Urban Cohabscapes: exploring European Co-Habitative landScapes diversity, in the ECOLOPES framework.

Abstract

Urban liveability is closely related to the landscape features that support human societies. The promotion of liveability influences the well-being of both human and non-human inhabitants of the city, as the two share the same urban habitat. In this paper, we propose a classification of urban landscapes tailored to facilitate the acquisition of interdisciplinary knowledge on the multi-inhabitant liveability of urban landscapes. Our classification represents the layered urban dimensions through four different subclassifications: local and landscape Urban Form, Anthropic Imprint, and Biophysical Conditions. We developed a flexible and scalable methodology that enables us to expand to other cities, by using only opensource geospatial and remote sensing data. We modelled our four subclassifications at 10-metres through a set of automatic pipelines, running Principal Component Analysis as dimensionality reduction and KMeans unsupervised classification. In this paper we explore the application of our methodology in the framework of ECOLOPES, a project that investigates the human and non-human liveability in cities through the computational design of green building envelopes. We apply the methodology to three distinct European cities, i.e. Vienna, Munich, and Genoa. We produced a set of 12 raster maps from 64 variables, with a total of 32 classes and 1264 possible combinations. We analysed inter and intra-urban class frequencies by highlighting the primary spatial signatures over each sub-classification, and between the overall Functional Urban Areas and the core areas. In this paper we discuss how this approach could foster multidisciplinary studies on urban liveability that hold into account not just humans, but all living inhabitants in cities. From this application, we envision a second step where our methodology will be applied to the full extent of European cities.