Evolution of Urban Patterns: Urban Morphology as an Open Reproducible Data Science

Abstract

The recent growth of geographic data science (GDS) fuelled by increasingly available open data and open source tools has influenced urban sciences across a multitude of fields. Yet there is limited application in urban morphology—a science of urban form. Although quantitative approaches to morphological research are finding momentum, existing tools for such analyses have limited scope and are predominantly implemented as plug-ins for standalone geographic information system software. This inherently restricts transparency and reproducibility of research. Simultaneously, the Python ecosystem for GDS is maturing to the point of fully supporting highly specialized morphological analysis. In this paper, we use the open source Python ecosystem in a workflow to illustrate its capabilities in a case study assessing the evolution of urban patterns over six historical periods on a sample of 42 locations. Results show a trajectory of change in the scale and structure of urban form from pre-industrial development to contemporary neighborhoods, with a peak of highest deviation during the post-World War II era of modernism, confirming previous findings. The wholly reproducible method is encapsulated in computational notebooks, illustrating how modern GDS can be applied to urban morphology research to promote open, collaborative, and transparent science, independent of proprietary or otherwise limited software.