Urban Lacunarity Analysis of Medium-Size Brazilian Cities

Open spaces of cities play a key role at ensuring environmental sustainability and also at the restructuring of its urban territory. Evaluating the distribution of those spaces in the cities is a necessary requirement in the definition of guidelines for Public Master Plans. In this context, this paper aims to evaluate the distribution of the open spaces in 10 similar-sized brazilian cities, whose morphologies are the result of different processes of occupation and urban growth by using the multiscalar measure of lacunarity, complementary to the fractal dimension, which allows to distinguish different spatial patterns of density, packaging, dispersion and permeability. The values of lacunarity were obtained from georeferenced binary images of each city’s major urban areas. The results demonstrate that almost all of the cities have lacunarity curves with concave down, associated with the presence of well-dispersed open spaces among their urban areas.

This paper was presented at Portuguese-language Network of Urban Morphology (PNUM) in Guimarães, Portugal from 15 to 16 July 2016.