The article presents the results of an investigation that aims at integrating different approaches to the analysis of the urban form. The proposed methodology integrates two lines of investigation: a) texture analysis of high resolution satellite images using fractal and lacunarity measures to describe the spatial distribution of pixels with similar gray levels; b) Visual Graph Analysis (VGA) that describes visual and access properties of urban open spaces. A second order analysis is proposed in order to describe the texture of VGA maps and investigate to what extent the underlying configurational and texture patterns are correlated.
The figure below shows the visual connectivity of 4 urban fragments from the city of Recife, Brazil. The light areas in each fragment correspond to the most visually connected public spaces.
This article was published on the annals of the
16th International Seminar on Urban Form held in Guangzhou (China) from 4 to 7 September 2009.
