previous studies