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Foreword: plan less to plan better -- Preface: towards masterplanning for change -- About the authors -- PART I TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF URBAN FORM -- 1 Design and change: reconciling the paradox -- 1.1 Urbanisation, anthropocene and the great acceleration -- 1.2 About connectedness and complexity: the way change occurs -- 1.3 How complex systems change: adaptive cycles, panarchy & -- resilience -- 1.3.1 Adaptive cycle and panarchy -- 1.3.2 Bouncing back and bouncing forward: the concept of resilience across disciplines -- 1.3.3 Neither back nor forward: evolutionary resilience -- 1.4 Implementing resilience in urban design -- 2 From system ecology to urban morphology -- 2.1 System ecology & -- urban morphology: not so different after all -- 2.2 Introducing urban morphology -- 2.2.1 How urban form changes: the urban form adaptive cycle -- 2.2.2 Between inertia and change: panarchy in urban form -- 2.3 Design and change: the paradox reconciled -- PART 2 MASTERPLANNING FOR CHANGE: THE DESIGN APPROACH -- 3 Towards a design agenda -- 3.1. Designing the city as a complex system -- 3.1.1 Sustainability, resilience and 'shepherded self-organization' -- 3.1.2 Advancing the place-making tradition -- 3.2 The five attributes of resilient cities -- 3.2.1 Defining the attributes -- 3.2.2 The attributes at-scale: a component-specific description -- 4 Masterplanning for change: the design approach -- 4.1 Analysis -- WP. 1: Drawing the City -- WP. 2: History -- WP. 3: Stories -- WP. 4: Planning and Policy Framework -- WP. 5: Community Potential -- WP. 6: Density and Urban Intensity -- WP. 7: Comparing Places -- WP. 8: Mental Map -- WP. 9: Fear Map -- WP. 10: Street Centrality -- WP. 11: Street Hierarchy -- WP. 12: Transportation Network -- WP. 13: Street Front Quality.

Unprecedented urbanisation processes characterise the Great Acceleration, urging urban researchers to make sense of data analysis in support of evidence-based and large-scale decision-making. Urban morphologists are no exception since the impact of urban form on fundamental natural and social patterns (equity, prosperity and resource consumption's efficiency) is now fully acknowledged. However, urban morphology is still far from offering a comprehensive and reliable framework for quantitative analysis. Despite remarkable progress since its emergence in the late 1950s, the discipline still exhibits significant terminological inconsistencies with regards to the definition of the fundamental components of urban form, which prevents the establishment of objective models for measuring it. In this article, we present a study of existing methods for measuring urban form, with a focus on terminological inconsistencies, and propose a systematic and comprehensive framework to classify urban form characters, where 'urban form character' stands for a characteristic (or feature) of one kind of urban form that distinguishes it from another kind. In particular, we introduce the Index of Elements that allows for a univocal and non-interpretive description of urban form characters. Based on such Index of Elements, we develop a systematic classification of urban form according to six categories (dimension, shape, spatial distribution, intensity, connectivity and diversity) and three conceptual scales (small, medium, large) based on two definitions of scale (extent and grain). This framework is then applied to identify and organise the urban form characters adopted in available literature to date. The resulting classification of urban form characters reveals clear gaps in existing research, in particular, in relation to the spatial distribution and diversity characters. The proposed framework reduces the current inconsistencies of urban morphology research, paving the way to enhanced methods of urban form systematic and quantitative analysis at a global scale.

Cities are complex products of human culture, characterised by a startling diversity of visible traits. Their form is constantly evolving, reflecting changing human needs and local contingencies, manifested in space by many urban patterns. Urban morphology laid the foundation for understanding many such patterns, largely relying on qualitative research methods to extract distinct spatial identities of urban areas. However, the manual, labour-intensive and subjective nature of such approaches represents an impediment to the development of a scalable, replicable and data-driven urban form characterisation. Recently, advances in geographic data science and the availability of digital mapping products open the opportunity to overcome such limitations. And yet, our current capacity to systematically capture the heterogeneity of spatial patterns remains limited in terms of spatial parameters included in the analysis and hardly scalable due to the highly labour-intensive nature of the task. In this paper, we present a method for numerical taxonomy of urban form derived from biological systematics, which allows the rigorous detection and classification of urban types. Initially, we produce a rich numerical characterisation of urban space from minimal data input, minimising limitations due to inconsistent data quality and availability. These are street network, building footprint and morphological tessellation, a spatial unit derivative of Voronoi tessellation, obtained from building footprints. Hence, we derive homogeneous urban tissue types and, by determining overall morphological similarity between them, generate a hierarchical classification of urban form. After framing and presenting the method, we test it on two cities – Prague and Amsterdam – and discuss potential applications and further developments. The proposed classification method represents a step towards the development of an extensive, scalable numerical taxonomy of urban form and opens the way to more rigorous comparative morphological studies and explorations into the relationship between urban space and phenomena as diverse as environmental performance, health and place attractiveness.

The impact of sea-level rise on coastal towns is expected to be a major challenge, with millions of people exposed. The climate-induced risk assessment of coastal areas subject to flooding plays an essential role in planning effective measures for adaptation plans. However, in European legislation, as well as in the regional plans adopted by the member states, there is no clear reference to urban settlement, as this concept is variable and difficult to categorise from the policy perspective. This lack of knowledge makes it complicated to implement efficient adaptation plans. This research examines the presence of the issue in Portugal's coastal settlements, the European coastal area most vulnerable to rising sea levels, using the case of seashore streets as the most exposed waterfront public urban areas. Using the morphometric classification of the urban fabric, we analyse the relationship between urban typology and legislative macro-areas aimed at providing integrated adaptation plans. The study suggests that there is only a minimal relationship between the proposed classification and the geographical zones currently identified in coastal planning policies. Such incongruence suggests the need for change, as the policy should be able to provide a response plan tailored to the specificities of urban areas.

Research in Urban Morphology has long been exploring the form of cities and their changes over time, especially by establishing links with the parallel dynamics of these cities' social, economic and political environments. The capacity of an adaptable and resilient urban form to provide a fertile environment for economic prosperity and social cohesion is at the forefront of discussion. Gentrification has emerged in the past few decades as an important topic of research in urban sociology, geography and economy, addressing the social impact of some forms of urban evolution. To some extent, these studies emphasize the form of the environment in which gentrification takes place. However, a systematic and quantitative method for a detailed characterization of this type of urban form is still far from being achieved. With this article, we make a first step towards the establishment of an approach based on 'urban morphometrics'. To this end, we measure and compare key morphological features of five London neighbourhoods that have undergone a process of piecemeal gentrification. Findings suggest that these five case studies display similar and recognizable morphological patterns in terms of their built form, geographical location of main and local roads and physical relationships between street fronts and street types. These initial results, while not implying any causal or universal relationship between morphological and social dynamics, nevertheless contribute to (a) highlight the benefits of a rigorous quantitative approach towards interpreting urban form beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Urban Morphology and (b) define the statistical recurrence of a few, specific morphological features amongst the five cases of gentrified areas in London.

This paper presents a morphological study of 100 main street networks from urban areas around the world. An expansion in the scale of main street networks was revealed using a unique heuristic visual method for identifying and measuring the lengths of main street segments from each of the study areas. Case studies were selected and grouped according to corresponding urban design paradigms, ranging from antiquity to present day. This research shows that the average lengths of main street segments from networks of historic (i.e. ancient, medieval, renaissance, baroque and industrial) and informal case studies are much smaller relative to those from networks of more contemporary case studies (i.e. Garden City, Radiant City and New Urbanism). This study provides empirical evidence in support of prior, observational claims suggesting a consistent pattern in the smaller scale of main street networks from traditional urban areas, termed the '400-metre rule'. Additionally, it makes the case for further empirical research into similarly recursive spatial patterns within other elements of urban form (i.e. plots, blocks, etc.) that, if discovered, could aid in future urban design efforts to help provide the framework for more 'human-scale' urban environments.

Studies on urban deprivation date back to the 19th Century but remain important today due to rising levels of inequality and social segregation. However, while social causes of deprivation have been investigated, the role of the built environment remains neglected. Existing studies either provide broad coverage at the expense of detailed morphological descriptions or offer meticulous accounts of small-scale areas without capturing the broader context. This paper addresses such a gap by investigating the relationship between urban form, measured at the building level, and deprivation across the entire city of Isfahan, Iran. By doing so, we position this study in the tradition of urban morphology. Operationally, we, first, identify urban types (UTs), that is, distinctive patterns of urban form, by clustering 200+ morphological characters; second, we explore the relationship between proportion of buildings belonging to each UT, in each neighbourhood, and deprivation; third, we offer detailed descriptions of the UTs most strongly associated with deprivation, discuss possible drivers for the observed correlations, and link findings to relevant literature in the field. Twelve UTs are identified, with four showing the strongest impacts on predicting deprivation. This study brings novel insights on the morphology of deprivation of Isfahan, while contextualising them with respect to domain-specific studies, which have predominantly focused on Western cities. The proposed methodology can be replicated to explore morphologies of deprivation in different contexts, further our understanding of the topic, and potentially inform planning and policy making.

The modern discipline of urban morphology gives us a ground for the comparative analysis of cities, which increasingly includes specific quantitative elements. In this paper, we make a further step forward towards the definition of a general method for the classification of urban form. We draw from morphometrics and taxonomy in life sciences to propose such method, which we name 'urban morphometrics'. We then test it on a unit of the urban landscape named 'Sanctuary Area' (SA), explored in 45 cities whose origins span four historic time periods: Historic (medieval), Industrial (19th century), New Towns (post-WWII, high-rise) and Sprawl (post-WWII, low-rise). We describe each SA through 207 physical dimensions and then use these to discover features that discriminate them among the four temporal groups. Nine dimensions emerge as sufficient to correctly classify 90% of the urban settings by their historic origins. These nine attributes largely identify an area's 'visible identity' as reflected by three characteristics: (1) block perimeterness, or the way buildings define the street-edge; (2) building coverage, or the way buildings cover the land and (3) regular plot coverage, or the extent to which blocks are made of plots that have main access from a street. Hierarchical cluster analysis utilising only the nine key variables nearly perfectly clusters each SA according to its historic origin; moreover, the resulting dendrogram shows, just after WWII, the first 'bifurcation' of urban history, with the emergence of the modern city as a new 'species' of urban form. With 'urban morphometrics' we hope to extend urban morphological research and contribute to understanding the way cities evolve.