Decomposing and Recomposing Urban Fabric: The City from the Pedestrian Point of View

Describing the Residential Valorisation of Urban Space at the Street Level. The French Riviera as Example

“…Researchers in the field of Urban Geography defined several street-based measures to quantify aspects of urban form and commerce [ 7 , 8 ]. The former are, for example, the fragmentation of street fronts and canyon effect [ 7 ].…”

“…Researchers in the field of Urban Geography defined several street-based measures to quantify aspects of urban form and commerce [ 7 , 8 ]. The former are, for example, the fragmentation of street fronts and canyon effect [ 7 ]. Measures of commerce at the street level were, for example, the richness of retail categories within 300 m of a store location or the ratio between the number of stores belonging to a specific category and the total number of stores within the same radius [ 8 ].…”

“…In Urban Design, for example, researchers defined and computed several street-based metrics of network centrality (e.g., betweenness, closeness) [ 5 ]. Similarly, in the field of Geography, academics quantified several aspects of urban form and commerce at the street level and summarised this information through Bayesian clustering [ 7 , 8 ]. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, street-based indicators of the housing market have never been defined.…”

Multiple Fabric Assessment: Focus on Method Versatility and Flexibility

“…3) Clustering of local patterns through Bayesian probabilities in order to identify and characterize urban fabrics: spatial units are finally described by probability values of assignment to each resulting class. In the French Riviera case study [25][26][27][28], high quality data about street network (used for both PB creation and indicator calculations), buildings, parcels and elevation were made available by the French National Geographic Institute (IGN). From there, 21 indicators of urban form have been implemented and calculated at the proximity band level.…”

“…Multiple Fabric Assessment (abbr. MFA), has been proposed to integrate the human scale perspective in urban fabric studies through a combination of powerful geoprocessing methods [25][26][27][28]. MFA diverges considerably from most of the aforementioned studies since it is centered on urban spaces as they can be perceived by pedestrians, still sharing the same goal of identifying and characterizing urban fabrics.…”