Residential location in a vertical city: A syntactic study in Florianópolis

Abstract

A substantial portion of urban growth is motivated by profit seeking, which is related to location, the main component of land value. The verticalization is one of the strategies for obtaining larger profits from urban land, since the high cost of land leads developers to increase the number of floors in order to maximize the returns of their investment. The aim of this study is to investigate the configurational characteristics of the streets in which residential verticalization occurred in Florianopolis. In order to do this, we used the theory of Space Syntax and its two main measures, integration and choice. We found that the logic of vertical residential buildings location in Florianopolis is better revealed by local choice measure (R3), that is, there is a greater concentration of vertical residential buildings in streets used to access other parts of the system within a local area. However, this is also tied to the historical process of urbanization, with older and more consolidated areas showing a tendency to occupy its more integrated and higher choice streets up until a certain point in time, and then proceeding to occupy the more interiorized portions of the grid.