Analytical Protocol to assess the built-up forms on street networks (D2.2)

This protocol, Deliverable 2.2 of Work Package 2 (WP2) of the emc2 project, presents a methodology to assess the enclosure produced by buildings around a street network. The protocol assesses the relationship between street-based morphology and the capacity of streets to function as the structural backbone of urban life. It does so by focusing on the built environment as experienced from the street, using the momepy.streetscape framework (Araldi et al. 2025) to derive a set of morphometric descriptors, and then emphasising three core indicators: • Continuity, describing the presence and persistence of façades along the street; • Alignment, describing the regularity of façade positions and setbacks; • HW Ratio, describing the relationship between building heights and visible street width, and thus the degree of three-dimensional enclosure. These indicators are conceived as skeletal descriptors of the urban form that frames the street and can be derived from a vector-based 2.5D description of buildings, easily available for cities across the world (for example through OSM data). Within the emc2 project and its WP2, they are intended to complement configurational measures of centrality, functional data on activities and services, and socio-demographic indicators to identify street potential to act as main streets within metropolitan areas. This resource was produced within the emc2 project, which is funded by ANR (France, grant ANR-23-DUTP-0003), FFG (Austria, grant FO999905461), MUR (Italy, grant 2024/0017648) and Vinnova (Sweden, grant 2023-02581) under the Driving Urban Transition Partnership, which has been co-funded by the European Commission.