Beyond Individual Buildings: Quantifying the Fine-Grained Urban Fabric of Kond, Yerevan for Built-Heritage Conservation

Historic urban districts are often valued through monuments, façades, or visually recognisable architectural styles, while the smaller-scale tissue that sustains their spatial identity remains difficult to defend in planning debates. This paper examines Kond, a historic district in central Yerevan, Armenia, as a fine-grained urban fabric whose heritage value lies less in isolated buildings than in the relationship between topography, circulation, parcel grain, and incremental construction. The contribution is not to replace field observation with remote sensing, but to translate field-observable qualities into measurable, comparable, and reproducible evidence for built-heritage conservation. Using a multi-source spatial workflow, the study combines monthly VIIRS nighttime-light data, ALOS AW3D30 digital surface model (DSM) data, and OpenStreetMap building and road geometries. Kond is compared with a nearby Soviet-grid control district and interpreted against the broader Kentron central-city background. The results show that Kond has participated in the post-2022 nighttime-light intensification of central Yerevan: its post-2022 VIIRS normalised index reaches 1.66 relative to the 2017-2019 baseline, close to the Kentron background but lower than the selected control area. This suggests that Kond is not an isolated historic enclave detached from central-city activity, although VIIRS does not prove a uniquely Kond-specific transformation. The strongest evidence is morphological. OSM building analysis shows the sharpest contrast: Kond contains approximately 6004.5 buildings per km², more than seven times the control density of 828.8 buildings per km²; its median building footprint is 44.7 m², compared with 295.6 m²; and 84.3% of its mapped buildings are smaller than 100 m², compared with 31.9% in the control district. ALOS DSM analysis further shows that Kond occupies a higher and more vertically varied surface than the control district, with a mean DSM elevation of 1019.24 m and an elevation range of 54 m, compared with 1006.58 m and 37 m in the control area. These findings support an argument for conservation at the scale of urban fabric. For Kond, heritage assessment should consider not only building age or façade value, but also measurable indicators of urban grain, including building density, median footprint size, and the proportion of buildings under 100 m².