GATE (Ground-Floor Architectural Typology at the Street Edge): A Multi-Resolution Morphometric Framework for Resolving Urban Vitality in a Mid-Sized Turkish City

Urban vitality research treats food-and-beverage venues as aggregate point-of-interest counts and existing morphometric classification frameworks operate at the building, block or neighbourhood scale, leaving the commercial ground-floor interface without a programme-specific typology. This study develops GATE (Ground-floor Architectural Typology at the street Edge), a 22-variable morphological framework operating at the venue–street–interface scale, and applies it to 85 interfaces across eleven commercial arteries in the core of a mid-sized Turkish city. Ward hierarchical clustering yields a single dendrogram read at macro (k = 3) and micro (k = 7) resolutions, validated through Kruskal–Wallis tests that separate 17 and 19 of the 22 variables, respectively. Three macro types emerge: narrow-fronted apartment-ground-floor venues, detached garden-plot pavilion venues and vertically organised transparent-fronted venues. Space Syntax Integration, Choice and Shannon diversity produce no significant relationship with pedestrian density in the aggregate. Type stratification points to a resolution-dependent moderator effect: the apartment-ground-floor type shows negative Integration and positive Choice coupling, while the transparent vertical type shows positive Integration coupling, producing a directional pattern consistent with Simpson’s paradox. GATE provides one of the first programme-specific venue-level morphological frameworks and establishes an explicit quantitative mapping of the Panerai–Castex analytical typology with future multi-city applications to test its generalisability.