Talat,
On 17 Oct 2008, at 06:51, Talat Munshi wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> As part of my research on urban form and travel behavior
> relationship, I
> am looking at methods and techniques to quantify urban form in
> different
> contextual situations.
>
> To draw a background to the methods that can be used to quantify urban
> form, I am looking for literature that discuss spatial and non
> spatial
> data availability and compatibility in different contextual
> (developed/developing/under developed) situations.
>
> If you know any article that discusses the same, I will be thankful to
> you for sharing it.
We should talk...
My PhD research is on the connections between walking and urban form,
looking at how attitudes are affected by different urban areas. I will
be using quantitative measures of urban form to do this:
1. Space Syntax. Space Syntax uses mathematical graph theory to
describe the connectivity of points in the street network. The book I
am reading about this is "Space is the machine" by Bill Hillier, which
is available at http://www.spacesyntax.com/en/downloads/downloads/space-is-the-machine.aspx
2. Physical measurements. This can be difficult because many urban
areas have very similar characteristics, which means you get
multicollinearity when making a mathematical model. I will be trying
to avoid this by developing a classification system for urban form
"species" by "family" and "genus". Each "species" will have similar
characteristics, and is theorised to have arisen at about the same
time to fill a similar niche. My system will be based around UK
development history, but I hope it will be adaptable to anywhere else,
as long as I have a good way of organising it. I have found several
papers (mostly from the US) that take a small set of variables, and
are particularly interested in things like how "grid like" the street
network is, but you have also reminded me that Elwin Koster at The
University of Groningen ( http://www.let.rug.nl/~ekoster/ ) has done
some work on digital cartography and urban morphology (the study of
urban form).
Let me know in more detail what you are interested in, and we can
exchange references.
--
Anzir Boodoo, PhD student
The Institute for Transport Studies, The University of Leeds, LEEDS
LS2 9JT
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