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

Author(s):  
Alessandro Araldi ◽  
Giovanni Fusco

The Nine Forms of the French Riviera: Classifying Urban Fabrics from the Pedestrian Perspective. Giovanni Fusco, Alessandro Araldi ¹Université Côte-Azur, CNRS, ESPACE - Bd. Eduard Herriot 98. 06200 Nice E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Keywords: French Riviera, Urban Fabrics, Urban Form Recognition, Geoprocessing Conference topics and scale: Tools of analysis in urban morphology     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. References   Conzen, M.R.G (1960) Alnwick, Northumberland : A Study in Town-Planning Analysis. (London, George Philip). Conzen, M.P. (2009) “How cities internalize their former urban fringe. A cross-cultural comparison”. Urban Morphology, 13, 29-54. Graff, P. (2014) Une ville d’exception. Nice, dans l'effervescence du 20° siècle. (Serre, Nice). Yamada I., Thill J.C. (2010) “Local indicators of network-constrained clusters in spatial patterns represented by a link attribute.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100(2), 269-285. Levy, A. (1999) “Urban morphology and the problem of modern urban fabric : some questions for research”, Urban Morphology, 3(2), 79-85. Okabe, A. Sugihara, K. (2012) Spatial Analysis along Networks: Statistical and Computational Methods. (John Wiley and sons, UK).

Author(s):  
Francois Racine

Contributions to the literature on Canadian urbanism and, in particular, Canadian urban design, despite some notable exceptions, are relatively limited. The presentation explains from an urban form perspective the practice of urban design in Montreal from the mid-twentieth century onwards. The research seeks to interpret the development of urban design practice in Montreal by reviewing a representative sample of urban projects built over the past six decades. The urban projects are used to illustrate the different renewal strategies adopted, to understand how urban design ideology/ideas have changed over time in Montreal and how they have influenced the spatial organization, form, and aesthetic of the city. The principal theoretical and methodological contribution of the research is to develop a morphological framework to study and understand the physical-spatial mode of organization of planned built environments and to study their relationship to urban form (Racine 2016). The author uses this chronological investigation of the cases to reveal how each school of thoughts that has emerged in the discipline of urban design since its foundation in 1956 (Krieger, Saunders, 2009), has addressed the problems of modernist urban planning and to move the field of urban design thinking forward. The first results of our analysis show the importance of morphological and spatial relations between vernacular and planned built environments.  The morphological issue of continuity of urban space is crucial to assure a certain level of urban equity between citizens and to assure the sustainability of the development of the city as a whole.


Author(s):  
Magdalena Vicuña

Santiago de Chile´s areas of growing centrality are currently under residential densification processes, which vary in degrees of intensity and forms of impact in the urban environment. As a result of a weak conduction of residential densification, the structural-radical transformation of the urban fabric has resulted in urban space degradation. However, residential densification is a form of urban growth that, well designed and planned, allows optimizing infrastructures and building a more complex and inclusive city. This work aims to understand to what extent urban morphology shapes these processes of urban transformation in 15 selected areas of 25 hectares; proposing typologies of residential densification based on the intensity of the process and the state of transformation of the urban fabric. Density (dwellings/hectare) is understood in systemic relation with those parameters that determine urban compactness and configure public space: lot subdvision composition, setbacks, building footprint and height, floor area ratio and mixed use index, among others. The impact of intensive densification on urban space would have three main effects: (1) the standardized tower radically fragments the fabric structure and skyline, to the extent multiple and dispersed vertical operations transform lot geometry, abruptly increase building height and lower land occupation; (2) triggers a "residentialization" effect, unbalancing existing diversity of activities and contributing to undermine urban vitality; and (3) impairs the quality of public space, by introducing exogenous typological elements (such as setbacks) and reducing contact between private space and the street.


Author(s):  
Ye Zhang ◽  
Xiangya Xie ◽  
Jie Zhang

Ye ZHANG1, Xiangya XIE2, Jie ZHANG2 1 Department of Architecture, School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566 2 School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing100084, P. R. China E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]   Keywords (3-5): urban transformation, small and medium-sized historical Chinese cities, big data While an increasing number of research on transformation and conservation of historical areas of major Chinese cities have been witnessed in recent years (e.g. Whitehand et al, 2011; Whitehand et al 2014; Whitehand et al 2016, among many others), endeavours to studying more ordinary and small and medium-sized historical towns in China are rare. In the near future, those historical towns will be confronted with a new wave of developments, given that urbanisation of small and medium-sized cities and towns is high on China’s 13th five-year plan (2016-2020). This will pose a serious challenge to the conservation of their already vulnerable traditional urban fabric. This study aims to develop an accurate description of the transformation of built form, in particular street and block patterns, of the small and medium-sized historical towns, and how this is associated with the change of spatial distribution of urban activities. A total number of 36 towns in Zhejiang province, China are selected as case studies. Transformation of the urban fabric is examined based on cartographical maps of different historical periods using combined methods of urban network analysis and field survey. A large amount of user-generated geo-referenced open data, such as social media reviews, point-of-interest mapping, microblogs and night time illumination maps, are harnessed to produce a detailed description of urban activity patterns, of which the relationships to the transformation of urban form are investigated using multi-variate regression models. The results show how basic built form parameters such as spatial integration, between-ness centrality, block size and block depth can effectively and accurately describe the transformation of the small and medium-sized historical towns and how the formal changes are linked to the geographical shift of different urban activities. In which ways the findings can inform decision making in urban conservation practice to better address the tension between conservation and developments is discussed at the end.References: Whitehand Jeremy WR, Gu Kai, and Whitehand Susan M. (2011). "Fringe belts and socioeconomic change in China."  Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 38 (1):41-60 Whitehand Jeremy WR, Gu Kai, Conzen Michael P, and Whitehand Susan M. (2014). "The typological process and the morphological period: a cross-cultural assessment."  Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 41 (3):512-533. Whitehand Jeremy WR, Conzen Michael P, and Gu Kai. 2016. "Plan analysis of historical cities: a Sino-European comparison."  Urban Morphology 20 (2):139-158.


Author(s):  
Fernando Miguel García Martín ◽  
Fernando Navarro Carmona ◽  
Eduardo José Solaz Fuster ◽  
Víctor Muñoz Macián ◽  
María Amparo Sebastià Esteve ◽  
...  

The Integrated Sustainable Urban Development strategy (English acronym ISUD, Spanish acronym EDUSI) is an urban planning tool that the municipalities with more than 20.000 inhabitants in Spain need to be funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) in the 2014-2020 period. The city of Villena is located south- east Spain, inland the province of Alicante. The Villena municipality developed this tool in order to have a holistic and integrated vision of the situation of the city from the urban, social, economic and environmental points of view. As a part of the analysis performed to develop this strategy, a spatial analysis of the urban fabric of Villena was carried out. This study employed concepts from the typomorphological schools of Italy, England and France (Moudon, 1994) as well as from the research on relation between density and urban form (Churchman, 1999, Berghauser & Pont, 2009, Steadman, 2014). The data and cartography of the Spanish Cadaster, processed with SIG software, allowed the study. The spatial analysis included different variables of the built environment, including building height and age; plots size; open space ratios, Not-built plots; type of built-plots according to height and built surface; and compactness of the fabrics. The results of this analysis showed a relationship between the morphological variables and the problems identified in the citizen participation meetings carried out for the elaboration of the ISUD. The identified aspects of urban morphology obsolescence allowed proposing strategies of action to update the built environment to current demands. References (100 words) Berghauser Pont, M., & Haupt, P. (2009). Space, density and urban form. TU delft. Retrieved from http://repository.tudelft.nl/view/ir/uuid%253A0e8cdd4d-80d0-4c4c-97dc-dbb9e5eee7c2/ Churchman, A. (1999). Disentangling the concept of density. Journal of Planning Literature, 13(4), 389–411. Moudon, A. V. (1994). Getting to know the built landscape: typomorphology. In K. A. Franck & L. H. Schneekloth (Eds.), Ordering space: types in architecture and design (pp. 289–311). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Steadman, P. (2014). Density and built form: integrating “Spacemate” with the work of Martin and March. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 41(2), 341–358.


Author(s):  
Irem Erin ◽  
Alessandro Araldi ◽  
Giovanni Fusco ◽  
Ebru Cubukcu

Irem Erin¹, Alessandro Araldi², Giovanni Fusco2, Ebru Cubukcu1, ¹City and Regional Planning Department. Dokuz Eylul University.  Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi-Mimarlık Fakültesi Tınaztepe Kampüsü, Doğuş Caddesi No:209, 35160 Buca- IZMIR, Turkey ²Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, UMR ESPACE. 98 Bd Edouard Herriot, BP 3209 06204 NICE cedex 3, France E-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] number: +905363341475 Keywords (3-5): Morphological analysis, quantitative methods, urban design, environmental psychology Urban morphology investigates “how cities are built and why, how cities should be built, what should be built and what has actually been built?” (Moudon 1997). Together with the qualitative analysis, the founding fathers of urban morphology also proposed quantitative measures of urban fabrics. Allain's methodological work (2004) presents an overview of these quantitative analyses of topological, dimensional and geometrical relations among form elements in urban fabrics. However, 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 have increased 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 network, 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, the evolution of these methods along with the theories in urban morphology from qualitative to quantitative approaches will be discussed. Methods will be classified by combining their goals, as well as the morphological objects and the scales on which the analyses will focus. Finally, we will discuss how these methods could be combined and used in two different research perspectives: urban design and environmental psychology. References Allain, R (2004) Morphologie urbaine: géographie, aménagement et architecture de la ville, Paris, Armand Collin Araldi A., Fusco G. (2017) Decomposing and Recomposing Urban Fabric: the City from the Pedestrian Point of View, ICCSA 2017 Proceedings (in press) Berghauser Pont, M., Haupt, P. (2010). SPACEMATRIX, Space, Density and Urban Form. Rotterdam, NAi Publishers. Hillier, B. (1998) Space is the machine: A configurational Theory of Architecture, Cambridge University Press. Moudon, A. V. (1997). Urban morphology as an emerging. Urban morphology,1, 3-10. Porta S., Crucitti P., and Latora V. (2006) The network analysis of urban streets: a primal approach. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 33(5):705-725. 


2020 ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Ramón Aguilar Lucato

ResumenSe analiza la impronta morfológica actual de la histórica producción desigual del espacio urbano madrileño. Se eligieron quince muestras de tejidos urbanos, tres en cada una de las clases morfológicas discutidas por Rodríguez-Tarduchy (2011), representativas de las innovaciones que se han generado en los modos de producir las grandes ciudades españolas. Cada tejido se localiza en una realidad socioeconómica en el marco de su clase morfológica (inferior, intermediaria y superior). La investigación se basó en el análisis de seis indicadores y posibilitó conclusiones cuantitativas sobre los cambios en los modos de diseñarse la ciudad en la medida que esta se expandía e innovaciones urbanísticas eran incorporadas a su trazado; y sobre las variaciones en la forma en una misma clase morfológica, pero en distintos contextos sociales. Con la ayuda del Diagrama Spacemate, se cuantificaron dos agrupamientos bien definidos y opuestos, confirmando la progresiva producción de una ciudad dual, es decir, densa en los tejidos más antiguos y difusa en las nuevas periferias.AbstractThis work verifies how the historical uneven production of Madrid's urban space is reflected in the present. Fifteen urban fabrics samples were chosen, three in each of the morphological classes discussed by Rodríguez-Tarduchy (2011), representative of the innovations that have been generated in the ways of producing large Spanish cities. Each fabric is located in a socioeconomic reality within the framework of its morphological class (lower, intermediate and upper). The research was based on the analysis of six indicators and made possible quantitative conclusions on the changes in the trends of designing the city as it expanded and urban innovations were incorporated into its layout; and on variations in urban form within the same morphological class, but in different social contexts. With the help of the Spacemate Diagram, two well-defined and opposite groupings were quantified, confirming the progressive production of a dual city, dense in the oldest fabrics and diffuse in the new peripheries.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Boeing

Urban planning and morphology have relied on analytical cartography and visual communication tools for centuries to illustrate spatial patterns, propose designs, compare alternatives, and engage the public. Classic urban form visualizations – from Giambattista Nolli’s ichnographic maps of Rome to Allan Jacobs’s figure-ground diagrams of city streets – have compressed physical urban complexity into easily comprehensible information artifacts. Today we can enhance these traditional workflows through the Smart Cities paradigm of understanding cities via user-generated content and harvested data in an information management context. New spatial technology platforms and big data offer new lenses to understand, evaluate, monitor, and manage urban form and evolution. This paper builds on the theoretical framework of visual cultures in urban planning and morphology to introduce and situate computational data science processes for exploring urban fabric patterns and spatial order. It demonstrates these workflows with OSMnx and data from OpenStreetMap, a collaborative spatial information system and mapping platform, to examine street network patterns, orientations, and configurations in different study sites around the world, considering what these reveal about the urban fabric. The age of ubiquitous urban data and computational toolkits opens up a new era of worldwide urban form analysis from integrated quantitative and qualitative perspectives.


Author(s):  
Rosina Vinyes ◽  
Sergio Porcel ◽  
Fernando Anton ◽  
Mariona Figueras ◽  
Laia Molist

Social inequality has become of great importance nowadays, and it is in metropolitan areas where it appears to be more intense. Thus, inequality becomes unavoidable when rethinking the contemporary cities. To get a grasp of this phenomenon, for the first time in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, a common look between urban morphology and social cohesion is made. The goal is to describe the socio-morphologic structure of the metropolitan territory, which is the result of combining both categorizations and maps of the existing sociological and morphological aspects. For such purpose, a two-stage methodology has been used. The first stage develops the quantitative and qualitative criteria to overlap the two existing maps, and stablishes the areas that will be considered the new socio-morphologic fabrics. The second one applies the areal interpolation method to assign this socioeconomic and/or demographic information to these new fabrics. The result of this combination is a categorization of twenty-one types of fabrics that describes the socio-morphological metropolitan reality. This new categorization sheds light on a tight relationship between urban shape and social cohesion, both conditioning each other. Moreover, the new map shows socio-morphological similarities between distant areas and announces common urban strategies to achieve a larger urban equity. The interest of having this new approach increases when thinking in the new investigation lines that will be derived from there. One of them would be the evolutionary reconstruction, which will allow visualizing processes and ease the understanding of certain phenomena to foresee urban blight.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (163) ◽  
pp. 94-102
Author(s):  
S. Ilchenko

Background: This article uses the term “way of living” in its connection with “place identity” to analyze the impact of new urban residents (migrant peasants) on the urban space transformation. In the thematic study of the spatial development of the Ho Chi Minh City center, the configuration of the influence of the key actors (state and community) is analyzed. The architectural environment of the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon) is considered in the context of the similarity of its development (consequences of development) to the transformation of the space of Ukrainian cities. Methods: Observations and theoretical discourse on the recent changes in the city’s spatial organization are used to create a detailed description of several quarters of the city center on which the study focuses. This description allows us to understand the nature of changes in the urban environment, which is expressed in the continuous (daily) deconstruction of the historical environment, and the main drivers of this process. Turning to the hypothesis of the influence of the new residents’ “way of life”, which is different from the one of the urban residents, the study was supplemented by the analysis of the spatial organization and neighborhood of the fishing village of Gành Dầu in the province of tỉnh Kiên Giang. Results: The study of the space-community interactions of this sustainable rural settlement determines the similarity of the “rural identity” of local residents with the “urban identity” (autochthonous urban population of Ho Chi Minh City) in terms of perception and use of the common space. Therefore, differences in lifestyle (urban/rural) are not the main source of influence on the gradual changes in urban morphology and the loss of authentic buildings. In the context of this study, the impact of “consumer identity” as a manifestation of a “fluid society” (characterized by instability and uncertainty) that is in the process of constant change is more noticeable. It is important to emphasize that the influence of the local community (with any type of identity) on the transformation of the urban space occurs only through the informal spatial practices, and is not the only or determining factor. Conclusions: Due to the similarity of the processes of the spatial development of the Vietnamese and Ukrainian cities, this study provides a significant comparative example for the analysis of the urban environment transformations. This study helps to introduce a new research program that addresses the gap between the architectural analysis of the interaction between the (substituted) community-space and research in other scientific fields.


Author(s):  
Martin Fleischmann ◽  
Alessandra Feliciotti ◽  
Ombretta Romice ◽  
Sergio Porta

Cities are complex products of human culture, characterised by a startling diversity of visible traits. Their form is constantly evolving, reflecting changing human needs and local contingencies, manifested in space by many urban patterns. Urban morphology laid the foundation for understanding many such patterns, largely relying on qualitative research methods to extract distinct spatial identities of urban areas. However, the manual, labour-intensive and subjective nature of such approaches represents an impediment to the development of a scalable, replicable and data-driven urban form characterisation. Recently, advances in geographic data science and the availability of digital mapping products open the opportunity to overcome such limitations. And yet, our current capacity to systematically capture the heterogeneity of spatial patterns remains limited in terms of spatial parameters included in the analysis and hardly scalable due to the highly labour-intensive nature of the task. In this paper, we present a method for numerical taxonomy of urban form derived from biological systematics, which allows the rigorous detection and classification of urban types. Initially, we produce a rich numerical characterisation of urban space from minimal data input, minimising limitations due to inconsistent data quality and availability. These are street network, building footprint and morphological tessellation, a spatial unit derivative of Voronoi tessellation, obtained from building footprints. Hence, we derive homogeneous urban tissue types and, by determining overall morphological similarity between them, generate a hierarchical classification of urban form. After framing and presenting the method, we test it on two cities – Prague and Amsterdam – and discuss potential applications and further developments. The proposed classification method represents a step towards the development of an extensive, scalable numerical taxonomy of urban form and opens the way to more rigorous comparative morphological studies and explorations into the relationship between urban space and phenomena as diverse as environmental performance, health and place attractiveness.


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