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The goal is to satisfy social demand for living in quiet surroundings, near open
landscapes where natural resources can be safeguarded, while reducing car use at
the same time. Beyond the theoretical aspect which makes use of the hierarchical
principles peculiar to fractals, it is shown how the concept can be used practically
for developing planning scenarios.
2.2
The Morphology of Sprawling Patterns:
Some Preliminary Remarks
One of the most striking reasons why sprawling urban patterns look “amorphous” is
that they are made up of elements belonging to a great variety of scales ranging
from buildings to entire metropolitan areas. The metropolitan area of Stuttgart
illustrates this. Even the rather coarse-grained map of the built-up area in Fig.
2.1
a
reveals details of very different sizes: along the boundary of any arbitrarily chosen
settlement cluster, small bays alternate irregularly with larger ones. Moreover,
metropolitan areas are made up of many clusters of very different sizes that are
nonuniformly distributed across space. Ribbon-like built-up areas run along valleys
or transportation network routes, but sparsely urbanized areas also occur. This shows
the interaction between urbanization and natural conditions (Mohajeri et al.
2013
).
Similar characteristics appear at the microscale of towns as can be seen from the
close-up of the northern urban fringe of the agglomeration of Stuttgart (Fig.
2.1
b).
Here buildings form clusters of different sizes and densities since industrial zones,
historical town centers, and recent detached housing areas are mixed. But the size
of the vacant areas between clusters also varies greatly.
Traditional density-based measures currently used in geography and planning are
unsuitable for describing such features. Indeed, density measures
mean occupation
Fig. 2.1
(
a
) A simplified map of the metropolitan area of Stuttgart. (
b
) A detailed GIS-data base
for one outskirt (Frankhauser
2005
)
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