Exploring the impact of urban morphology on urban well-being

Short description: The goal of this thesis is to explore and reveal the relationship between urban well-being and urban space.

Keywords:  Urban well-being, noise pollution, mental health, urban morphology, urban spatial structure

Topic at: TU Munich

Staff involved: Dongsheng Chen (dongsheng.chen@tum.de)  

Description:

Urban well-being is essential as it serves as a foundation for a thriving and sustainable city [1,2]. Citizens’ well-being refers to the quality of urban life experienced by citizens, including their physical and mental health, e.g., noise pollution and psychological well-being. Nowadays, more than 55% of population in the world live in urban areas, with an increasing trend. It’s more and more important to study the mechanism of urban well-being, in order to provide supports for planning and constructing healthy cities.

Urban environment has long been linked with human well-being. The complex urban forms and urban spatial structure undoubtedly affect urban well-being. However, despite efforts made, the quantitative relationship between complex urban morphology and urban well-being remains unclear or contradictory [1,2]. One challenge is to accurately characterize the complex regional urban environments in order to quantitatively modelling their relationship.

Urban morphometrics provide a range of effective indicators for building morphology, which can accurately characterize the complex regional urban environments [3]. The student is expected to be proficient in the use of these Python-based tools, so as to achieve the goal of exploring the impact of urban morphology on urban well-being.

The student is required to have a background in urban planning and skills in statistics, python programming and graph data analysis as this study is expected to output a quantitative graph-based model.

Figure below: Morphological tessellation for building footprints and some Morphological metrics; Credits: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0198971519302856

Literature/references:

  1. Ala-Mantila, S., Heinonen, J., Junnila, S., & Saarsalmi, P. (2018). Spatial nature of urban well-being. Regional Studies, 52(7), 959-973.
  2. Hoogerbrugge, M. M., Burger, M. J., & Van Oort, F. G. (2022). Spatial structure and subjective well-being in North-West Europe. Regional Studies, 56(1), 75-86.
  3. Fleischmann, M., Feliciotti, A., Romice, O., & Porta, S. (2020). Morphological tessellation as a way of partitioning space: Improving consistency in urban morphology at the plot scale. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 80, 101441.