Urban Form and Spatial Dispersion of Population in Cities
City; Urban Sprawl; Spatial Analysis; Python; Urban planning.
This doctoral research investigates the relationships between the spatial dispersion of population and the urban form of cities using automated tools in Python. Based on the study of urban complexity and its performance measures, at different scales, this work analyzes the real configuration of urban design for the graph’s theory, transport, and the Space Syntax Theory, which drive the city. This research aims to elaborate possible relationships and refutations for issues related to urban and regional planning and design. Therefore, urban configuration is the result of the functionality of the urban space, reflecting in the social logic of space. This urban space constitutes an empirical reality of the place, called sociological architecture. Defined by a system of barriers and permeability to movement, of transparencies and opacities to vision, of full and emptiness, the empirical reality of social expectations composes the different possibilities of encounters and avoidances between individuals. To assess the possible relationships between the spatial dispersion and the urban form, this study uses several computational tools to automate the description of urban space according to its hierarchical structure at global and local level, crossing a georeferenced database of 8,914 cities around the world, in a Geographic Information System - GIS. The theoretical foundation supports this methodological and technical approach of the Space Syntax Theory and graph theory, which employs the representation of axial maps and their attributes, mainly in terms of topological accessibility, as well as in the spatial identification of the site, based on GIS tools. Thus, this work analyzes the conflict between the most accessible areas and the concentration of people. With this, it identifies the influence of the city's urban project on the population's quality of life. It assesses aspects of historical evolution and current reality, inserted in the contemporary context of the cities, which have changed rapidly due to urban growth in recent decades.