The Morphology of Urban Land Use

Abstract

The irregularity of land uses and land parcels which constitute the morphology of a small English town is measured. Form is described by the digitised perimeters and areas of land-use parcels, and various methods are introduced which relate area to perimeter, and perimeter to scale, enabling the degree of irregularity to be assessed by means of the concept of fractal dimension. A theoretical exposition of scale and dimension leads to the definition of methods for relating area and scale to perimeter, which are then tested using land-use data for the town of swindon, wiltshire. Residential, commercial-industrial, educational, transport, and open space constitute the range of land uses defined, and three approaches based on area-perimeter, aggregated perimeter-scale, and individual perimeter-scale regressions are tested. The methods tested, although well established, are demonstrably inadequate, but some consistency in gauging the range of irregularity over the set of land uses is presented. It is suggested that future work be orientated towards more disaggregated measures of land-parcel irregularity.(a)