Access structure

Yacheng Song, Ye Zhang and Dongqing Han
Additional contact information
Yacheng Song: School of Architecture, 12579Southeast University, China

Environment and Planning B, 2021, vol. 48, issue 9, 2808-2826

Abstract: Although various hierarchical structures have been investigated with respect to the different elements of urban form, the hierarchical spatial order of access from streets to plots and buildings has not been adequately explicated and objectively assessed. In this article, a new method, access structure, is presented to bridge this knowledge gap. Based on Krop’s generic multilevel diagram of urban form, different types of access structure are developed and symbolically represented. They are then quantitatively measured and compared using three metrics and an associated ternary diagram. Subsequently, the new method is tested first in analysing the internal structure of an individual urban block and then in distinguishing urban blocks with different structural characteristics. Eight urban blocks across the city of Nanjing, China, are selected as case examples. The results show that access structure is capable of accurately describing and evaluating complex spatial relationships between streets, plots and buildings. Access structure is potentially a useful method for studying the complex emerging built form of rapidly changing cities, especially in developing countries such as China.

Keywords: Urban form; spatial structure; urban block; Nanjing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2399808320988560 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirb:v:48:y:2021:i:9:p:2808-2826

DOI: 10.1177/2399808320988560

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning B
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().