On urban form and urban resilience: Examining the underlying politics and advancing the role of immaterial technology and typomorphology in assessing urban resilience to heat stress

abstractita

This thesis focuses on one of the emerging research topics within the field of urban morphology that investigates how the concept of resilience, which has recently be-come a buzzword very favored to address the complexity and future uncertainty in cities, can be integrated into the study of urban form, as the raw material of urban de-sign and a key element that can guide cities towards more sustainable trajectories. More specifically, the thesis tackles some of the theoretical and methodological challenges for integrating resilience thinking into urban morphology, where two main re-search gaps have been addressed. The first, is the need to understand the core meaning of resilience in urban morphology and systematically examine its underlying politics (e.g. resilience of/through what? To what? For whom? How? When? Where?) so that it can be effectively operationalized. The second is the need to support urban planning and design decisions with tools and methods that provide an improved understanding of the impact of urban form on urban resilience to different stresses and shocks. In particular, the thesis, through the use of immaterial technology (e.g. Geographical Information Systems, machine learning and remote sensing techniques), focuses on improving and developing quantitative methods to better understand the impact of urban form on urban resilience to heat stress, as one of the most pressing challenges in cities nowadays that has been demonstrated to be exacerbated by urban form. And assessing their applicability in growing contemporary cities in arid areas, as the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and where little research has been conducted. At the core of these methods are the typomorphological classifications, which have been demonstrated to be powerful descriptive-analytical as well as normative/prescriptive means of understanding and designing cities.