Understanding the urban form of informal settlements

Cities are the largest complex adaptive system in human culture and have always been changing in time according to largely unplanned patterns of development. Though Urban Morphology, a specific field of urban design studies, has typically addressed studies of form in cities and the process of formation and transformation, with emphasis on historical cases, diachronic comparative studies are still relatively rare, especially those based on quantitative analysis. As a result, we are still far from laying the ground for a comprehensive understanding of the model of change of the urban form. However,developing such understanding is extremely relevant as the cross-scale interlink between the spatial and social-economic dynamics in cities is increasingly recognized to play a major role in the complex functioning of urban systems and quality of life. I study the urban form of San Pedro de Ate, an informal settlement in Lima, Peru, throughout its entire cycle of development over the last seventy years. My study, conducted through a four-month on-site research, is based on the idea that informal settlements would change according to patterns similar to those of pre-modern cities, though at a much faster pace of growth. To do so, aerial photographs of four different time periods (from 1949 to 2005) have been digitized and then morphological analysis has been conducted at four scales: Building, Plot, Block and Settlement - comprehensive of Open Space and Street Network - that I have called `Pattern Analysis'. This is a three-step procedure, consisting of i ) Pattern Detection: patterns of change in the settlement's urban structure are identified and classified using recognised literature on pre-modern cities, ii ) Pattern Measurement: a quantitative analysis based on the computation of mathematical indicators of urban form, and iii ) Longitudinal Analysis: the study of the development of urban form in time. Similarities between informal settlements and historic cities, have been further assessed by means of a comparative quantitative analysis between San Pedro de Ate and Muratori's study of San Bartolomio - one of the first neighbourhoods in Venice. This comparison represents a unique example and is conducted within both diachronic studies among individual cases and diatopic ones through different cases. Results show that the urban elements in San Pedro are reduced in dimension but higher in density with respect to cases studied in the literature so far. Moreover, the emergence of the urban elements in time and their densification process seem to follow a two-step growth: an initial rapid development, followed by a much slower one.Cities are the largest complex adaptive system in human culture and have always been changing in time according to largely unplanned patterns of development. Though Urban Morphology, a specific field of urban design studies, has typically addressed studies of form in cities and the process of formation and transformation, with emphasis on historical cases, diachronic comparative studies are still relatively rare, especially those based on quantitative analysis. As a result, we are still far from laying the ground for a comprehensive understanding of the model of change of the urban form. However,developing such understanding is extremely relevant as the cross-scale interlink between the spatial and social-economic dynamics in cities is increasingly recognized to play a major role in the complex functioning of urban systems and quality of life. I study the urban form of San Pedro de Ate, an informal settlement in Lima, Peru, throughout its entire cycle of development over the last seventy years. My study, conducted through a four-month on-site research, is based on the idea that informal settlements would change according to patterns similar to those of pre-modern cities, though at a much faster pace of growth. To do so, aerial photographs of four different time periods (from 1949 to 2005) have been digitized and then morphological analysis has been conducted at four scales: Building, Plot, Block and Settlement - comprehensive of Open Space and Street Network - that I have called `Pattern Analysis'. This is a three-step procedure, consisting of i ) Pattern Detection: patterns of change in the settlement's urban structure are identified and classified using recognised literature on pre-modern cities, ii ) Pattern Measurement: a quantitative analysis based on the computation of mathematical indicators of urban form, and iii ) Longitudinal Analysis: the study of the development of urban form in time. Similarities between informal settlements and historic cities, have been further assessed by means of a comparative quantitative analysis between San Pedro de Ate and Muratori's study of San Bartolomio - one of the first neighbourhoods in Venice. This comparison represents a unique example and is conducted within both diachronic studies among individual cases and diatopic ones through different cases. Results show that the urban elements in San Pedro are reduced in dimension but higher in density with respect to cases studied in the literature so far. Moreover, the emergence of the urban elements in time and their densification process seem to follow a two-step growth: an initial rapid development, followed by a much slower one