Lesson 5: Urban Form and Buildings¶
Planning question: How dense is the urban fabric, and what shape is it?
Building footprints reveal the character of a place. You will compare Jayanagar and Shivajinagar with figure-ground maps, building shape measures and a ground coverage grid.
What you will learn¶
- Make figure-ground maps from OSM footprints
- Measure footprint area, compactness, elongation and orientation with momepy
- Calculate ground coverage on a 100 m grid
- Compare the morphology of two neighbourhoods
Key concepts¶
- Urban morphology: the study of the form of a city
- Ground coverage: the share of land covered by buildings
- Shape indices: numbers that describe building form
What you will make¶
Figure-ground maps and ground coverage heat maps for the two areas.
| Packages | osmnx, momepy, geopandas |
| Data | OpenStreetMap |
| Time | 30 to 45 minutes |
Try it yourself¶
The end of the notebook includes these exercises:
- Add Whitefield to the comparison.
- Change the grid cell size.
- Try another momepy measure.
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