Typologies play a role in urban studies since a long time, but definitions are often rather abstract, ill-defined and at worst end in fixed stereotypes hiding underlying spatial complexity. Traditional typologies are focussing on separate elements, which allow for understanding crucial differences of one spatial feature in greater detail, but lack the capacity to capture the interrelation between elements. Further, they often focus on one scale level and therefore lack to acknowledge for interscalarity. Recent publications define morphological typologies based on quantitative variables, building on the seminal book 'Urban Space and Structures' by Martin and March, published in 1972, but using more advanced spatial analysis and statistics. These approaches contribute to the discussion of types in two ways: firstly, they define types in a precise and repeatable manner allowing for city-scale comparisons; secondly, they acknowledge cross-scale dynamics important for e.g. living qualities and economic processes where not only the local conditions are important, but also the qualities in proximity. This paper focuses on the comparison of building types in three Swedish cities, using the multi-variable and multi-scalar density definition. A statistical clustering method is used to classify cases according to their measured similarity across the scales. The results show that working with types is a fruitful way to reveal the individual identity of these types, compare cities and highlight some differences in the way the three cities are structured.

As cities are growing the need for complementary sub centres increases, both in order to distribute amenities and to make resources more accessible for citizens, as well as to relieve the pressure on the city core. Such planning strategy, a kind of decentralized concentration, has been seen as a mean for holding back urban sprawl in Stockholm. Lately, urban centres are also argued to contribute to the development of more equal living conditions making opportunities, service, and urban life accessible also in more peripheral urban locations. The values of ‘suburban urbanities’ has also been highlighted in a way that reach far beyond the commercial activities (Vaughan 2015).The Regional planning authority in Stockholm as well as the City of Stockholm identifies a number of regional subcentres and ‘urban boulevards’ that should connect the city since and make it less fragmented. The social incentive for this strategy is prominent in both plans. However, these subcentres are dependent on urban centrality which needs to be taken into consideration.The strength, or the success, of a subcentre is partly influenced by urban design interventions and is argued to be related to 1) the configurative properties (distribution of space) and 2) land use parameters and density (distribution in and through space) (Koch 2016; Hillier 1999; Vaughan 2010). In order to increase the understanding for what urban design interventions that may be efficient, this paper will draw from the concepts developed by Stan Allen (1999) of point, line and field and John McMorrough (2001). The combination of the configurative perspective and the point-line-field perspective is argued to contribute with knowledge of how urban form generates and supports the emergence of urban centrality and the development of subcentres with implications not only for consumption and mobility, but also for social outcomes such as urban life and equal living conditions. The empirical application aims to illustrate how configurative analysis complement the point-line-field theory in describing the character of the centres and the findings are argued to contribute to the identification of more precise and efficient urban design interventions of how to develop the centres.

In the wake of climate change and its impact on increasing the number and intensity of floods, adaptability of cities to and resistance against the flood hazard is critical to retain functionality of the cities. Vulnerability of urban infrastructure and its resilience to flooding from different points of view have been important and worth investigating for experts in different fields of science. Flood hazards as physical phenomena are influenced by form of the cities and thus the magnitude of their impacts can be intensified by urban infrastructures such as street networks and buildings (Bacchin et. al, 2011). In this paper, we aim to develop a method to assess the resilience of a river city (the city of Gothenburg in Sweden), which is prone to flood events, against such disturbances and find out how the city reacts to river floods and to what extent the city retains its accessibility to essential amenities after a flood occurs. To do so, collecting required data; we, firstly, simulate flood inundation with two different return periods (50 and 1000 years) and then the impact areas overlay on the street networks. Evaluating the resilience of the city, syntactic properties of the street networks before and after flooding are measured at different scales. Additionally, accessibility and the minimum distance of the street networks to essential amenities such as healthcare centers, schools and commercial centers, at a medium distance (3 Km) is examined. The results show that flooding influences the city configuration at global scale more than the local scale based on comparison of syntactic properties before and after flooding. However, the results of accessibility and the minimum distance show that the impact of flooding on the functionality of the city is more limited to the riparian areas and the city is not affected globally.

Flooding is one of the most destructive natural disasters which have rapidly been growing in frequency and intensity all over the world. In this view, assessment of the resilience of the city against such disturbances is of high necessity in order to significantly mitigate the disaster effects of flooding on the city structures and the human lives. The aim of this paper is to develop a method to assess the resilience of a river city (the city of Gothenburg in Sweden), which is prone to flood Hazard, against such disturbances. By simulating flood inundation with different return periods, in the first step, the areas of impact are determined. To assess the resilience, two different methods are followed. One is a syntactic method grounded in the foreground network in space syntax theory and the other is based on measuring accessibility to the essential amenities in the city. In the first method, similarity and sameness parameters are defined to quantitatively measure the syntactic resilience in the city. In the next step, accessibility to amenities and the minimum distance to amenities before and after each disturbance is measured. The results, in general, show that such disturbances affect the city structure and the resilience of the city differently. For instance, the city is more resilient after flooding ac- cording to accessibility measures. This clearly means that the answer to the question of resilience is mainly dependent on “resilience of what and for what.”

This paper addresses how ‘culture’ is or can be present in a city, where culture is understood in a wide sense as cultural activities and output of creative activity as well as partaking in or making use of the same. The main line of argument is that this requires consideration of how to work with configurational analysis, which has implications for a wider set of issues but made apparent in the specific focus.

While this is anchored in empirical analysis, the main point is a theoretical-methodological discussion. In short, the paper proposes a model where culture needs to be understood from four perspectives—to witness, to engage with, to show, and to do—since these are differently related to the built environment in the conditions for how they appear, what effects they might have, and in what ways they are affected by and affect urban environments.

Specifically, the empirical analyses point to how inequalities between areas can be understood. The conditions for making sculptures and how this affects and is affected by its surrounding, simply put, is different from the effects and conditions for the placing of public sculptures, as are their effects on public and private life.

By use of specific and particular examples of activities or outputs, the article will also highlight qualitative aspects that need to be considered in relation to more precisely what kind of ‘culture’ that is intended to be supported, and how this relates to questions of democratic development and social equality.

It has been argued that different urban configurations-planned vs. organic, treelike vs. grid like-perform differently when it comes to the intensity and distribution of pedestrian flows, built density and land uses. However, definitions of urban configurations are often rather abstract, ill-defined and at worse end in fixed stereotypes hiding underlying spatial complexity. Recent publications define morphological typologies based on quantitative variables (e.g. Barthelemy, 2015; Serra, 2013a; Gil et al., 2012; Berghauser Pont and Haupt, 2010) and solve some of these shortcomings. These approaches contribute to the discussion of types in two ways: firstly, they allow for the definition of types based on multiple variables in a precise and repeattable manner, enabling the study of large samples and the comparison between both cities and regions; secondly, they frame design choices in terms of types without being fixed and so open up for design explorations where the relation between the variables can be challenged to propose new types. This paper explores the typologies defined by Serra (2013a) and Berghauser Pont and Haupt (2010) further, as these target two of the most important morphological entities of urban form, namely the street network and the building structure. The purpose is to gain a better understanding of how types are composed and distributed within and across different cities. The method is based on GIS and statistical modeling of four cities to allow for a comparative analysis of four cities: Amsterdam, London, Stockholm and Gothenburg. For the street network, we process the Road-Centre-line maps to obtain a clean network model, then run segment angular analysis to calculate the space syntax measures of betweenness at different metric radii, defining the "centrality palimpsest" (Serra, 2013a). For the building structure, we process elevation data to obtain building height, then run accessible density analysis for all building density metrics (FSI, GSI, OSR, L) using the Place Syntax Tool (Berghauser Pont and Marcus, 2014). The street and building types are defined using cluster analysis (unsupervised classification), following a similar approach to Serra (2013a). The result is a typology of street ('paths') and building types ('places'), with different profiles of centrality and density across scales. The spatial distribution and frequency of these types across the four cities gives an objective summary of their spatial structure, identifying common as well as unique traits.

Resilience defined as the capacity of a system to manage impacts, keep its efficiency and continue its development has been scrutinized by researchers from different points of view over the past decades. Due to the prominence of resilience in urban planning, this paper intends to find out how the spatial structure of cities deals with disturbances, and if geographical phenomena such as rivers affect the resilience in cities. Using the space syntax methods syntactically analyze the resilience in cities, we innovatively introduce two measures; similarity and sameness. These measures are in relation with the syntactical properties of cities and compare the degree of resilience between different groups. Similarity measures the degree to which each city retains the relative magnitude of its foreground network after a disturbance and sameness is the degree to which each city retains the same segments as its foreground network after a disturbance. Likewise to network resilience studies, we apply different disturbances on cities and explore the reaction of cities to disturbances in terms of size of the foreground network and which segments are parts thereof. We then compare different groups based on these measurements as a method to analyze sameness and similarity. The results show that the resilience, in the way we define it, is different in different cities depending on in which view and based on which parameters we are discussing the resilience. Additionally morphological phenomena such as rivers have a great impact on the structure of cities and in turn on their resilience.

Background: As dynamic systems rivers and cities have been in interaction under changing relations over time, and the morphology of many cities has risen through a long and steady struggle between the city functions and the river system flowing inside. This makes river cities an interesting case to study how the presence of geographical features interacts with spatial morphology in the formation of cities.

Methods: The basis of this research is enabled by utilizing a novel model for cross-city comparison presented by Hillier in his Santiago keynote in 2012 called a “star model”. This is done on large samples of cities investigating concurrent configurations, as well as how the properties in this star model react to specific forms of disturbance.

Results: Results illustrate that the foreground network as identified through maximum choice values in cities are more vital to the structure of cities than the bridges. The overall syntactic structure tends to retain its character (degree of distributedness) and the location of its foreground network (which street segments constitute the foreground network) even when bridges are targeted. Furthermore, counter to the initial hypothesis, river cities tend to change less than non-river cities after targeted disturbance of the systems. Finally, the results show that while there is a statistical morphological difference between river cities and non-river cities, this difference is not directly explained through the bridges.

Conclusion: Integrating space syntax with statistical and geospatial analysis can throw light on the way in which the properties of city networks and urban structure reflect the relative effect of rivers on the morphology of river cities. The paper, finally, contributes through offering one piece of a better perception of the structure of river-cities that can support strategies of river-cities interaction as well as enhance our knowledge on the constraints and limits to that interaction.