Clustering patterns of urban built-up areas with curves of fractal scaling behaviour

Fractal dimension is an index which can be used to characterize urban areas. The use of the curve of scaling behaviour is less common. However, its shape gives local information about the morphology of the built-up area. This paper suggests a method based on a k-medoid for clustering these curves. It is applied to forty-nine wards of European cities, and shows that the curves add interesting intraward information to our knowledge of the spatial variation of the urban texture. Moreover, morphological similarities are observed between cities: living, architectural, and planning trends are not specific to individual cities. doi:10.1068/b36039