Types of Morphological Configurations of the City across the Globe – a Remote Sensing based Comparative Approach

The spatial configuration of the built city is like DNA – it is unique to each city. And yet, it could be shown, that spatial configurations of cities are very similar in certain geographical regions on our globe and, in turn, very different from other regions. In this study, the classification scheme of local climate zones (LCZs) is applied to spatially map the morphological appearances of the cities across the globe. We empirically explore their spatial configurations using different city models and three alternative data representations. We use a single spatial unit model to compute a global land use mixture, a monocentric model to compute density diffusion, as well as to describe a concentric land use mixture at intra-urban scale. We then, for each data representation, cluster cities using k-means to extract typologies of urban morphology. While the results show 1) the geographical congruence of some types of urban morphology, they also show that there are also 2) strong intra-regional variabilities, and 3) multiple cross-regional types. These point to deeper premises than the geographical location of the respective city as main encoder for the city’s DNA. Through the comparison of the results obtained for the three data representation, we discuss these various aspects