Urban form is the physical characteristics that make up built-up areas, including the shape, size, density and configuration of settlements. It can be considered at different scales: from regional, to urban, neighbourhood, ‘block’ and street.
What is urban form and how is it created?
CITYWIDE URBAN FORM Urban form is the configuration of the combined physical components of the ity; it is c created by the interrelationship of those components as they form a cohesive whole. The components of urban form include: circulation (streets, sidewalks, transit, and bikeways), open space, buildings, and natural features.
What are the forms of urbanization?
The Urban Form Urbanization has been shaped by transport infrastructures, such as roads, transit systems, or simply walkways. Consequently, there is a wide variety of urban forms, spatial structures, and associated urban transportation systems.
What are urban forms and urban transportation?
Urbanization has been shaped by transport infrastructures, such as roads, transit systems, or simply walkways. Consequently, there is a wide variety of urban forms, spatial structures, and associated urban transportation systems. Urban form. Refers to the spatial imprint of an urban transport system as well as the adjacent physical infrastructures.
What is an urban form profile?
These profiles provide an outline of both the urban form and socio-economic characteristics of the areas studied. The chapter concludes with a review of the urban form features of the case study cities and neighbourhoods, and shows how the different physical elements integrate together with socio-economic characteristics.
How do you describe urban form?
Urban form is the physical characteristics that make up built-up areas, including the. shape, size, density and configuration of settlements. It can be considered at different. scales: from regional, to urban, neighbourhood, 'block' and street.
What are the types of urban form?
The scales at which urban form can be considered or measured include the individual building, street, urban block, neighbourhood and city.
What is urban form pattern?
Urban form refers to the physical layout and design of a metropolitan area, city, or town. It involves the patterns of its component parts and the process of their formation and transformation.
Why is urban form important?
Urban morphology is important because it is grounded in what is present in the visual built environment. This may be derided as being simply descriptive, but accurate and precise description is the basis for any scientific study.
What are the elements of urban form?
Urban form generally encompasses a number of physical features and non-physical characteristics including size, shape, scale, density, land uses, building types, urban block layout and distribution of green space.
What are the factors affecting urban form?
The measurable characteristics of urban form include city size, urban sprawl, and mixed land use. Other factors that influence cardiovascular mortality, such as urban industrial level, economic status, aging population, and medical resource, were also considered in the model.
What is an organic urban form?
An organic urban form is one that develops without centralized planning. Nobody tells people where to put houses, or which way the city gate should face. In contrast, a planned urban form is designed and coordinated.
What are urban areas?
An urban area is the region surrounding a city. Most inhabitants of urban areas have nonagricultural jobs. Urban areas are very developed, meaning there is a density of human structures such as houses, commercial buildings, roads, bridges, and railways. "Urban area" can refer to towns, cities, and suburbs.
What are urban systems?
Urban systems are interconnected systems of buildings, microclimate, transportation, power and water supply, and humans. Urban systems research offers insights into urban efficiency, sustainability, and resilience, leveraging emerging opportunities in IoT, big data, machine learning, and exascale computing.
What is form in urban design?
Built form refers to the function, shape and configuration of buildings as well as their relationship to streets and open spaces.
What is the purpose of urban planning?
Urban planning encompasses the preparation of plans for and the regulation and management of towns, cities, and metropolitan regions. It attempts to organize sociospatial relations across different scales of government and governance.
How do urban areas develop?
Over time, as these rural populations grew, cities began to develop. Urban areas are defined by dense populations, the construction of multiple and often large buildings, monuments and other structures, and greater economic dependence on trade rather than agriculture or fishing.
What is form in urban design?
Built form refers to the function, shape and configuration of buildings as well as their relationship to streets and open spaces.
What are the five urban hearths?
The Five Hearths of UrbanizationMesoamerica (200 BCE)Mesopotania (3500 BCE)Nile River Valley (3200 BCE)Indus River Valley (2200 BCE)Huang He (Yellow River) and Wei River (Yangtze River) (1500 BCE)
What is an organic urban form?
An organic urban form is one that develops without centralized planning. Nobody tells people where to put houses, or which way the city gate should face. In contrast, a planned urban form is designed and coordinated.
What are urban areas?
An urban area is the region surrounding a city. Most inhabitants of urban areas have nonagricultural jobs. Urban areas are very developed, meaning there is a density of human structures such as houses, commercial buildings, roads, bridges, and railways. "Urban area" can refer to towns, cities, and suburbs.
Where are some examples of planned new cities?
There are a few outstanding examples of planned new cities in such widely scattered places as India (where Le Corbusier designed Chandigarh ), the Middle East, and South America. In Asia the emerging industrial economies of the post-World War II period produced large, densely populated, congested metropolises.
How did European planning influence the development of cities?
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the influence of planning broadened within Europe as various national and local statutes increasingly guided new development. European governments became directly involved with housing provision for the working class, and decisions concerning the siting of housing construction shaped urban growth. In the United States, local planning in the form of zoning began with the 1916 New York City zoning law, but it was not until the Great Depression of the 1930s that the federal government intervened in matters of housing and land use. During World War II, military mobilization and the need to coordinate defense production caused the development of the most extensive planning frameworks ever seen in the United States and Britain. Although the wartime agencies were demobilized after hostilities ended, they set a precedent for national economic and demographic planning, which, however, was much more extensive in Britain than in the United States.
What is urban form?
The term “urban form” is used to describe a city’s physical characteristics. It refers to the size, shape, and configuration of an urban area or its parts. How it will be understood, structured, or analyzed depends on scale. Characteristics of the urban form range from, at a very localized scale, features such as building materials, facades, ...
What is urban function?
Urban function can be conceptualized as function of city in relation to the society, hinterland, or other settlements; as activities taking place inside of cities; or as a relation between urban (social) needs and urban (spatial) forms. Urban functions are generator that shape...
What is the physical expression of the relation between places within a town?
The physical expression of the relation between places within the town, which influence a dynamic diversity, should be addressed with an expression that is implied in the decided town concept and deprived of all the elements that comprise the personal expression of each place.
What is outdoors space?
The outdoors space definition - as not to become a gratuitous act of creating a scenery - includes acquired knowledge of consequences within the exterior urban space of any type of activity existing (residence, industry, offices, ... ) in the buildings and how they are formally expressed and organised.
Parcel Direction
The parcel direction, as a spatial index to evaluate the urban form, is paid less attention in urban morphology domain. In this paper we proposed a new indicator “parcel direction (PD)” and its definition to evaluate the urban form quantitatively.
An agent based model for low carbon urban form
More energy is being consumed as urbanization spreads. Extensive research has found that a dominant share of urban energy consumption belongs to transportation energy, which has a strong relationship with urban form in the intracity level.
Human mobility and urban form
Identifying the impact of the socioeconomic attributes of urban space on human mobility: Evidence from the analysis of TAZ and individual scales in Beijing
Identifying required policies for a desired urban form
We propose an approach to identify the spatial policy parameters (termed the implementation intensity reflecting planning controls on corresponding spatial constraint) associated with a predefined alternative plan, namely, a predefined-binary urban form.
Rediscovering Chinese cities through the lens of land use pattern
Urbanization is a dynamic phenomenon involving significant changes in land use. Due to the nature of top-down and bottom-up combined urbanization, Chinese cities exhibit a more complex and multidimensional urban land use pattern.
What is urban form?
Urban form. Refers to the spatial imprint of an urban transport system as well as the adjacent physical infrastructures.
How does urbanization occur?
Urbanization is occurring in accordance with the development of urban transport systems, particularly in terms of their capacity and efficiency. Historically, movements within cities tended to be restricted to walking, which made urban mobility rather inefficient and time-consuming. Thus, activity nodes tended to be agglomerated, and urban forms compact with mixed uses. Many modern cities have inherited an urban form created under such circumstances, even though they are no longer prevailing. The dense urban cores of many European and East Asian cities, for example, enable residents to make between one third and two-thirds of all trips by walking and cycling. At the other end of the spectrum, the dispersed urban forms of most Australian, Canadian, and American cities, which were built more recently, encourages automobile dependency and are linked with high levels of mobility. Still, Chinese cities have experienced a high level of motorization, implying the potential of convergence towards more uniform urban forms. Many cities are also port cities with trade playing an enduring role not only for the economic vitality but also in the urban spatial structure, with the port district being an important node. Airports terminals have also been playing a growing role in the urban spatial structure as they can be considered as cities within cities.
How is urban transportation correlated with mobility?
The amount of urban land allocated to transportation is often correlated with the level of mobility. In the pre-automobile era, about 10% of the urban land was devoted to transportation, which was simply roads for dominantly pedestrian traffic. As the mobility of people and freight increased, a growing share of urban areas was allocated to transport and the infrastructures supporting it. Large variations in the spatial imprint of urban transportation are observed between different cities as well as between different parts of a city, such as between central and peripheral areas. The major components of the spatial imprint of urban transportation are:
What is urban spatial structure?
Urban spatial structure. Refers to the set of relationships arising out of the urban form and its underlying mobility of passengers and freight. It tries to evaluate to what extent specific urban structures can be achieved with specific transport systems.
What are the nodes of an urban system?
These are reflected in the centrality of urban activities, which can be related to the spatial accumulation of economic activities or to the accessibility to the transport system. Terminals, such as ports, train stations, railyards, and airports, are important nodes around which activities agglomerate at the local or regional level. Nodes have a hierarchy related to their importance and contribution to urban functions, with high order nodes such as management and retailing and lower order nodes such as production and distribution.
How have airport terminals influenced urban spatial structure?
Airports terminals have also been playing a growing role in the urban spatial structure as they can be considered as cities within cities. The evolution of transportation has generally led to changes in urban form. The more radical the changes in transport technology, the more the alterations on the urban form.
What is clustering in urban planning?
Clustering. Refers to the locational setting of activities in relation to a specific part of the urban area. A cluster of activities is, therefore, a concentration around a specific focal point, which tends to be transport infrastructures such as a highway interchange, a transit terminal, or a smaller town that has been absorbed by the expansion of the metropolis.
What is urban form?
Urban form is the configuration of the combined physical components of the ity; it is c created by the interrelationship of those components as they form a cohesive whole. The components of urban form include: circulation (streets, sidewalks, transit, and bikeways), open space, buildings, and natural features.
Do all elements of a neighborhood need to be the same?
All elements of a neighborhood do not need to be of the same architectural style to create a Complete Neighborhood. While it is important to use common design components to create interest and character, individuality of the various parts of the neighborhood is more important.
Is Fresno a suburban area?
Fresno has generally grown out over the years its from first origins, Downtown. For decades that growth has been mostly of a low density suburban style development that relies heavily on the auto as the single means of mobility. This has created a condition of sprawl, sometimes leaving neglected neighborhoods and developed land uses adjacent to a number of major streets either vacant or underutilized. This can be seen in Downtown today, as well as other areas surrounding Downtown .
What is urban form?
It should be noted that urban form does not simply relate to physical features, but also encompasses non-physical aspects. One can see this in the example of. density.
What is the dominant land use in urban context?
en vironment. W ithin the urban context, the dominant land use tends to be residential
What is the built environment?
The built environment is an outcome of the land development process that expresses the community's relation to its surroundings. In the context of earthquakes, the built environment directly relates to a disaster's outcome in terms of loss of life and property. Hence it becomes imperative to assess the built environment and minimize the seismic impact comprehensively. The currently available literature focuses on the individual elements of the built environment operating as independent domains of research. However, this article emphasizes the need to understand the built environment from an ecosystem perspective where each element interacts to produce a comprehensive disaster effect. Utilizing urban planning as a seismic risk reduction tool, this paper identifies the elemental composition of the urban environment and proposes a framework to assess the Built Environment Vulnerability (BEV). The study functions at the mid-scale resolution and introduces two new concepts, Discrete and Systemic Vulnerabilities. A total of 1107 buildings and 134 kilometers of road have been surveyed, and object-oriented analysis is carried out in six neighborhoods of Siliguri Municipal Corporation, India. The results are the differential BEV pre and post-earthquake across the six neighborhoods corresponding to their different built characteristics.
What are the levels of a city?
individual building, street, urban block, neighbourhood and city. These levels
How are spatial form and ecological features of cities related?
The spatial form and the ecological features of the city are closely related. Not only biodiversity, urban soils, climate, and hydrology, but also the energy and material flows of the city are influenced in different ways by the spatial composition of different land uses, built-up area, the degree of surface sealing, the proportion and type of green spaces, and other factors. Their analysis through approaches such as biotope and structure type mapping as well as gradient analysis is, therefore, a key to the ecological understanding of cities and city regions for an ecologically oriented urban development.
What are some locally unwanted land uses?
space. There are also certain ‘locally-unwanted land uses’ such as prisons (Grant,
What is urban form?
Urban form is the physical characteristics that make up built-up areas, including the shape, size, density and configuration of settlements. It can be considered at different scales: from regional, to urban, neighbourhood, ‘block’ and street. The UK’s urban form has been shaped since the beginning of human settlement, and is evolving continually in response to social, environmental, economic and technological developments, mediated by policies in numerous sectors. In the post-war period, this has predominantly been planning, housing and urban policy, as well as health, transport and economic.
What is the report on urban form and infrastructure?
The report provides a baseline analysis of, and a forward look at, urban form and infrastructure in the UK. It sets out the legacy of development in the post-war period, and explains how settlement patterns have evolved in relation to investments in infrastructure (for transport, energy, water, waste, ICT, health and education). It provides a summary of the positive and negative consequences of the UK's key development patterns: compact and contained established towns and cities; edge and out-of-town developments; peripheral housing estates and urban extensions; newer settlements; and dispersed developments. It then considers emerging approaches to the governance of urban form and infrastructure, with potential lessons for the UK, in the face of a number of challenges and uncertainties related to climate change, economic instability, and demographic and social shifts. Finally, the report offers an analysis of plausible future options for the development of: a) existing places (via compaction/containment, the development of polycentric city regions and managed shrinkage); and b) new developments (via peripheral growth, new settlements or dispersed developments). The report concludes with a number of conditions necessary for the effective delivery and management of urban form and infrastructure to 2065.
What is the relationship between urban form and infrastructure in the UK?
Overall, the UK’s development patterns are characterised by the containment of development, uneven success of different towns and cities, and dispersed, development in the countryside. These patterns are serviced by infrastructure provided by different sectors, in a largely disjointed way. The UK faces a severe housing and affordability crisis, and challenges related to social, economic, and environmental change. The next section of the report looks at how the UK’s legacy can be built on for a successful future.
How has post war urban development been facilitated?
Much post war urban development has been facilitated by, and planned for, car use, locking residents into car use as they have no other viable ways of travelling. This has led to lower density housing estates on the edge of cities and in more rural locations, and facilitated accessibility to edge-city leisure, retail and employment locations. This raises challenges as less carbon intensive futures are sought and as fuel prices rise.
What is compact city?
Since the early 1990s, the dominant conception of a successful or sustainable urban form has been the ‘compact city’ (Jenks et al., 1996; OECD, 2012). The EC, OECD, World Bank and national governments in most developed nations support the development of contained, high density, mixed use cities and towns. The model is seen as the solution to housing the world’s growing urban population in a way that protects productive and environmentally important land, reduces sprawl, minimises travel (and thus emissions), and accrues the benefits of efficiencies of scale in providing housing, public services, and infrastructure. The pros and cons of this model have been widely researched: there is much evidence to both support and counter its claimed benefits and its feasibility in different contexts. Yet it remains an exceptionally widely prescribed policy across the world (Olofsdotter et al., 2013; OECD, 2012).
Levels of Analyzing Urban Form
- Study of urban form is performed in order to understand the spatial structure and character of a metropolitan area, city, town, or village by examining the patterns of its component parts and the ownership or control and occupation. Urban form is closely related to scale and can be described as the “morphological attributes of an urban area at all ...
Elements of Urban Form
- At a basic level, elements of urban form are commonly defined as streets, blocks, plots, and buildings. City streets, street blocks, plots, and buildings are combined in a specific way, resulting in different types of urban tissues. Some of these tissues are clearly identifiable and offer their cities a unique character. But there are also other approaches to define elements of urban form …
Models of Urban Forms
- There are various models of the general form of the cities. Some of them are (Lynch 1984): 1. 1.The star– The underlying presumption is that the best form of any city of moderate to large size is a radial star or “asterix.” It is organized around a single dominant center, of high density and mixed use, from which major transportation lines (4–8) radiate outward. This concept allows fo…
Qualities of Urban Form
- The form of city is always willed and valued (Lynch 1984; Kostof 1991), though it is not always obvious due to its complexity. In his seminal book Good City Form, Kevin Lynch (1984) identifies three main normative theories – metaphors of general urban form that express social values – the cosmic model metaphor, machine metaphor, and organic metaphor. 1. The cosmic modelas…