Abstract
ABSTRACTA better understanding of the relationship between the structure and functions of urban and suburban spaces is one of the avenues of research still open for geographical information science. The research presented in this paper develops several graph-based metrics whose objective is to characterize some local and global structural properties that reflect the way the overall building layout can be cross-related to the one of the road layout. Such structural properties are modeled as an aggregation of parcels, buildings, and road networks. We introduce several computational measures (Ratio Minimum Distance, Minimum Ratio Minimum Distance, and Metric Compactness) that respectively evaluate the capability for a given road to be connected with the whole road network. These measures reveal emerging sub-network structures and point out differences between less-connective and more-connective parts of the network. Based on these local and global properties derived from the topological and graph-based representation, and on building density metrics, this paper proposes an analysis of road and building layouts at different levels of granularity. The metrics developed are applied to a case study in which the derived properties reveal coherent as well as incoherent neighborhoods that illustrate the potential of the approach and the way buildings and roads can be relatively connected in a given urban environment. Overall, and by integrating the parcels and buildings layouts, this approach complements other previous and related works that mainly retain the configurational structure of the urban network as well as morphological studies whose focus is generally limited to the analysis of the building layout.
Highlights
The representation and analysis of the spatial structure of geographic spaces are relatively old but still open research issues for many environmental and urban sciences
The research presented in this paper is based on the modeling of different levels of topological relationships applied on different elementary entities that together form the core of a given urban space
To take into account the overall road network structure, we introduced several metrics (Ratio Minimum Distance, Minimum Ratio Minimum Distance, and Metric Compactness) that evaluate the capability for a given road to be connected with the whole road and different sub-parts of the network
Summary
The representation and analysis of the spatial structure of geographic spaces are relatively old but still open research issues for many environmental and urban sciences. When considering the spatial and structural patterns that emerge from a given urban space, the distribution of the built environment and its relationships (i.e. accessibility) with the underlying street network are key factors to take into account This is a key component when the objective is to provide a better understanding of the overall urban layout, and this has been hardly considered, to the best of our knowledge, in previous urban research and studies (Ewing, Pendall, and Chen 2003; Wells and Yang 2008) Building layouts can be characterized by a measure of compactness that combines population and building characteristics (i.e. size, density, distribution, clustering) (Tsai 2005; Berghauser-Pont and Haupt 2007; Ye and Van Nes 2014; Raimbault 2018).
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