CityReads│How Are Cities Built?27 Basic Types of Built Landscape
How Are Cities Built?
27 Basic Types of Built Landscapes
Based on aerials, maps, and images available through Google and other sources, I develop a typology of built landscape forms found within 24 metropolitan regions worldwide. The analysis shows that 27 basic types of built landscape make up metropolitan regions worldwide.
Picture source : http://explore.regionalchange.ucdavis.edu/ourwork/map-collection/built-landscapes-of-metropolitan-regions-map-collection
“Built landscape” refers to an area of consistent form at a neighborhood scale, often 1 square km or greater.
Five main elements determine built landscape types: street and block patterns; patterns of parcelization and land use; building form, scale, and placement on lots; street and parking design; and typical relationships between “green” and “gray” landscape components. Street, block, and parcel patterns are most important.
Built landscapes affect people every day in terms of their subjective experience of place; their ease of traveling by foot, bike, car, or public transit; their choice of housing forms, shopping, or recreational activities; their participation in civic life; and their proximity to natural features and open space. Built landscapes are also correlated with environmental performance measures such as motor vehicle use, greenhouse gas emissions, and urban heat island effects.
Built landscape choices are thus central to the task of creating more sustainable urban regions.
Developing a Global Typology of Built Forms
In a preliminary stage I developed a typology of residential form for U.S. cities. I set out to revise and expand the typology to include a greater variety of land use types for cities internationally. My assistants and I first performed a visual analysis of a convenience sample of widely distributed global metropolitan regions to expand the list of types into approximately 55 variants. We then combined similar patterns to arrive at a final typology of 27 built landscape forms.
The following figures provide a brief description of these forms and a visual introduction.
Airport：Very large-scale landscapes for air travel, usually on the periphery of metro areas and dating to the early 20th c. or later. Similar worldwide.
Allotment gardens：Area of contiguous garden plots large enough to contain small dwelling structures. Found primarily in northern Europe and Russia. 18th c. on.
Apartment blocks：Relatively uniform landscapes of large residential buildings, often slablike. Rare in North America; common in Europe and Asia. Buildings higher and with less orientation to the outdoors than garden apartments. Common after WWII.
Campus：Large institutional sites often with formal or picturesque design of spaces. Can include universities, corporate campuses, office parks, palaces, prisons, fairgrounds, and military bases. Many eras.
Civic：Urban landscape dominated by large civic buildings and spaces, typically with formal design. Often overscaled and sterile. Larger building footprints and less mix of use than many other forms. From ancient times on.
Commercial strip：Low-density linear commercial development along highly trafficked streets. Building footprints small; streets and parking areas large. Motor vehicle oriented. 1920s on.
Country roads：Incremental, linear, small-scale development along formerly rural roads outward from a city. Creates “fingers” of urbanization. Throughout history.
Degenerate grid：Large-scale residential landscapes with rectilinear street patterns and poor connectivity. Subtypes include interrupted and warped parallels (Southworth & Owens, 1993). Mid-20th c. onward.
Garden apartments：Apartment landscapes in which low- to mid-rise buildings have a strong relationship to exterior green space and site amenities. Late 19th c. on.
Garden suburb：Detached homes along curvilinear but well-connected streets with extensive greenery. Two main subtypes: late 19th c. picturesque style created for affluent neighborhoods and post-1950 middle-class tracts (in some countries).
Heavy industry：Industrial uses on large parcels. Often includes large-footprint buildings, specialized equipment, outdoor storage of materials,fuel tanks, and rail access. 19th c. on.
Hillside：Irregular winding streets shaped by steep terrain. Often an upper-class residential retreat from the city. Many eras.
Incremental/mixed：Small-scale land subdivision and development, usually within an existing large-scale road system, resulting in a nonuniform mix of forms and moderate-to-poor street connectivity. Many eras.
Land of the dead：Large areas for burial, often with formal or picturesque design. Cairo’s “City of the Dead” is inhabited by the living as well. Can serve important function as park and religious space. Common throughout history.
Long blocks：A rectilinear residential form characterized by very long block length (>1,000 feet), often due to pre-existing agricultural parcels urbanized in the 20th c.
Loops & lollipops：Large-scale, mass-produced residential landscapes with regular, curvilinear street patterns and poor connectivity. After WWII.
Mall & Box：Large commercial buildings or a single large enclosed pavilion, usually with ample parking. Asian versions have less parking. Neotraditional varieties may have pedestrian streets. After 1950.
New urbanist：A recent form promoted by the Congress for the New Urbanism combining aspects of grid and garden suburb forms. High street connectivity; mixed-use centers. After 1980.
Organic：Tightly woven street pattern with dense, fine-grained urban development, created within preindustrial cultures as well as recent informal settlements.
Quasi-grid：A variety of rectilinear, well-connected but irregular street patterns created by topography, design, or incremental development. Land uses tend to be varied. Throughout history.
Rectangular block grid：A rectangular-block grid form used for early Renaissance suburbs in Europe, late-19th c. streetcar suburbs in North America, and Latin American cities in many eras. High street connectivity. In U.S. and Europe typically before 1900.
Rural sprawl：A semirural residential landscape with very large parcels (usually 1–10 acres per dwelling unit). Rapidly growing in many countries, though at times restricted by laws to protect farmland. Generally after 1950.
Superblock：Large master-planned blocks with large residential buildings and interior circulation via small access roads. Building placement and interior design more varied than apartment blocks. Created beginning in mid-20th c. following modernist design principles.
Trailer parks：A dense enclave of mobile homes on small lots with narrow access roads. Often screened from surrounding landscapes. Exclusive to North America. Mid-20th c. on.
Upscale enclave：An affluent residential landscape master-planned or developed incrementally. Often gated. Can be similar to garden suburbs, but more insular and with lower street connectivity. Antiquity onward.
Urban grid：A grid of relatively small, squarish blocks with varied land use often found at the core of many cities. In North American cities this is usually the Central Business District. Usually platted in mid-19th c. or before.
Workplace boxes：Landscapes of boxy buildings serving industrial or commercial uses. Office park subtype has extensive, landscaped parking. Warehousing/distribution subtype features prominent loading docks and is near major roads. After 1950.
Comparative Analysis
I conclude that a modest number of built landscape types reoccur throughout the world (27 in this analysis, many with subtypes). Occurring in different mixtures in different places, these types combine to produce the postmodern collage of metropolitan form.
The typology presented here is a first step toward developing a truly global understanding of built landscapes and their implications. The typology is flexible: It can be refined and additional subtypes can be identified.
Each landscape type does vary worldwide. Streets and parcels within many types, for example, are smaller in Europe and Asia than in North America and Australia. Variations also exist within a given metro area. But the point of this typology is that even if such variations exist, enough other important features remain the same to constitute distinct types of built landscapes that present similar planning opportunities and challenges worldwide.
Each built landscape type has its own characteristics and history. Some have centuries-old roots and spread around the globe through colonization, economic globalization, or the diffusion of design ideals from more developed countries to less developed ones. The Spanish Laws of the Indies, dating from 1573, helped spread the urban grid form through the Americas; Renaissance design ideals helped spread formal civic spaces to many cities; and in the early 20th century, the British Empire helped popularize notions of garden suburbs, devolved in part from Ebenezer Howard’s “garden city” ideal. Today, international consulting firms, schools of design education, and the global adoption of many similar regulatory standards are likely among the main influences promoting the spread of certain forms.
As I suggest earlier in this study, many built landscape types are relatively new, arising in the 20th century as the result of recent technologies, growing affluence, the spread of regulatory systems that separate land uses, and largescale capitalist economics.
Only nine built landscape types can be considered common or very common among the world’s metropolitan regions. In descending order of average land area covered in the regions studied here, these are “loops & lollipops,” “degenerate grids,” “rural sprawl,” “workplace boxes,” “incremental/mixed,” “organic,” “rectangular block grids,” “heavy industry,” and “apartment blocks.” These types collectively account for 78% of the land area in the 24 regions studied.
Main findings about the prevalence of built landscape types:
1. Traditional urban landscapes account for a very small percentage of 21st-century urban regions
2. Suburban-style development is now prevalent worldwide.
3. “Degenerate grids” is the most widely spread built landscape type. “
4. The “apartment blocks” type is common in most urban regions except the United States.
5. The “rural sprawl” type occupies large land areas in most regions.
6. “Malls & boxes” and “commercial strip” landscapes are limited outside of North America.
7. Integration of natural and built landscapes is rare.