Morphological indicators of the building fabric: Towards a Metric Typomorphology

Urban morphology has made remarkable progress within its quantitative track. This advancement signifies the potential contribution of the school of typomorphology to the growing literature on urban sustainability that tends to measure the relative performance of urban fabrics with metric variables. To that end, a joint framework combining the different metric definitions of the urban form provided by individual studies would ensure a terminological consensus, which is somewhat lacking in the current literature. Reviewing the indicators of the building fabric and the original definitions suggested in prominent studies in urban morphology, this paper proposed an expanded index for the so-called metric typomorphology. In this framework, following the conceptual and metric formulations of the form indicators, the building fabrics of the three neighbourhoods in Rotterdam in the Netherlands are mapped by typo-morphological analyses. This paper suggests an eventual computational basis for the typological characterization of tissues with a particular reference to the building fabric.