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, with advances in Geographic Data Science and the growing availability of digital mapping products, researchers in this field have developed an interest in quantitative urban morphology, or urban morphometrics, with the potential to overcome such limitations. 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, minimizing 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 (or taxa) and, by determining overall morphological similarity between them, generate a hierarchical classification (phenetic taxonomy) 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.
翻译:城市病理学为了解许多此类模式奠定了基础,主要依靠定性研究方法,以获取城市地区不同的空间特征;然而,这些方法的手工、劳动密集型和主观性质阻碍了发展一个可扩展、可复制和数据驱动的城市形式特征;最近,随着地理数据科学的进步和数字制图产品的日益普及,该领域的研究人员对数量化城市形态学或城市形态学或城市形态学产生了兴趣,并有可能克服这些局限性;在本文件中,我们介绍了一种从生物系统学中得出的城市形态数字分类方法,该方法使城市类型得到严格的检测和分类;最初,我们从最低限度的数据投入中产生了丰富的城市空间数字特征,尽量减少因数据质量和可得性而带来的限制;最近,随着地理数据科学的进步和数字制图产品的日益普及,该领域的研究人员对数量化城市形态学或城市形态学或城市形态学发展产生了兴趣,从而有可能克服这些限制;在本文件中,我们提出了一种从生物系统学系统学中得出的城市形态的数值分类方法,从而能够对城市类型进行严格的检测和分类;因此,我们从城市结构上和结构结构上得出了城市形态上的分类,从而得出了城市形态和结构上的分类。