“RIVER CITIES”: URBAN STRUCTURE AND CONFIGURATIONAL ANALYSIS

Water bodies affect urban morphology, influencing settlements’ location and development. As distinctive land features, rivers strongly influence structures of nearby cities in term of land use, spatial pattern and perception. Current spatial layout of “river cities” can be assumed as the result of several spatial transformations occurred over time attempting to adapt urban development to the specific geography. Therefore, the analysis of urban patterns contributes to describe how geomorphologic landscape’s features have influenced city’s structure, in physical and functional terms. Configurational analysis allows to investigate the urban configuration, meaning not only a geometric arrangement of buildings and open spaces, but even spatial relationships between urban spaces. Based on topologic distances, operative techniques provide a set of “configurational indexes” which quantitatively describe urban grid properties. Referring to a “river-city” (Turin, Italy), the results of a configurational analysis’ application are analysed, as part of a wider research belonging to a doctoral thesis. The distribution of all obtained indexes helps in describing several city structure’s features and it points out the localization of main urban centralities. Given that the studied metropolitan area is crossed by many rivers, built zones and main urban functions are located in different relative positions in respect of river banks, representing a significant test area to deeply investigate river-city interaction.