Seven city types representing morphologic configurations of cities across the globe

Abstract What we understand by the simple term ‘city’ is in fact describing highly diverse domains: different economies, demographics, ways of living, land uses, built-up morphologies, among other things. The built landscape alone ranges from low-density, one-storey suburban settlements to high-density accumulations of skyscrapers. Models have repeatedly attempted to describe these various ‘city’ manifestations and to understand the processes that shape these spatial appearances and patterns. In this paper we analyze the morphological-spatial configurations of urban landscapes. We empirically examine 110 cities distributed around the globe. By using the Local Climate Zones (LCZs) classification scheme, we quantitatively describe morphologic variances of the built landscape within cities. We find seven city types (clusters) that capture the global diversity of spatial urban configurations. These seven types testify in parts to common geographic-cultural spaces. Some are largely congruent with well-known spatial units such as Europe or the Islamic world. In contrast to theoretical city models, however, we also find clusters that are more spatially complex such as African-American or Asian-African clusters. On the one hand, the study confirms that similar cultural, socio-economic, demographic or political conditions in fact do produce similar morphologic-spatial urban configurations. On the other hand, it also shows that there exist similar morphological configurations across geographic-cultural spaces.