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The spatial distribution and frequency of street, plot and building types across five European cities

Pont, MB; Stavroulaki, G; Bobkova, E; Gil, J; Marcus, L; Olsson, J; Sun, K; ... Legeby, A; + view all (2019) The spatial distribution and frequency of street, plot and building types across five European cities. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science , 46 (7) pp. 1226-1242. 10.1177/2399808319857450. Green open access

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Abstract

Typologies have always played an important role in urban planning and design practice and formal studies have been central to the field of urban morphology. These studies have predominantly been of a historical-qualitative nature and do not support quantitative comparisons between urban areas and between different cities, nor offer the precise and comprehensive descriptions needed by those engaged in urban planning and design practice. To describe contemporary urban forms, which are more diffuse and often elude previous historic typologies, systematic quantitative methods can be useful but, until recently, these have played a limited role in typo-morphological studies. This paper contributes to recent developments in this field by integrating multi-variable geometric descriptions with inter-scalar relational descriptions of urban form. It presents typologies for three key elements of urban form (streets, plots and buildings) in five European cities, produced using statistical clustering methods. In a first instance, the resulting typologies contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of streets, plots and buildings. In particular, the results offer insight into patterns between the types (i.e. which types are found in combination and which not) and provide a new large scale comparative analysis across five European cities. To conclude, a link between quantitative analysis and theory is established, by testing two well-known theoretical propositions in urban morphology: the concept of the burgage cycle and the theory of natural movement.

Type: Article
Title: The spatial distribution and frequency of street, plot and building types across five European cities
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1177/2399808319857450
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808319857450
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Typo-morphology, cluster analysis, built density, network centrality, land division
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > The Bartlett School of Architecture
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10082270
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