Methodological Foundation of a Numerical Taxonomy of Urban Form

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable, data-driven method for classifying urban forms using numerical taxonomy inspired by biological systematics, leveraging minimal data inputs and hierarchical clustering.

Contribution

It presents a novel numerical taxonomy approach for urban morphology that overcomes limitations of qualitative methods and enables systematic, scalable classification of urban types.

Findings

Successfully applied to Prague and Amsterdam

Generated hierarchical classification of urban forms

Demonstrated robustness with minimal data inputs

Abstract

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, advances in Geographic Data Science and the availability of digital mapping products, open the opportunity to overcome such limitations. And yet, our current capacity to systematically capture the heterogeneity of spatial patterns remains limited in terms of spatial parameters included in the analysis and hardly scalable due to the highly labour-intensive nature of the task. 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 and, by determining overall morphological similarity between them, generate a hierarchical classification 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.