Morpho: Combining morphological measures

Abstract

The physical form of cities has an influence on the main social, economic and environmental aspects of our lives. The understanding of this influence depends on the availability of effective and specific morphological approaches to deal with the main elements of urban form. Despite the emergence of different approaches, it can be argued that most of them are developed in isolation, meaning that ‘we are not learning from each other’, and that some approaches focus not on the physical and tangible elements of urban form, but on abstract characteristics of the city. Against this background, the Morpho methodology was recently proposed to assess the physical form of urban areas. Morpho is framed by a concept of ‘urbanity’, combining seven measures to capture how streets, plots and buildings are arranged in different ways in order to shape different types of the built environment. Reported previously at the street scale, this paper extends the application of Morpho to the city scale. In addition, based on a systematic application in different case studies, the paper offers a reflection on the contribution of this methodology to a better understanding of the physical form of cities.