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You can find the transcript through this link.

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Are you interested how urban form has been influenced by globalisation?

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Debate of the article titled The global homogenization of urban form – An assessment of 194 cities from 2020, by Richard Lemoine-Rodríguez, Luis Inostroza, and Harald Zepp, published in the Landscape and Urban Planning journal.

This is a great preparation to our next interview with Alex Josephson in episode 406 talking about the globalisation of architecture.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see the effect of globalisation on the built environment. This article shows most of cities becoming more homogenous and transitional as a consequence of fragmentation and compactness.

Find the article through this link.

Abstract: The spatial structure of cities, i.e. their composition, shape and degree of fragmentation or compactness, is a physical expression reflecting development efficiency. Identifying the evolution of urban systems in time and space is crucial towards sustainable urban development. In this paper, we assess the spatial structure of 194 cities from 1990 and 2015, in order to identify patterns, clusters of similar cities, trajectories, and the global distribution of urban form. We delineated the contiguous urban fabric, employed landscape metrics to quantitatively describe urban patterns, applied a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimension of data to an uncorrelated set of variables and identified groups of cities with similar urban forms by means of hierarchical clustering. We found four types of urban form: compact-grey, transitional, ragged-small and fragmented-complex cities. Globally, continentally and regionally, cities have followed a trend towards more homogeneous urban forms, most of them becoming transitional as a consequence of both, processes of fragmentation and compactness. The only exception of this trend is a group of large cities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which are still predominantly fragmented-complex. Under the persisting process of urban expansion, small to medium-sized cities showed to be the most dynamic in terms of expansion and change in urban form, which makes them key towards sustainable urban development. This analysis contributes to the understanding of the transformations induced by the process of urban expansion that shapes urban form. Such information is crucial for achieving urban sustainability.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• No.259R – Lessons from nine urban areas using data to drive local sustainable development
• No.404 – Interview with Jeff Siegler about ownership

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