Configurational Approaches to Urban Form: Empirical Test on the City of Nice (France)

TL;DR

This paper reviews various configurational analysis techniques for urban form and empirically tests their effectiveness in distinguishing different urban patterns in Nice, France.

Contribution

It provides a systematic overview of configurational analysis methods and evaluates their applicability to real urban environments.

Findings

Different techniques can effectively recognize distinct urban forms.

Configurational analysis offers valuable insights into urban spatial structure.

Some methods outperform others in classifying urban patterns.

Abstract

Configurational analysis can be seen as the adaptation to urban space of complex network approaches already developed in social network analysis (Freeman 1979). Its central idea is that elements of urban form should be analysed with respect to the relationships that they establish with all other form elements within a given scale of analysis. In twenty years of research on urban form using configurational analysis, a certain variety of approaches and of more specific techniques has been developed. The main goal of this paper is to give a systematic overview of the different techniques and approaches and to test selected techniques in their ability to recognise different urban forms within the city of Nice, France.