Despite the fact that cities are increasingly the fundamental socioeconomic units of human societies worldwide, a unified quantitative framework concerning urban form and function has yet to be established. As a step in this direction, we analyze settlement data from the Prehispanic Basin of Mexico to show that this system displays spatial scaling properties analogous to those observed for mode...

extended abstractintroductionone of the basic challenges of governments, especially in developing countries, is to organize the desired national spatial structure in the changing urbanization. such a structure allows us to divide economic and social functions in the urban and regional hierarchy in a balanced manner. in most provinces and territories of iran, the urban hierarchy has formed compl...

Although the average population density of a city is an extremely simple indicator, it is often used as a determinant factor for describing various aspects of urban phenomena. On the other hand, a plethora of different measures that aim at characterizing the urban form have been introduced in the literature, often with the risk of redundancy. Here, we argue that two measures are enough to captu...

The current literature often values intangibles goods as cultural heritage by applying stated preference methods. In recent years, however, the increasing availability of large (spatial) databases on real estate transactions and listed prices has opened up new research possibilities and has reduced various existing barriers to applications of conventional (spatial) hedonic analysis to the real ...

Cities now occupy a central role in economic regeneration. Literature on such regeneration has focused on the supply side, neo-liberal leanings of projects, the centrality of cultural production and consumption, and the undemocratic, exclusionary geographies being produced through such regeneration schemes. This paper explores how urban regeneration strategies, premised on promoting cultural pr...

This paper – ideas in progress – reports on new research that I am developing that is intended to build and extend upon some of my early work in the field of Latin American low-income housing and urban policy development, and which also looks head-on at the issue of urban rehabilitation. However, unlike most of that genre of work which focuses upon the historic core of cities, this research exa...

Study of urban form is an important area of research in urban planning/design that contributes to our understanding of how cities function and evolve. However, classical approaches are based on very limited observations and inconsistent methods. As an alternative, availability of massive urban data collections such as Open Street Map from the one hand and the recent advancements in machine lear...

Understanding varying levels of biodiversity within cities is pivotal to protect it in the face of global urbanisation. In the early stages of urban ecology studies on intra-urban biodiversity focused on the urban-rural gradient, representing a broad generalisation of features of the urban landscape. Increasingly, studies classify the urban landscape in more detail, quantifying separately the e...