Exposure to nature-based experiences (NBE) in urban preschools is increasingly recognized as a vital antidote to children's growing disconnection from nature, often described as nature-deficit disorder. This cross-cultural study examines how NBE can be operationalized within dense urban preschool environments through comparative analysis of policy, spatial design, and pedagogical practices in Scotland and Malaysia. Drawing on a literature review, school audits guided by Biophilic Design Parameters, Leuven Involvement Scale observations, parent surveys, and teacher interviews across five study sites in Glasgow and Selangor, this study investigates how spatial affordances, educator perceptions, and climatic conditions shape children’s opportunities for nature engagement. Findings underscore teachers’ pivotal mediating role, showing that their confidence and influence in implementing structured nature-based activities consistently generated high engagement. In contrast, unstructured engagement varied substantially with spatial quality, accessibility, and familiarity. Sensory-rich landscapes and community green spaces supported the highest level of engagement, while uniform settings constrained autonomous exploration. Parent survey data indicated predominantly indoor lifestyles and limited direct nature exposure, reinforcing preschools’ essential compensatory function, particularly in Malaysia. Key barriers included extreme weather, safety concerns and restricted outdoor access. In responses, the study advances a context-sensitive NBE framework to guide future Malaysian preschool design and policy.

Exposure to nature-based experiences (NBE) in urban preschools is increasingly recognized as a vital antidote to children’s growing disconnection from nature, often described as nature-deficit disorder. This cross-cultural study examines how NBE can be operationalized within dense urban preschool environments through comparative analysis of policy, spatial design, and pedagogical practices in Scotland and Malaysia. Drawing on a literature review, school audits guided by Biophilic Design Parameters, Leuven Involvement Scale observations, parent surveys, and teacher interviews across five study sites in Glasgow and Selangor, this study investigates how spatial affordances, educator perceptions, and climatic conditions shape children’s opportunities for nature engagement. Findings underscore teachers’ pivotal mediating role, showing that their confidence and influence in implementing structured nature-based activities consistently generated high engagement. In contrast, unstructured engagement varied substantially with spatial quality, accessibility, and familiarity. Sensory-rich landscapes and community green spaces supported the highest level of engagement, while uniform settings constrained autonomous exploration. Parent survey data indicated predominantly indoor lifestyles and limited direct nature exposure, reinforcing preschools’ essential compensatory function, particularly in Malaysia. Key barriers included extreme weather, safety concerns, and restricted outdoor access. In responses, the study advances a context-sensitive NBE framework to guide future Malaysian preschool design and policy.

A new multimodal analytical approach is proposed to assess, act upon and predict climate risks that materialise differently across neighbourhood contexts. Current methods for assessing neighbourhood responses to climate risks tend to be dominated by either city-level adaptive capacity frameworks or building-level adaptation strategies. These approaches often overlook the empirically grounded and integrative potential of the neighbourhood scale. Neighbourhoods, particularly their capacity for collective action, which is linked to urban form, play a critical role in fostering adaptive behaviour. Despite this recognition, analytical approaches examining adaptation responses to climate risk at this level remain underdeveloped. Using a staged integrative approach, the study involved an initial scoping literature review of 494 documents, from which sources (n = 77) published over the past two decades were selected. This process revealed key environmental, spatial and social dimensions of neighbourhood adaptation in relation to climate risk. This proposed approach enables a richer understanding of climate risk by shifting from simple capabilities at the meso-scale to dynamic adaptive systems. Without this lens, local responses to climate risks remain standardised, lacking the diversity and dynamism required at context-specific levels. PRACTICE RELEVANCE The proposed approach helps planners, policymakers and design practitioners understand how adaptation occurs, why it varies across neighbourhoods, and how climate risks/responses emerge from urban form, infrastructure, social practices and governance interactions often obscured by city-wide or building-level analyses. Standardised measures thus miss local vulnerabilities/capacities, but this analytical approach assesses neighbourhoods as adaptive systems to enable targeted, context-sensitive interventions. Key actions include integrating neighbourhood-scale analysis into planning, combining spatial/environmental data with community insights, and using iterative monitoring to support adaptive decision-making over one-size-fits-all solutions.

Regular exposure to natural environments significantly supports children’s holistic learning and overall health and well-being [...]

This research formulates a context-sensitive classification framework for the evaluation of public spaces within rapidly urbanizing Chinese neighbourhoods, with the objective of informing regeneration strategies that reconcile modernization with cultural heritage preservation. Focusing on Chengdu’s partially developed Ma’an neighbourhood, the study investigates the transformation of five public space typologies, e.g., street frontages, public open spaces, public green spaces, semi-public areas, and corridor spaces, under contemporary urban pressures. A mixed-methods approach was employed, integrating historical mapping, urban morphometric analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork, including site observation and semi-structured interviews with residents and local stakeholders. Findings indicate that spatial reconfiguration has altered accessibility, patterns of use, and collective identity. The study is guided by three research questions: (1) How have public spaces in the Ma’an neighbourhood changed under the pressures of urban modernisation? (2) What socio-cultural consequences have these changes had for community identity and social cohesion? (3) How can the Ma’an case inform strategies for balancing redevelopment with cultural preservation? The results show that traditional spatial types continue to support localized interactions and cultural memory, whereas newer spaces prioritize multifunctional and commercial uses. In doing so, the study contributes to theoretical discussions in urban morphology and socio-cultural geography while offering a replicable public space classification framework for cultural heritage-sensitive urban renewal applicable to transitional neighbourhoods in China nationally and in comparable contexts.

"Sustaining a city’s culture and character. Principles and best practices." Journal of Urban Design, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

Studies on urban deprivation date back to the 19 th Century but remain important today due to rising levels of inequality and social segregation. However, while social causes of deprivation have been investigated, the role of the built environment remains neglected. Existing studies either provide broad coverage at the expense of detailed morphological descriptions or offer meticulous accounts of small-scale areas without capturing the broader context. This paper addresses such a gap by investigating the relationship between urban form, measured at the building level, and deprivation across the entire city of Isfahan, Iran. By doing so, we position this study in the tradition of urban morphology. Operationally, we, first, identify urban types (UTs), that is, distinctive patterns of urban form, by clustering 200+ morphological characters; second, we explore the relationship between proportion of buildings belonging to each UT, in each neighbourhood, and deprivation; third, we offer detailed descriptions of the UTs most strongly associated with deprivation, discuss possible drivers for the observed correlations, and link findings to relevant literature in the field. Twelve UTs are identified, with four showing the strongest impacts on predicting deprivation. This study brings novel insights on the morphology of deprivation of Isfahan, while contextualising them with respect to domain-specific studies, which have predominantly focused on Western cities. The proposed methodology can be replicated to explore morphologies of deprivation in different contexts, further our understanding of the topic, and potentially inform planning and policy making.

This systematic review aims to illustrate the state of the art of walkability indices and future research directions. A comprehensive search in the general Google database and Google Scholar identified a total of 45 records published between 2005 and 2023. Using a selection process based on the PRISMA model, 32 records were identified as meeting the inclusion criteria. These are organized incrementally, highlighting their novelty relative to preceding studies, and divided into sectors of prevalent application. The 5Ds theory provides a first contribution by identifying walkability metrics based on proximity to amenities, land use diversity, and density. Recent advancements, leveraging GIS systems and open data, have expanded such metrics to include green spaces, footpath design, and noise pollution. However, these developments remain largely tied to the catchment area logic and offer coarse descriptions of the built environment’s morphological structure, often lacking justification for metric selection and weighting. To address these shortcomings, future research should use more detailed descriptions of urban form, balance metric comprehensiveness with data availability, employ robust methods for metric selection, and explore alternative weighting techniques based on cognitive and emotional responses to urban settings. These efforts are crucial for advancing the understanding and measurement of walkability in the context of the compact city and place-making paradigms.

Purpose In urban studies, understanding how individuals perceive density is a complex challenge due to the subjective nature of this perception, which is influenced by sociocultural, personal and environmental factors. This study addresses these complexities by proposing a systematic framework for comprehending how people perceive density within urban contexts. Design/methodology/approach The methodology for developing the framework involved a systematic review of existing literature on the perception of density and related concepts, followed by integrating insights from empirical investigations. The framework designed through this process overcomes the limitations identified in previous research and provides a comprehensive guide for studying perceived density in urban environments. Findings The successful application of the framework on case studies in Glasgow and international settings enabled the identification of 20 critical spatial factors (buildings, public realm and urban massing) influencing density perception. The research provided insights into the subjective nature of density perception and the impact that spatial characters of urban form play, demonstrating the framework's effectiveness in understanding the impact of urban form, which is the realm of design and planning professions, on individual experiences. Originality/value The paper's originality lies in its comprehensive synthesis of the existing knowledge on the perception of density, the development of a user-responsive framework adaptable to future research and its application in case studies of different natures to identify recurrent links between urban form and user-specific constructs.

The world is urbanising fast. Official estimates report that around 70% of the global population will live in cities by 2060. While this phenomenon is assumed to be beneficial, social inequality and safety issues are on the rise. Among the latter, women's safety in the urban environment is a topic of particular concern due to rising numbers of assaults, especially in South Asia. However, systematic investigations of the relationship between women's safety in cities and urban form lack. In this paper, we explore such a relationship in Kochi (India) by correlating 24 urban types (UTs), i.e. distinctive patterns of urban form, obtained from previous work, with four scores of women's safety (i.e. presence of people in streets, feeling safe, visibility, gender diversity), extracted from an open dataset by Safetipin, a social organisation focusing on gender issues in the urban space. Four UTs out of 24 are consistently correlated with the set of four scores. Three of such UTs are inversely correlated, with two of them presenting sparse, relatively low-density urban fabrics with very small or very large buildings; one UT shows a very fine grained, relatively dense, mainly residential fabric with very small buildings. Conversely, one UT shows a positive correlation with safety. It is characterised by a compact, fine grained and more orderly urban fabric with averagely sized buildings hosting multiple functions.

Earth Observation (EO)-based mapping of cities has great potential to detect patterns beyond the physical ones. However, EO combined with the surge of machine learning techniques to map non-physical, such as socioeco-nomic, aspects directly, goes to the expense of reproducibility and interpretability, hence scientific validity. In this paper, we suggest shifting the focus from the direct detection of socioeconomic status from raw images through image features, to the mapping of interpretable urban morphology of basic urban elements as an in-termediate step, to which socioeconomic patterns can then be related. This shift is profound, in that, rather than abstract image features, it allows to capture the morphology of real urban objects, such as buildings and streets, and use this to then interpret other patterns, including socioeconomic ones. Because socioeconomic patterns are not derived from raw image data, the mapping of these patterns is less data demanding and more replicable. Specifically, we propose a 2-step approach: (1) extraction of fundamental urban elements from satellite imagery, and (2) derivation of meaningful urban morphological patterns from the extracted elements. We refer to this 2 -step approach as "EO + Morphometrics". Technically, EO consists of applying deep learning through a reengi-neered U-Net shaped convolutional neural network to publicly accessible Google Earth imagery for building extraction. Methods of urban morphometrics are then applied to these buildings to compute semantically explicit and interpretable metrics of urban form. Finally, clustering is applied to these metrics to obtain morphological patterns, or urban types. The "EO + Morphometrics" approach is applied to the city of Nairobi, Kenya, where 15 different urban types are identified. To test whether this outcome meaningfully describes current urbanization patterns, we verified whether selected types matched locally designated informal settlements. We observe that four urban types, characterized by compact and organic urban form, were recurrent in such settlements. The proposed "EO + Morphometrics" approach paves the way for the large-scale identification of interpretable urban form patterns and study of associated dynamics across any region in the world.

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Cities are complex products of human culture, characterised by a startling diversity of visible traits. Their form is constantly evolving, reflecting changing human needs and local contingencies, manifested in space by many urban patterns. Urban morphology laid the foundation for understanding many such patterns, largely relying on qualitative research methods to extract distinct spatial identities of urban areas. However, the manual, labour-intensive and subjective nature of such approaches represents an impediment to the development of a scalable, replicable and data-driven urban form characterisation. Recently, advances in geographic data science and the availability of digital mapping products open the opportunity to overcome such limitations. And yet, our current capacity to systematically capture the heterogeneity of spatial patterns remains limited in terms of spatial parameters included in the analysis and hardly scalable due to the highly labour-intensive nature of the task. In this paper, we present a method for numerical taxonomy of urban form derived from biological systematics, which allows the rigorous detection and classification of urban types. Initially, we produce a rich numerical characterisation of urban space from minimal data input, minimising limitations due to inconsistent data quality and availability. These are street network, building footprint and morphological tessellation, a spatial unit derivative of Voronoi tessellation, obtained from building footprints. Hence, we derive homogeneous urban tissue types and, by determining overall morphological similarity between them, generate a hierarchical classification of urban form. After framing and presenting the method, we test it on two cities – Prague and Amsterdam – and discuss potential applications and further developments. The proposed classification method represents a step towards the development of an extensive, scalable numerical taxonomy of urban form and opens the way to more rigorous comparative morphological studies and explorations into the relationship between urban space and phenomena as diverse as environmental performance, health and place attractiveness.

Urban environments are complex, impacting on climate change, social justice and health globally and locally. Their spatial, social, economic, environmental dimensions are interlinked and must be studied from a complexity viewpoint. Yet, while complexity has successfully entered urban scholarship and practice in many fields, urban form, a key component of urban environments, is not yet studied in these terms and consequently they are not yet designed as complex. This paper argues that the discipline of urban design should be (re)defined as the understanding and design of urban environments as places of organised complexity. It can become the discipline best placed to manage a useful global overview of sustainable placemaking. It does so by tracing urban design's historical relationships and attitudes towards the evolution of the city, contrasting definitions of complexity in science, with the deterministic way in which the early urban design practitioners viewed design. It then looks at urban design's relationship with other design professions in the UK and suggests its lack of clarity and efficiency is an enduring consequence of this historic trajectory. Finally, it proposes urban design as the discipline concerned with the understanding and design of complex-adaptive urban environments and advocate its establishment as an independent profession.

Urban environments are complex, impacting on climate change, social justice and health globally and locally. Their spatial, social, economic, environmental dimensions are interlinked and must be studied from a complexity viewpoint. Yet, whilst complexity has successfully entered urban scholarship and practice in many fields, urban form, a key component of urban environments, is not yet studied in these terms and consequently they are not yet designed as complex. This paper argues that the discipline of urban design should be (re)defined as the understanding and design of urban environments as places of organised complexity. It can become the discipline best placed to manage a useful global overview of sustainable placemaking. It does so by tracing urban design's historical relationships and attitudes towards the evolution of the city, contrasting definitions of complexity in science, with the deterministic way in which the early urban design practitioners viewed design. It then looks at urban design's relationship with other design professions in the UK and suggest its lack of clarity and efficiency is an enduring consequence of this historic trajectory. Finally, it proposes urban design as the discipline concerned with the understanding and design of complex-adaptive urban environments and advocate its establishment as an independent profession.

"The Block. A guide for urban designers, architects and town planners." Journal of Urban Design, 27(1), pp. 148–149

Unprecedented urbanisation processes characterise the Great Acceleration, urging urban researchers to make sense of data analysis in support of evidence-based and large-scale decision-making. Urban morphologists are no exception since the impact of urban form on fundamental natural and social patterns (equity, prosperity and resource consumption's efficiency) is now fully acknowledged. However, urban morphology is still far from offering a comprehensive and reliable framework for quantitative analysis. Despite remarkable progress since its emergence in the late 1950s, the discipline still exhibits significant terminological inconsistencies with regards to the definition of the fundamental components of urban form, which prevents the establishment of objective models for measuring it. In this article, we present a study of existing methods for measuring urban form, with a focus on terminological inconsistencies, and propose a systematic and comprehensive framework to classify urban form characters, where 'urban form character' stands for a characteristic (or feature) of one kind of urban form that distinguishes it from another kind. In particular, we introduce the Index of Elements that allows for a univocal and non-interpretive description of urban form characters. Based on such Index of Elements, we develop a systematic classification of urban form according to six categories (dimension, shape, spatial distribution, intensity, connectivity and diversity) and three conceptual scales (small, medium, large) based on two definitions of scale (extent and grain). This framework is then applied to identify and organise the urban form characters adopted in available literature to date. The resulting classification of urban form characters reveals clear gaps in existing research, in particular, in relation to the spatial distribution and diversity characters. The proposed framework reduces the current inconsistencies of urban morphology research, paving the way to enhanced methods of urban form systematic and quantitative analysis at a global scale.

Asia is urbanising rapidly. Current urbanisation practices often compromise sustainability, prosperity, and local quality of life while context-sensitive alternatives show very limited impact. A third way is necessary to integrate mass-production, heritage, and human values. As part of UNICITI’s initiative, A Third Way of Building Asian Cities, we propose a scalable and replicable methodology which captures unique morphological traits of urban types (i.e., areas with homogenous urban form) to inform innovative large-scale and context-sensitive practices. We extract urban types from a large set of quantitative descriptors and provide a systematic way to generate figure-grounds aligned with such urban types. The application of the proposed methodology to Kochi (IN) reveals 24 distinct urban types with unique morphological features. Profiles, containing design-relevant values of morphometrics, are then produced for a selection of urban types located in the historical district of Fort Kochi/Mattancherry. Based on these, figure-ground design demonstrations are carried out in three sample sites. Outcomes seem aligned with the urban character of their respective types, while allowing distinct design expressions, suggesting that the proposed approach has potential to inform the design in historical/heritage areas and, more broadly, the search for a Third Way of Building Asian Cities.