Effects of urban growth on street networks and land use in Mosul, Iraq: A case study

Abstract

Urban centers grow and expand gradually, and this growth is accompanied by renewal processes for many parts of these centers over time. Traditionally, conditions and needs developed slowly and cities often only changed greatly due to natural disasters or wars. However, with the acceleration of the Industrial Revolution and subsequent important technical transformations in transportation modes, a large, accelerating, and indisputable impact affected historical urban centers, which suffered many morphological changes represented by the intrusive opening of streets to the passage of vehicles with varying degrees of sympathy toward the characteristics of these centers. This research starts from the general hypothesis that street networks affected the changes in old urban centers represented by growth and urbanization and the accompanying change in how parts of this traditional fabric were used. Therefore, we need to have a clear and accurate perception of the change in the characteristics of the spatial organization of the urban and historical centers that resulted from these formal changes. This requires defining and describing the characteristics of this spatial organization before and after these changes occurred. The present research adopts the space syntax method to measure morphological changes and the historic center of Mosul in Iraq is chosen for the practical study due to the city’s need for a development strategy that controls expansion and growth when rebuilding the city after the destruction that resulted from the military operations in the war with ISIS.