The urban form of Portuguese cities

Abstract

This paper addresses two main challenges: how to offer an overview on the urban form of Portuguese cities, and how to analyse the fundamental aspects of the evolution of this physical form over time. The Morpho methodology is applied to address these challenges. This methodology focuses on a reduced number of urban form elements and characteristics, all related to the town plan: the spatial accessibility of the street system, the dimension of street blocks, the density of plots, and the coincidence between building and plot frontages. Morpho is applied to Portugal’s 20 most important cities. In addition to producing specific new knowledge on this sample of Portuguese cities, the paper presents results that are relevant for a wider geographical context, and demonstrates the potential of the methodology in comparing a large set of cities.