Urban Complexity through Vision Intelligence: Variance, Gradients, and Correlations across Six Italian Cities
Mirko Degli Esposti, Armando Bazzani, Chiara Dellacasa, Matteo Falcioni, Mario Massimon, Martino Pietropoli

TL;DR
This study develops a scalable vision-based methodology to analyze urban quality metrics across six Italian cities, revealing significant heterogeneity, weak urban gradients, and modest correlations among visual environment features.
Contribution
It introduces an advanced Urban Vision Intelligence system for objective, large-scale analysis of urban visual quality and structure across multiple cities.
Findings
Significant spatial variance in urban quality metrics.
Weak correlation between distance from city center and quality.
Positive association between façade quality and greenery.
Abstract
This paper introduces a scalable methodology for the objective analysis of quality metrics across six major Italian metropolitan areas: Rome, Bologna, Florence, Milan, Naples, and Palermo. Leveraging georeferenced Street View imagery and an advanced Urban Vision Intelligence system, we systematically classify the visual environment, focusing on key metrics such as the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) and the Fa\c{c}ade Degradation Score (FDS). The findings quantify Structural Heterogeneity (Spatial Variance), revealing significant quality dispersion (e.g., Milan ), and confirm that the classical Urban Gradient -- quality variation as a function of distance from the core -- is consistently weak across all sampled cities (), suggesting a complex, polycentric, and fragmented morphology. In addition, a Cross-Metric Correlation Analysis highlights…
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Taxonomy
TopicsUrban Green Space and Health · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis · Urban Heat Island Mitigation
