The Emergent Structure of Urban Form and Function

A Data-Driven Overview of the British Landscape

Martin Fleischmann

Dani Arribas-Bel

Today

Urban Form & Function
Urban Grammar
The Emergent Structure

(Urban) Form & Function

How we arrange “stuff” in cities matters…

Source: A map of every building in America (New York Times)

… it matters a lot

Form

What does it look like? “Physical structure and appearance of cities”

Qualitative, quant. case studies, morphometrics, remotely sensed

Function

What is it used for? “Activities that take place within an environment”

Geography, Economics, Sociology, Environmental Sciences, Tansport studies…

Why Form & Function?

Encodes the past	Frames the future
Geography History Technology …	Productivity Sustainability Quality of Life …

F&F in Literature

Critical to understand:	But often:
Agglomeration economies Neighborhood effects Environmental sustainability …	Coarse Aggregate Ad-hoc …

Detail matters

Source: Six 15-minute walks capture the diversity, history of Houston neighborhoods (Urban Edge)

Scaling morphological studies

… can be daunting

Traditional schools

… (almost) cannot scale

Conzen (1960), Caniggia & Maffei (1979)

Space Syntax

… can scale but offers specific insights

Space Syntax OpenMapping (2018)

Morphometric approaches

… are trying to find a way

Araldi & Fusco (2019), Berghauser Pont et al. (2019), Jochem et al. (2020), Fleischmann et al. (2021)

Urban Grammar

Spatial Signatures

Characterisations of space based on form and function designed to understand urban environments

Meaningful spatial units

Enclosed tessellation

Context

[STAGE] Barriers Enclosure Morph. Tess. Encl. Tess. Characters Clusters Signatures

Enclosed Tessellation	Embedding form & function	Spatial Signatures

+

[STAGE] Barriers Enclosure Morph. Tess. Encl. Tess. Characters Clusters Signatures

Enclosed Tessellation	Embedding form & function	Spatial Signatures

+

Benefits

Data-driven & (multidiscipline) theory-informed
Granular & scalable
Flexible deployment

The Test

The Setup

Five different cities

Historical environments
Geography & culture
Data landscapes

The Cities

Barcelona	Dar es Salaam	Houston	Medellin	Singapore
Spain	Tanzania	USA	Colombia	Singapore

The Data

Form

Local open data
OpenStreetMap
Satellite-derived

Function

Local open data

Land use/cover

Global grids

Nightlights

Clustered with K-Means + clustergram

Barcelona

Houston | Medellin

Singapore | Dar es Salaam

British Signatures

Characters

Form

Dimension
Shape
Intensity
Connectivity
Diversity

Function

Population
Employment
Industry
Land use/cover
Amenity access

N ≈ 300

Data

Form

OS OpenMap
OS OpenRoads

Function

(Business) Census
OpenStreetMap
Geolytix
Listed buildings
CDRC
CORINE / Sentinel 2
VIIRS

BRITISH SIGNATURES

Countryside (3)

Periphery (4)

Urban (9)

(Geographical) Coverage

94% (50%)

5% (40%)

1% (10%)

Distribution/co-occurrence

Urban hierarchy

Signature drivers

“Open by default”


Data, data, data Methods, code Infrastructure	Dissemination Open Data Products Journaling/reporting

https://urbangrammarai.xyz

Lessons

Encoding

Geography	History	Technology

Hierarchy

Wrap up

(Urban) form & function…

underpin many social processes
are becoming easier to measure better
You should use them more in your work!

The Emergent Structure of Urban Form and Function

A Data-Driven Overview of the British Landscape

Martin Fleischmann
@martinfleis Dani Arribas-Bel
@darribas