Variography and Morphometry for Classifying Building Centroids: Protocol, Data and Script.

Different spatial patterns of urban growth exist such as infill, edge-expansion and leapfrog development. This paper presents a methodology, and a corresponding script, that classify new residential buildings as patterns of urban growth. The script performs a combination of variography and morphometry over building centroids on two different dates. The test data is made of the building centroids of 2002 and 2017 for Centre-Var, a region located in southern France. The different bounding regions, yield from series of morphological closings, allow classifying the building centroids that appeared between 2002 and 2017 into different categories of spatial patterns of urban growth. The final classification is made according to the degree of clustering/scattering of new centroids and to their locations regarding existing urban areas. Preliminary results show that this protocol is able to provide useful insights regarding the degree of contribution of each new residential building to the following patterns of urban growth: clustered infill, scattered infill, clustered edge-expansion, scattered edge-expansion, clustered leapfrog and scattered leapfrog. Open access to the script and to the test region data is provided.