The form of a metropolitan territory: The case of Amsterdam and its periphery

The Flat City space syntax model (Read, 2005) has been developed to extend the functionality of the space syntax method into the periphery of the contemporary metropolitan city, and to provide a method for describing and evaluating the form of contemporary urban landscapes. The Flat City model proposes that the built environment is structured into layers of ‘place-regions’, each layer with its own definitive scale and each with its own connective network enabling the movement which ties that level of ‘places’ together into a ‘region’. A detailed empirical study of the spatial distribution of street-edge commercial functions in the metropolitan territory around Amsterdam is presented here in the terms of this model. This distribution is understood as form and it will be proposed that different formations appear in the territory as ‘emergent’ products of processes of connection and movement within their respective ‘place-region’ layers, and of their local ‘grounding’ within layers at lower scale-levels. Detailed data of visible street-edge commercial function was collected for the entire landscape region and classed according to the scales of spread of their customer-bases. This data was mapped against their corresponding scales of movement ‘grids’ of the ‘place-region’ layers to locate them and to trace their generation as urbanization patterns in the metropolitan surface. A formation process appears to follow a clear logic of scale, functions locating themselves in relation to the movement grid which corresponds to the scale of spread of their customer base, while exact ‘content’ varies. But a process of ‘grounding’ appears to give many of these patterns their characteristic forms. Final settlement form depends very often on a process of the ‘grounding’ of higher-scaled functions in lower-scaled movement grids in a relation of ‘co-orientation’ with the higher-scaled movement grids. A provisional classification schema of metropolitan urbanization form is proposed on the basis of this one case and the method is briefly critically evaluated against other descriptions of metropolitan territorial form including those of Boeri, Lanzani and Marini, Oswald and Baccini, and De Boeck and De Geyter