Classification of residential buildings into spatial patterns of urban growth: A morpho-structural approach

This paper presents a methodological protocol that combines a structural and a morphological approach to classify residential buildings into spatial patterns of urban growth. Variography analysis is employed to endogenously detect thresholds of building agglomerations, subsequently used as distance parameters for series of morphological closings over the distribution of the building centroids. The different bounding regions ultimately allow classifying new residential buildings into different categories according to their degrees of clustering/scattering and to their locations within/without existing urban structures and within/without recent urban sprawl. The protocol, developed for areas where suburbs tend to proliferate, is tested on a region in southern France using residential buildings in 2002, 2017, and those that appeared between these two dates. It successfully classified the new buildings into the following categories: “clustered infill urban densification†, “scattered infill urban densification†, “low-density edge-expansion†, “compact edge-expansion†, “low-density scattered urban development†, and “leapfrog urban development†thus showing that new residential buildings are not contributing to urban sprawl and development in a similar fashion. Open access is provided to the source code and to the test region data.