Experiments of Network Literacy for Urban Designers: Bridging Information Design and Spatial Morphology

Urban morphology has long been studied through typologies, spatial configurations, and historical change, yet cities are not static artifacts but dynamic environments continually reshaped by people, infrastructures, and politics. This article brings Actor–Network Theory (ANT) into dialogue with Aldo Rossi’s notion of the locus to rethink urban design as both enduring form and relational process. Building on Manuel Lima’s taxonomy, the study develops a methodological workflow that translates street networks into visualizations, pairing embeddings with topographic maps to highlight structural patterns. Applied to a comparative set of cities, the analysis distinguishes three broad morphological tendencies—archetypal, geometrical, and relational—each reflecting different logics of urban organization. The results show how scale and connectivity condition the interpretability of embeddings, revealing both alignments and divergences between cartographic and topological representations. Beyond empirical findings, the article frames network literacy as a meeting ground for design theory, science and technology studies, and information visualization. It concludes by proposing that advancing urban morphology today requires not only new computational tools but also sustained interdisciplinary collaboration across design, urban studies, and data science.