Understanding cities by looking at their built forms

How much could we know about cities by only inspecting their physical forms? Studying the dynamic and intertwined urban processes, the formation, evolution, transition and deformation of various urban entities, has never been straightforward. These urbanization processes are partly hidden within, yet still manifested by, the physical forms of cities. The fundamental assumption in the study of urban morphology is that we can make inference about urban characters, such as their historical development process, socio-economic status, ecology, etc., by examining their physical appearances. In order to take advantage of the information nested in the urban morphology and extend our scope of knowledge about city forms, we can shift our view away from the ground to a synoptic perspective so that the typology of physical patterns can be systematically examined.

Pioneered by early efforts of geographers Otto Schlüter and Michael Robert Günter Conzen, studying the urban morphology at the city scale brings the opportunities to understand the hiatus and growth of cities by only looking at their physical forms. Yet, these efforts were largely qualitative and relied on roughly depicted urban forms.

For an improved scientific understanding of urban morphology, the quantitative depiction of urban elements such as buildings, plots and streets are demanded. Today, we do have data about urban elements at various levels of details in digital format, even in 3D, which we can feed into digital models to characterize urban morphological types, and further link physical forms to different aspect of cities in a quantitative manner. This also means that such approach requires a lot of computation power but can be deployed on our Geospatial Computing Platform at ITC.