Visualization and Analysis of Urban Street Forms Focusing on Street Composition

The form of streets is deeply related to spatial cognition in our cities. The goal of this paper is to understand the characteristics of street form from the perspective of ‘street composition,’ which examines the distribution of streets with various morphological scales, rather than the ‘street structure’ that has been addressed in previous studies. Seven indicators for quantifying street composition—namely ‘width,’ ‘orientation difference,’ ‘single length,’ ‘connected length,’ ‘types of feature points,’ ‘elevation,’ and ‘slope’—are presented. Using these indicators, distribution maps and histograms of allocation ratios were created and analyzed for 20 cities in Japan.