BEGIN seminar – Dr Martin Fleischmann
Date: Tuesday, 3rd of March 2026, at 14:00 (UK Time)
Location- Hybrid: In person (Room 310, Irvine Building, St Andrews) and Online (MS Teams).
Understanding the structure of space: Urban Morphometrics as a Backbone of Urban Taxonomy
Abstract:
Built environments, formed of a plethora of patterns of building, streets, and plots, have a profound impact on how cities are perceived and function. While various methods exist to classify urban patterns, they often lack a strong theoretical foundation, are not scalable beyond a local level, or sacrifice detail for broader application. This talk outlines the Hierarchical Morphotope Classification (HiMoC), a novel, theory-driven, and computationally scalable method of classification of built form. HiMoC operationalizes the idea of a morphotope – the smallest locality with a distinctive character – using a bespoke regionalization method to delineate contiguous, morphologically distinct localities. These are further organized into a hierarchical taxonomic tree reflecting their dissimilarity based on morphometric profile derived from buildings and streets retrieved from open data, allowing flexible, interpretable classification of built fabric that can be applied beyond a scale of a single country. The resulting classification is a foundation of the Urban Taxonomy, a project that aims to understand the structure of cities, currently covering a subset of countries in Europe, grouping over 170 million building footprints into over 1,000,000 morphotopes, and those into a flexible tree. In this talk, you will learn how the urban taxonomy is generated, what it can tell about the ways we have built our cities, and how you can interact with it yourself.
Recording:
Bio:
Martin is a member of the Urban and Regional Laboratory at the Charles University in Prague where he leads the Research Team on Urban Structure, a fellow in the Geographic Data Science Lab at the University of Liverpool and a former member of the Urban Design Studies Unit at the University of Strathclyde. He has a PhD in Architecture from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where he focused on urban morphology and quantitative aspects characterisation of urban form. He holds degrees in Urban Design (University of Strathclyde, 2017) and Architecture and Urbanism (Czech Technical University in Prague, 2015). His research interest lies in urban morphology and spatial data science focusing on quantitative analysis and classification of urban form, remote sensing and all the related things, bringing the architectural aspects of the description of cities to geography and data science.
