Street morphology analysis citywide : a bi-dimensional approach

The configurational analysis of urban form is most commonly based on linear representations of streets. The space or right-of-way of streets, however, is subdivided into clearly demarcated and measurable space for pedestrians and vehicles which entails a much more complex spatial organisation than lines can represent. Because of the endurance of street layouts, the reallocation of streetspace becomes a key design operation for street adaptation to new types of movement technologies and for promoting active travel. The research introduces a new methodology for quantifying streetspace allocation of all streets in a large system using a geocomputational approach that both allows decoding high-resolution topographic data over a large geographic extent and can be replicated across multiple cities. I use GIS to produce a series of maps that describe the visual structure of the pedestrian-vehicular streetspace relation. The programmatic application of the street cross-section technique enables the comprehensive analysis of streetspace citywide at a high-spatial resolution offering new data to expand street morphology studies in informative ways with the potential for interrogating current street designs. From the analysis of the streetspace allocation of all streets in London, it is possible to argue that studying pedestrian and vehicular space allocation is not only important for understanding the reciprocal relationships between the design and strategic scales of streets but also valuable for supporting urban design and transport policies towards more people-oriented streets