Submission of Abstracts & Papers | SSS14

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Space Syntax Lab Seminars - Dr Martin Fleischmann & Prof Dani Arribas-Bel. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

The Emergent Structure of Urban Form and Function: A Data-Driven Overview of the British Landscape The internal structure of urban environments that compose individual cities is key to understanding the rules underpinning their genesis, development, and further evolution. Their growth and change follow piecemeal, local, bottom-up processes that, to be fully understood, require analytical methods following the same logic without imposing a priori classes or groups. In this paper, we use the concept of spatial signatures, a bottom-up data-driven classification of predominantly urban environments based on their form and function, as the basis for a deep dive into the composition of cities. Its application on the whole of Great Britain provides a unique combination of national scale and detail with spatial units derived from individual buildings and street segments. We use this classification to analyse the inherent regularity and emergence of spatial patterns in urban systems, unveiling unique insights into cities' built structures. The results provide a profound understanding of the spatial distribution of signature types within and outside cities, from their geographical distribution to co-occurrence and relationship between classes, we expose the unique, organic hierarchy of British cities. The findings illustrate the ability of spatial signatures to capture and delineate the organisation of space based on a rich description of its urban form and urban function, one that combines granular detail and national scale and opens new pathways for understanding how our cities are shaped and how to manage their future development. _ This event is organised by the Space Syntax Laboratory, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Dr Kimon Krenz ([email protected])

SSS14 | 2024