Assessment of Patterns of Spatial Transformations

Abstract

Sustainable urban design for historical city centres should carefully focus on the transformations in urban morphology and land use aspects as a starting point. It is important to understand the process of an urban space's evolution to assess its future design. This paper aims to assess the patterns of urban transformation in historical city centres that belong to different periods of their history, to highlight the relationship between the occupation of urban space and urban transformation. Aiming to understand the impact of different factors on urban transformation and identity, the research method adopts space syntax analysis using axial and segment maps to compare the variation of syntactic parameters over time for three city centres in Algeria (Algiers, Constantine and Tlemcen) in three periods that mark the different key stages of urban evolution. The selected case studies represent typical examples of the foundation and evolution of cities in Algeria. Results show that patterns of urban evolution in the three city centres present almost similar variations, despite the global differences between them (size, population, initial morphology, and site topography) in addition to the operations of transforming the urban morphology. The main findings of this research can be stated as a model of urban evolution for the historic city centres in Algeria during the mentioned periods.1.