Tag: urban form

Categories
Urban

Big Data in Urban Morphology

My new article “Spatial Information and the Legibility of Urban Form: Big Data in Urban Morphology” has been published in the International Journal of Information Management (download free PDF). It builds on recent work by Crooks et al, presenting workflows to integrate data-driven and narrative approaches to urban morphology in today’s era of ubiquitous urban big data. It situates this theoretically in the visual culture of planning to present a visualization-mediated interpretative process of data-driven urban morphology, focusing on transportation infrastructure via OSMnx.

OSMnx: Figure-ground diagrams of one square mile of each street network, from OpenStreetMap, made in Python with matplotlib, geopandas, and NetworkX

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Categories
Planning

New Chapter: Street Network Morphology

My chapter The Morphology and Circuity of Walkable and Drivable Street Networks is now in-press for publication in the forthcoming book The Mathematics of Urban Morphology (download free PDF). The book integrates recent theoretical and empirical work from urban planning, geography, sociology, architecture, economics, and mathematics around the theme of how we model and understand the urban form’s physical patterns and shaping processes. Fellow authors in this volume include Michael Batty, Diane Davis, Keith Clarke, Bin Jiang, Kay Axhausen, Carlo Ratti, and Stephen Marshall. The book itself can be purchased here.

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Categories
Planning

Urban Form Figure-Ground Diagrams

Check out the journal article about OSMnx.

I previously demonstrated how to create figure-ground square-mile visualizations of urban street networks with OSMnx to consistently compare city patterns, design paradigms, and connectivity. OSMnx downloads, analyzes, and visualizes street networks from OpenStreetMap but it can also get building footprints. If we mash-up these building footprints with the street networks, we get a fascinating comparative window into urban form:

Figure-ground map of building footprints and street network in New York, San Francisco, Monrovia, and Port au Prince from OpenStreetMap data, created in Python with OSMnx

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Categories
Planning

Square-Mile Street Network Visualization

Check out the journal article about OSMnx. All figures in this article come from this journal article, which you can read/cite for more.

The heart of Allan Jacobs’ classic book on street-level urban form and design, Great Streets, features dozens of hand-drawn figure-ground diagrams in the style of Nolli maps. Each depicts one square mile of a city’s street network. Drawing these cities at the same scale provides a revealing spatial objectivity in visually comparing their street networks and urban forms.

We can recreate these visualizations automatically with Python and the OSMnx package, which I developed as part of my dissertation. With OSMnx we can download a street network from OpenStreetMap for anywhere in the world in just one line of code. Here are the square-mile diagrams of Portland, San Francisco, Irvine, and Rome created and plotted automatically by OSMnx:

OSMnx: Figure-ground diagrams of one square mile of Portland, San Francisco, Irvine, and Rome shows the street network, urban form, and urban design in these cities

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