Urban Morphology

Every measure of a city is a measure of its footprints, its land unit and its boundary.

The urban morphology path, from footprints and land units to blocks, street networks and the edge of the city. footprints, land, streets, boundary1footprintsOSM, Overture, BAG2land unitscells, blocks, grids3streetsorientation, metrics4the cityfabric types, extentStage one decides what a building is; every later number inherits it

Urban form can be measured from open data anywhere, and every number depends on three choices made before the first calculation: which footprints, which unit of land, and where the city stops. The same Den Haag buildings give a floor area ratio of 1.92 or 2.43 depending on the land unit, and a grid turned 45° scores 0.61 on orientation order where Chicago’s, aligned with the compass, scores 0.87. These guides start with the elements of form, density measures, orientation, tessellation, blocks and urban extent; then download footprints from OSM, Overture and the 3D BAG, compute shape metrics, tessellate, polygonise blocks, measure coverage and floor area, cluster fabric types, compute network statistics and delineate urban centres from GHSL — with the fixes for tessellations that fail, orientation entropies computed wrong, densities that follow the boundary, buildings missing from OSM and blocks that are really street space.

Step seven is the one every later number depends on: once the footprint source is chosen, the tessellation, the density measures and the fabric types all inherit its definition of a building, and the fixes at the end are mostly about checking that inheritance.

Start here

The cornerstone guide — the whole workflow end to end. Everything after it goes deeper into one part of it.

Step 1 Urban Morphology Explained urban morphology explained Begin the path →

The full path, in order

The concepts underneath the work, then each task, then the errors that task produces. Work down, or jump to the step you need.

  1. Building Density Measures Explained floor area ratio coverage explained 🧭 Concept
  2. Street Network Orientation Explained street orientation order explained 🧭 Concept
  3. Morphological Tessellation Explained morphological tessellation explained 🧭 Concept
  4. Urban Blocks Explained urban block size explained 🧭 Concept
  5. Urban Extent Explained urban extent definition 🧭 Concept
  6. How to Download Building Footprints from OSM and Overture in Python building footprints overture osm python ⚙️ How-To
  7. How to Calculate Building Shape Metrics in Python building shape metrics python ⚙️ How-To
  8. How to Measure Street Orientation Entropy in Python street orientation entropy python ⚙️ How-To
  9. How to Create a Morphological Tessellation in Python momepy tessellation python ⚙️ How-To
  10. How to Extract Urban Blocks from a Street Network in Python urban blocks from streets python ⚙️ How-To
  11. How to Calculate Coverage and Floor Area Ratio in Python floor area ratio python ⚙️ How-To
  12. How to Cluster Urban Fabric Types in Python urban fabric clustering python ⚙️ How-To
  13. How to Calculate Street Network Metrics in Python street network metrics python ⚙️ How-To
  14. How to Delineate an Urban Extent from GHSL in Python urban extent ghsl python ⚙️ How-To
  15. Tessellation Fails or Produces Odd Cells momepy tessellation error 🔧 Fix
  16. Street Orientation Looks Wrong street orientation entropy wrong 🔧 Fix
  17. Density Depends on the Boundary population density wrong area 🔧 Fix
  18. Buildings Missing from OSM osm buildings incomplete 🔧 Fix
  19. Blocks from Streets Come Out Wrong blocks from streets slivers 🔧 Fix

Topics this path covers

A path is a route; a topic is everything the site has on a subject. Open a topic to see the guides this path skips.

Urban form & morphology Networks & routing Geometry & topology Spatial statistics Census & demographics Data sources & downloads

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