Quantitative Analysis of Street Forms

Setsuko Mizuno¹ and Hidekazu Kakei

¹Department of Life-Science, Nagoya Feminine Culture College, 1-17-8 Aoi, Higashi-ku, Nagoya 461, Japan

(Received May 24, 1993; Accepted December 10, 1993)

Keywords: Street Forms, Quantification, Medieval German Cities, Medieval Islamic Cities

Abstract. This paper proposes a technique for quantitative method to analyse street forms and discusses its effectiveness. Numerous studies of urban space have been done, but only a few have been concerned with street forms. Street forms have usually been described qualitatively and seldom quantitatively. Consequently, the same street may be described differently by different researchers and comparison of street forms remains obscure. Here we propose a method to quantify street forms by applying fractal analysis. Case studies of medieval German and Islamic cities illustrate the effectiveness of the method.