Form and urban change – An urban morphometric study of five gentrified neighbourhoods in London

Abstract

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 emphasise 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 paper, 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 recognisable 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.

The statistical physics of cities

“…(See for example the review about statistical physics of social dynamics [9] and about models of collective behaviours [28].) Among these, social segregation -and in particular gentrification -is an important topic for cities, and it has been shown [29] that areas that have gentrified display similar morphological patterns. Modelling the dynamics of segregation is an important topic.…”

Measuring health of highway network configuration against dynamic Origin-Destination demand network using weighted complex network analysis

“…Furthermore, since the ultimate goal of our proposed method is to provide a more efficient direction to the user, the effect of the proposed method on the urban structure and its future development may need to be further considered from the urbanization perspective. The recent researches such as [ 33 , 34 ] can be used for the network configuration setting by considering the spatial features in the urban area.…”

A Machine Learning Approach to Study the Relationship between Features of the Urban Environment and Street Value

“…Modern European cities are characterised by the presence of different types of urban fabrics; for example, there exist a dense and irregular one, typical of historic centres, a more spaced out and regular one, common to urban extensions of the XIX and early XX century, and a more discontinuous one, characterised by free-standing buildings surrounded by lawns and parking lots, typical of the modernist period. Quantitative measures of the forms of urban fabrics can be found, for example, in the works by Berghauser-Pont and Haupt [31], Gil et al [32], Araldi and Fusco [33], and Venerandi et al [34]. For example, Araldi and Fusco proposed the Multiple Fabric Assessment method (MFA), a technique that automatically detects types of urban fabrics based on morphometric descriptors of proximity bands around street segments, by taking into account the contextual role of interconnected street segments.…”