Large housing estates - analysing the morphologic similarities and differences of a specific town planning concept.

Abstract

Urban Landscapes show different urban structures. The physical face of cities is the result of complex city planning and general principles of spatial planning. And this physical face can be seen as the theater of life influencing life quality, social justice, mobility patterns, etc. In this work we focus on a specific phenomenon in post-war Germany: the town planning concept of large housing estates and their physical realizations. Same principles seem to lead to very similar urban structures and morphologies. However, over time different principles of spatial planning directions were applied for large housing states in the 1950/60s (the principle of the "structured and low dense city") and the 1970/80s (the principle of "urbanity by density") in Western Germany and for the entire time period until 1990 in the German Democratic Republic (the principle of the "socialistic city"). In this study we analyze whether large housing estates resulted in similar or different urban morphologies. And, whether different urban morphologies developed across variations of the specific town planning concept applied. To do so, we base our work on spatial data capturing the large housing estates in Level of Detail-1 (LoD-1) 3D building models and the street network. These geoinformation are derived from multi-sensoral Earth observation data as well as from Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) (in our case from OpenStreetMap). For the measurements and analyses of the morphologies of large housing estates we develop and apply spatial features such as building density, floor space index, orientation of buildings, orientations of streets, among others. We reveal that different directions of the same town planning concepts for large housing estates generally create physical variabilities of the urban morphologies within a relatively small range. A closer look, however, reveals that variations do exist and that specific town planning principles had de facto influence on the resulting morphologies.