Specifically, this paper takes Nanjing Xiaoxihu Historic Block as the core case and proposes the Cross-Scale Topological Network Model to construct a multi-level spatial structure covering street nodes, front-door spaces, courtyard nodes and functional room nodes.System.Through historical data analysis and field reconstruction, we recovered six morphological stages of six representative plots (Plots 1-6) of Xiaoxihu from 1930s to 2010s, and accordingly drew cross-scale network topology maps and J-Graph maps to quantify their structural depth, node coupling relationships and link path changes.

Based on this, this paper proposes Structure Evolution Degree (SED), which measures the evolution of the network in time series from three dimensions: node type variation, path depth perturbation and spatial function reorganization.Instead of relying on the field-of-view analysis, SED is based on the graph structural features to capture the “structural tension” of the urban evolution process.Instead of relying on visual field analysis, SED is based on graph structural features to capture the “structural tension” and “systematic rupture” in the urban evolution process.

In order to further explain the social mechanism behind the spatial evolution, this paper introduces the Multi-layered Graph Framework, which constructs a triangular structural model consisting of Urban Morphology Layer, Interaction Layer and Social Behavior Layer, and identifies the social mechanisms behind the spatial evolution.We introduce the Multi-layered Graph Framework to construct a triangular structural model consisting of “Urban Morphology Layer”, “Interaction Layer”, and “Social Behavior Layer”, to identify the “Key Subgraphs” generated by the social forces embedded in the spatial structure, and to systematically develop the analysis of the “Urban Morphology Layer” and the “Social Behavior Layer”. The study identifies the “Key Subgraphs” generated by the embedding of social forces in the spatial structure, and systematically develops a social mapping explanation of “how space changes”.

On the theoretical level, the study integrates Lefebvre’s theory of “spatial production”, Bourdieu’s theory of “Habitus and field” and Foucault’s “spatial mechanism of power” to construct a graph structure to explain the encoding paths of institutional regulation, residents’ habitus and community negotiation in the nodal space.The mechanism analysis of Plot 3 and Plot 5 shows that the spatial reconstruction process of Xiaoxihu presents a hybrid system of mechanisms consisting of Permanence, Variation and Permutation, and its evolution is not linear, but rather consists of multiple social mechanisms focusing on the space in front of the door, the space in front of the door, the space in front of the door, the space in front of the door, the space in front of the door, the space in front of the door, the space in front of the door, the space in front of the door, the space in front of the door, the space in front of the door, the space in front of the door and the space in front of the door.social mechanisms focused on nodes such as front-door space, courtyard junction, and functional room paths, forming structural responses in the topological map.

At the methodological level, this study bridges the path break between typological and structuralist approaches, and proposes a graph structural system that can be used for spatial transformation analysis, social mechanism identification and design strategy prediction, which serves both micro-node analysis and has the potential to be translated to machine learning (e.g., graph neural network) models.

At the empirical level, the study reconstructs the topological mapping of Xiaoxihu Block at six stages, and analyzes the SED trend, P/V/P type and key sub-maps of typical plots against each other to reveal the topological responses of residents’ behavior, property rights transfer and institutional intervention in the spatial structure, providing concrete paths to understand how the “Reality” is generated and identified in the spatial hierarchy.This provides a concrete path for understanding how “social reality” is generated and recognized in the spatial hierarchy.

In summary, the methodology system of “cross-scale graph structure + social mechanism modeling” proposed in this paper not only expands the toolbox of urban morphology research, but also provides the theoretical foundation and technical framework for the identification of spatial strategies and expression of negotiation mechanisms in the future scenarios of community governance, urban regeneration, participatory design, and morphology intelligent generation.

The post Mathematics of urban morphology appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

Nowadays, because of the climate change challenges and the consequent spread of renewable energies ¬– whose link with the Earth’s resources is strong and evident – energy production seems to increasingly become and impactful activity on the landscape. This impact – usually negatively evaluated – often causes a conflict between those who consider the preservation of the natural landscapes as a priority, and those who turn the gaze more on the ecological and environmental emergency.

Within this complex and multifaced scenario, the main key issues of the research are:

– What is a sustainable energy landscape, which opportunities does it offer, and which are the current challenges?

– Designing new solar energy landscapes, what room for manoeuvre does the landscape architecture project have?

– How can the shape of solar energy facilities re-design contemporary landscapes?

This research deals with the topic of morphological studies and architectural design of photovoltaic facilities as a tool to manage the current energy transition through the landscape architecture, and as opportunities to create sustainable, cultural, and quality landscapes.

The importance of conceiving photovoltaic fields not as temporary and unplanned objects but as architectures that are part of our urban and rural landscapes is the main thesis of this research. Because if it is true that photovoltaic fields may not just be temporary infrastructures but buildings, then it is also true that we can conceive of those buildings as works of architecture.

From a methodological point of view, the research combines an analytical approach and a research-by-design method.

One of the main aims of the research is to identify scalable design strategies for the project of new large-scale renewable energy plants.The research ambition is to impact contemporary attitudes in energy plant design activity, proposing new landscape typologies whose cultural values could be acknowledged, shared and enjoyed.

The research overlaps with the main goals of the ONU Agenda 2030 and the European Green Deal 2050, and includes the instances and the debates promoted both by associations and organizations for landscape quality preservation – e.g.: Council of Europe Landscape Convention, Europa Nostra, etc. – and the environmentalist activists and associations.

The thesis states that solar power plants are comparable to production factories, and their design belongs to the realm of architectural design. Until now, solar fields have been considered as temporary infrastructures which has led to lower attention to design qualities and a neglect of these facilities.

At the beginning of the thesis, the relevant contribution of architecture in the design of energy plants and landscapes becomes evident through the study of best practices. After the theoretical and historical framing, the solar energy landscapes are selected for the following studies. The research investigates the architectural forms that these infrastructures have generated in contemporary landscapes (case study analysis). Finally, the design experimentations suggest that the design of these energy plants not only can follow the parameters of architectural composition but also has the potential to design landscapes rich in qualities, to be discussed and evaluated together with the local communities and all the actors involved.

In this way, the architectural discipline can play a key role in designing and managing the current challenges of the energy transition, applying its strategies and methods to design renewable energy production spaces, and sustainable contemporary and future landscapes.

The post The Form of Energy. Solar landscapes in Europe as an architectural issue appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

The doctoral scholarship, focusing on issues related to inland and marginalised areas of the country, was funded by the Development and Cohesion Fund as part of the ‘Research and Innovation 2015-2017’ Plan, with reference to DDG MIUR 1233 of 30 July 2020. ‘National Operational Programme for Research and Innovation 2014-2020 Research Plan 30 July 2020 ‘National Operational Programme for Research and Innovation 2014-2020 Research and Innovation Plan 2015-2017 XXXVI Cycle’.

The post Beyond Marginality: Welfare, Governance and Spatial Imaginaries appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

The emergence of urban morphology as a distinct strand within architectural literature, focusing on core components like streets, buildings, and blocks, sets the context for this study. Among these elements, urban blocks hold a pivotal role due to their central position and interactions with other components. This research concentrates on urban blocks, specifically focusing on their detection and classification using machine learning techniques. It delves into the interplay between urban morphology and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), aiming to integrate these fields to gain deeper insights into urban form elements.

In addition to the introductory chapter, this study is organized into three distinct parts, each with a specific focus and set of objectives. The first part is devoted to developing a theoretical framework on the mapping of urban morphology in relation to AI applications, emphasizing the contemporary shift towards quantitative and data-driven approaches in analyzing urban form. This part delves into the quantification of urban form, the role of data-driven studies in urban analysis, and the critical impact of AI and remote sensing technologies in this field. It also presents a comprehensive review of various definitions found in the literature and introduces a novel, systematic approach for defining this concept. This part comprehends chapters 1 and 2.

The second part, representing the core of the thesis, centers on the model application, offering a detailed workflow, analytical framework, and insights into the extraction process, delving into the detailed application of a model incorporating deep learning on exemplifying on urban block detection and classification. This part comprehends chapter 3.

The final part focuses on the practical application of the method developed in this study. It delves into the urban block classification, analyzing the results derived from applying the model in different cities. This section examines the use of predefined metrics, conducts comparative analyses of clusters both within and across cities, and extends into the taxonomic comparison of two approaches, the conventional method, where blocks are defined based on their constituent elements (streets, plots, buildings) and classified based on their shape and size and the AI-driven approach. Additionally, it includes a thorough discussion on the feasibility and implications of this approach, thereby offering valuable insights into the future intersection of urban morphology and machine learning. This part comprehends chapters 4 and 5.

This research leverages high-resolution satellite imagery, capturing an extensive and diverse spectrum of urban forms from cities across Europe, America, and Asia. These images are accurately labeled to create a training dataset, an indispensable element in machine learning applications. In fact, the premise of supervised machine learning lies in training a model on a subset of data for which the variables of interest, those to be predicted, are known. In this study, the training dataset comprises a large collection of urban form images, with the urban block, the primary variable of interest, explicitly identified and marked by the researcher. Once the model ‘learns’ from this set of data, it can be used to make predictions on the presence or absence of urban blocks in previously unseen data, where the variable of interest is initially unknown.

The outcomes of this study delineate a comprehensive path for urban researchers to detect and classify urban forms. The results include the development of a taxonomy and a detailed analysis of its indicators, grounded in relevant literature. Beyond its conceptual contributions, the preliminary findings offer a glimpse into the outcomes of training and the evaluation of the supervised machine learning model utilized for the prediction and classification of urban blocks. This research marks a significant advancement in the integration of AI and machine learning techniques with urban morphology practices, laying the groundwork for a novel trajectory in future studies at this intersection. The study not only contributes to theoretical frameworks but also provides practical insights, exemplifying the potential of advanced technologies in reshaping urban research methodologies.

The post A comprehensive methodology for detecting, classifying and comparing urban blocks with Artificial Intelligence appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

Retail businesses compete in an oligopolistic market providing specific goods or services to consumers at observable market prices. Retailers decide how similar their product may be with respect to competitors and decide their best location. Location in the retail sector is meant to be more than just a geographic position. It is the relative position that a retailer can occupy given the proximity to other stores, and to potential consumers. It is an evaluation of social, economic, and even morphological aspects of urban life, such as centrality and accessibility, layout and design, visibility and popularity, cluster attraction, and spill-over. Hence, commercial city patterns are the result of a long process in which retailers deal with urban morphology, given that space is a scarce resource to be allocated with competitors.

The main objective of the research is to investigate the position of retailers in the municipality of Turin and the drivers that influence this fundamental decision process. The work is focused on the real estate and urban flow of people to indagate how these factors impact the commercial city pattern.

The post The distribution of retailers in Turin. appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

Affected by chronic natural disasters, Italy is a fragile territory by nature. In the last 50 years, eight violent earthquakes hit it, three in the Central Apennines’ diffuse areas in the previous twenty years alone.

The rules, the processes, and the solutions for emergency management in Italy, and the world, have moved architectural design away from standardized solutions and lack attention to the territorial complexities.

All are combined with the slowness of reconstruction processes, often completed within 20 to 30 years of the event. Since the 2016 seismic events in Central Italy and looking at the spatial impact of temporary buildings, this research reflects the relationships between emergency and permanent urban settlements and their effects/transformations in that long time “in-between” on urban and regional reconstruction.

What role does the ‘temporary’ emergency project take on in Italian post-seismic territories, and what geographies does it produce? How is it possible to re-design possible futures for this permanent provisional legacy?

In the absence of consolidated cartographic studies on the issue, an overall, systemic, and national scale phenomenon perspective, the thesis aims to reflect on temporary management. Geospatial analyses support the reflections, and the mapping methods define and decode those “theoretically” provisional processes (from the geographical to the settlement scale). The perspective is overcoming emergency operations, from the concept of protection to the idea of incorporation and coexistence within design practices of long-term risks.

The research proposes the construction of a multi-scale and multi-temporal geographic database supported by a geographic information system (GIS), which allows the interaction between geomatic tools to be explored as urban design tools.

Through a historical diachrony and a critical comparison of Italian and international cases, the research aims to investigate the settlement transformation resulting from temporary solutions to the actions and processes of continuous displacement, re-foundation, and reconstruction.

One of the results is the design of a harmonised geospatial (database) Atlas of “temporary” solutions, giving back an empirical and accurate overview of the current phenomenon in Central Italy, measurement, using stratification of heterogeneous sources and information, often not updated.

From there, focusing on specific territorial case studies in the inner area of Central Italy, the thesis intends to identify potential transformative scenarios for the two half cities, the existing, destroyed one and the legacy of the new, temporary one.

How can they coexist in future possible reconstruction processes in regions and communities affected by endemic emergencies – natural, economic and anthropic – which are increasingly ordinary rather than extraordinary?

The post Permanent temporariness in the post-earthquake appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

Over the past two decades, the logistics of food distribution have undergone radical transformation processes, primarily aimed at increasing performativity. This has taken place through logistical refinement, technological advancement and increasing automation throughout the supply chain. In this framework, in Italy, a fundamental role is played by the Mass Market Retailers (MMR, in Italian GDO) that, in the last decade, have opened hundreds of Distribution Centers (DCs) located in strategic areas to serve their stores.

Considering the technical processes that regulate these spaces, as well as the relationships with multi-actor and supranational economic and logistic systems, the wide literature that deals with them tends to privilege observations aimed at their decontextualization and extra-territoriality. To the point of recognizing in them the nodes of a global network, an automated ‘technopoly’ capable of functioning without a human being.

Although this dimension is certainly relevant, the research aims at showing how Distribution Centers are now spaced strongly linked to the territories within which they have been implanted, and how over time they have built economic and social relationships progressively more complex and durable.

In support of this thesis, in the research, I investigate about ten Distribution Centers of several MMR companies, located in three case study areas. These are selected among sites with a high logistics density, thus becoming distribution hubs at the regional and national levels.

On the one hand, the research seeks to build a solid theoretical framework that situates distribution centres primarily within urban studies of the logistics world. On the other hand, mainly through fieldwork, I seek to explore numerous aspects of DCs, focusing on the physical dimension of the places, the technical-functional dimension, the working conditions of the employees and the economic and social dynamics that the centres to determine and modify at the local level. The functioning of these spaces conveys specific forms of urbanity. The research intends to support how these forms require precise and relevant investigations, descriptions, and interpretations, capable of grounding the DCs in the territories in which they are located. Thus, capturing the importance of local relationships, the implications on mobility, housing, the redefinition of the relationship between space, automation, and human. Such an interpretative framework can help to relocate distribution centres within a more complex network of relationships, not just at the supra-local level. For this reason, it suggests the need to activate new policies and new projects.

Watch the video abstract on Youtube

The post Food Logistics-led Urbanization appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

A constant stream of trucks and people move every day between Addis Ababa and Djibouti, where most of the goods moving to and from Ethiopia transit, making this route a strategic economic corridor for both countries. The importance of this route can be traced back to the colonial past when, at the beginning of the 20th century, the French built the Chemin de Fer Djibouto-Éthiopien. Based on this colonial infrastructure, a new railway was inaugurated in 2018 as a key component of an ambitious effort to transform the country to middle-income status by 2025. It is a political strategy that plans to spur industrialisation, urbanisation and economic growth through the construction of new infrastructure.

This research looks at the spatial features of the urban development that is taking place along the Addis Ababa-Djibouti infrastructure corridor. The overlapping between infrastructure, industrialisation and development informs this research in an attempt to draft a compendium of the urban. The dualistic nature of space – real/imaginative – has oriented the research, offering the possibility of relocating the urban in an expanded dimension, where narratives of the built space are combined with the analysis of official documents, political discourses and visual materials, in an attempt to never move too far away from the architectural object and at the same time to capture, as suggested by De Boeck ‘the material articulations of imagination, ideology and social life’ associated with the development of infrastructure networks.

The post Infrastructure spaces appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

The adaptive reuse of existing buildings is central to the contemporary architecture debate. This phenomenon has become so important that prominent architects argue that the total demolition of any historic building in the contemporary city seems unthinkable.

Within this debate, the concept of potential emerges as a commonly-used, but undefined term in the field of preservation: its meaning is questionable.

Stemming from the roots of the contemporary preservationist debate, the present research embraces well-established theories in building adaptation and the most innovative approaches such as ‘experimental preservation’, ‘post-preservation’ and ‘counterpreservation’, considering heritage as an evolving concept.

In the field of adaptive reuse, the recovery of ‘untapped potential’ in existing buildings is one of the main adaptation goals. Although the use of the term potential varies in the literature, there appears to be some agreement within the field of adaptive reuse that it refers to ‘unexpressed transformability’.

This research aims to define, decode and assess the concept of transformative potential in existing buildings through a post-functional perspective.

The work intends to define this potential by its physical elements in the architectural realm.

The theoretical objective of this research is to add the concept of transformative potential to the current preservationist debate. This novel notion may then widen preservation theory in evaluating existing buildings by ‘tendencies’ embedded in the architectural form.

The research is broken down into four main chapters; the first chapter serves as a theoretical framework based on a literature review.

The critical literature review identifies many kinds of potentials and the present research chooses to develop transformative potential, mainly focusing on the physical features of buildings.

Adaptive reuse theory presents ‘building adaptation potential’ as the sum of elements establishing the degree of freedom in adaptation. Moreover, how its loss can be prevented emerges as fundamental, without defining this potential.

The hypothesis addresses this transformative potential in the architectural form, considering this form as a state of equilibrium between the structure of space and materials. The thesis will investigate both the qualitative and quantitative evolution of the form, in morphology and materials, at a specific time and following diachronic and transcalar perspectives.

A well-established approach in adaptive reuse studies, the methodology of this work is to refer to collective case studies. The sample consists of 20 successful cases of buildings adapted across Europe in the last 15 years, including adaptation projects from radical to minimum intervention. The case study selection will consist of studies within a variety of morphostructural types. The classification of buildings in typologies covers the classical treatises spanning from Vitruvius to Durand. Here, the proposal is to unbuild the classical typological classification in place of a morphological one.

The methodology integrates three main methods. Firstly, the morphological analysis consists of a critical redrawing of original buildings, highlighting dimensional features and configurational aspects and their evolution in the urban context. Secondly, the retrospective embodied energy assessment shows the flow of primary materials in each reuse activity using an I-O simplified formula. Thirdly, the evaluation of decay stages applies a reviewed ‘shearing layers’ method to assess building integrity over time.

The task is to express the transformative potential as a relationship between dimensional features, embodied energy and rate of decay, outlining a pattern within existing features and adaptive reuse interventions. This transformative potential may give weight to multiple use options in existing buildings, disassembling traditional classification by original function.

The post The Potential of Form appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

The reduction of energy consumptions in buildings is a fundamental point in the EU policies to achieve energy and climate targets. The aim of this research is to design Urban-Scale Energy Models –using GIS tools– able to explore energy consumption, production and productivity and to evaluate how energy consumption changes according to the urban environment and climate conditions. The goal is to create a platform, such as an urban-energy atlas, to help urban planners and policy makers to plan sustainable cities and smart energy systems. These energy models and tools at territorial scale may be used to:

explore energy consumption, emissions and thermal comfort conditions;

quantitatively assess renovation strategies and their impacts on the territory;

promote smart green solutions with the use of financial mechanisms and incentives;

identify effective energy policies, considering the real characteristics of the buildings, population and urban morphology (e.g. for building codes).

The post Smart Energy Solutions for Sustainable Cities and Policies appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.