Automating a Quantitative Representation of Urban Form: Integrating Built Environment Analyses as Input for Studies Relating Tangible and Intangible Dimensions of Places

To study the effects of urban environments on intangible dimensions of places, such as place attachment, in terms of their urban planning principles requires for spatial configurations and patterns in the urban form to be identified in a systematic and reliable way, ensuring comparability and allowing the evaluation of different approaches to urban design. Built environments are traditionally broken down into constituent structures, often analysed in parallel, if not independently, to understand urban scenarios. As a results, the interrelationships between the structures as coexisting aspects are lost and, with it, part of the complex character of the urban scenarios. A methodological approach to automate urban analyses of tangible aspects and integrate the results into a quantitative representation of physical and design patterns of places was presented in a workshop held during the Fourth International Symposium on Platial Information Science (PLATIAL'23) with the aim of gathering expert opinions and evaluate the methodology. Through the contributions and discussions, the strong need to consolidate a model to describe urban scenarios through the simultaneous consideration of multiple tangible aspects was identified. Likewise, the potential of the approach for exploring the interdisciplinary character of places and possible benefits of integrating different analysis and data gathering techniques was regarded during the workshop as positive.