What kind of dimensions can use to study comprehensive urban form? Most of the scholars have mentioned about the Density, accessibility and Land uses mix dimensions. But these dimensions can not capture well accurate urban form character. Other than that, what kind of dimensions can use to understand characters of the urbanity.
I think the following book can help a lot:
Oliveira, Vitor (2016). Urban morphology. Switzerland: Springer nature publishing.
In this book, Oliviera explains five elements for understanding the urban morphology :
1: The Concept of Urban Tissue
2: The Natural Context
3: The Streets System
4: The Plots System
5: The Buildings System
I think some other element can affect urban morphology such as Activity Nodes, Urban Land marks and Focal Points.
Hi Samith,
The Density, Mix, Access (known as the Urban DMA) which is a relatively new approach to mapping and understanding cities was developed by Dovey and Pafka, in their book Mapping urbanities. If you have not read the book yet, I recommend you should read the book. I am sure it will give you new insights about what morphology means and how these three dimensions will satisfy the basis for your study.
Moreover, there is a lecture available on YouTube by Dovey himself which is about the urban DMA that should be useful for your research.
Good luck!
journal with interest, although in Portuguese: Revista de Morfologia urbana - http://revistademorfologiaurbana.org/index.php/rmu
Land marks ,spatial district,like a historical ones , the type of patches, townescape and the type of context.
You might wanna consider the Space Syntax theory, it does attach indicators to its morphological analisys. Arguably, they all fall under accessability, as you mentioned.
Catalin Berescu thank you for your answer. i have few clarifications sir. Is it enought to study morphological charcters of the accessibility to understand urban form. then what will be the mobility charcters. otherwise can we study urban form by using only one dimention like space syntax. is there any other dimentions.?
Few thoughts: if your focus is on urban morphology (i.e. the articulation of urban form), then of course that is never enough to describe the form at a specific moment in time. Everybody struggles with achieving a balance in between the accurate description of the form and a more or less sophisticated description of some processes that generated it (like the `historical study` part that can be found at the beggining of almost every urban planning documentation) or that keeps it alive (e.g. mobility that creates density). Accesibility is just a good entry point for Space Syntax, in my understanding they attached some mathematics to Kevyn Lynch. There is always this tension in between a model that takes into account the one million things that can be found in a city, and than struggles to show how they influence the space, and the more simplified models that try to create a hierarchy of the determinants. But in the end everybody speaks about forms that follows functions and/or about functions that derive from an existing form. I guess your discontent is about not finding a discourse that encompasses the complexity of a city. I take the risk to make a claim: you can only find a good theory about cities in a particular region, not an universal theory, because cities are too different and are the result of local historical processes that end up in a form. You guessed by now that I am a `form follows function` type of guy. Best!
Hello Samith, I think that you can find good answers and further questions in Fran Tonkiss' 2013 book, Cities by Design. The social life of urban form (https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Cities+by+Design%3A+The+Social+Life+of+Urban+Form-p-9780745648989). Best wishes!
Adolphe Luc and his team, have managed (in my opinion, quite successfully) to set a relationship between urban morphology and environmental performance. While working for the MESH project ( http://mesh-research.com/research/?lang=en), by using a set of his simplified indicators of the city's morphological environment, we were able to model the aeraulic, thermal, visual, and acoustic comfort in public space. The tools that were developed were largely based on these two following publications of his:
Article A Simplified Model of Urban Morphology: Application to an An...
Article Modeling the link between built environment and urban climat...
See Article Measuring urban form: Overcoming terminological inconsistenc...
for comprehensive overview and http://docs.momepy.org/en/latest/ for the implementation of the large number of measurable indicators.
May I suggest you add a dynamic aspect to morphology, too, thus attending morphogenesis? From this perspective, form appears as a capture of a number of socio-spatial forces, which you might want to tackle.
Dear Samith,
As the scholarly genealogy of studies on the relationship between urban morphology and urbanity is mostly in French, the best for you is probably to begin from this essay of clarification by Albert Lévy:
https://www.cairn.info/revue-espaces-et-societes-2005-3-page-25.htm
There is two school of thoughts, British by M.R.G. Conzen and Italian by Muratori.
I suggest to look for it.
Clearly, accessibility is very important. However, we often think of accessibility solely in terms of time and distance. Affordability is also an important "accessibility" dimension. Maps of urban land values combined with density can provide important information about the affordability dimension of accessibility (e.g., cost per square foot of developed space or cost per FAR foot).
Another index might include the number and acreage of vacant or underutilized parcels in prime locations. They are evidence of land speculation, a parasitic activity that artificially inflates land prices at prime locations and thereby pushes development away from central prime locations and towards sub-optimal fringe locations (urban sprawl).
Measuring these two indices over time would provide important dynamic information.
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