Classifying urban form at a national scale: The case of Great Britain (ISUF 2021)
Channel: Martin Fleischmann
Date: 2021-06-29

"Classifying urban form at a national scale: The case of Great Britain (ISUF 2021)"

Talk given by Martin Fleischmann at the International Seminar on Urban Form 2021 Conference in (virtually) Glasgow. June 29, 2021.

This talk outlines the notion of “spatial signatures”, a characterisation of space based on form and function, and will specifically focus on its form component. Whilst spatial signature sits between the purely morphological and purely functional description of the built environment, its form-based component reflects the morphometric definition of urban tissue, the distinct structurally homogenous area of a settlement. The proposed method employs concepts of “enclosures” and “enclosed tessellation” to derive indivisible hierarchical geographies based on physical boundaries (streets, railway, rivers, coastline) and building footprints to delineate such tissues in the built fabric. Each unit is then characterised by a comprehensive set of data-driven morphometric characters feeding into an explicitly spatial contextual layer, which is used as an input of cluster analysis.

The classification based on spatial signatures is applied to the entirety of Great Britain on a fine grain scale of individual tessellation cells and released as a fully reproducible open data product. The results provide a unique input for local authorities to drive planning and decision-making and for the wider research community as data input.

The slides used for the talk are available at:

https://urbangrammarai.github.io/talks/202106_isuf/

The research presented in this talk is part of the Urban Grammar project at the Alan Turing Institute. More information available at:

https://urbangrammarai.github.io/