Study And Description Of Morphological Characteristics Of Residential Plots

In order to clarify various issues following the process of urbanization, the cognition of urban fabric makes sense in explaining the formation mechanism of modern cities. And theories and methods of urban morphology, which are rooted in European geographic study, make it possible to some extent. Urban morphology focuses on physical from of urban areas, such as buildings and related open space, plot, street system and so on, thus helping to understand why and how the city is gradually formed geographically and historically. Especially, the Cozenian school founded by M.R.G. Cozen has developed town plan analysis and recognized urban landscape into the town plan or ground plan, comprising three distinct’plan elements’:streets, plots and block plans of buildings. Within architecture the study of plots and buildings will lead to involve in the development of urban form more comprehensively.The plan analysis following Cozenian tradition has been identified as a fruitful approach in Europe, however, just a few studies of urban morphology have been undertaken in China, especially few at the scale of plot. And previous researches about residential plot concentrate more on living units or a few typical clips, lacking in thoroughly morphological exploration of plot itself and the relationship between plot and buildings within. Chinese cities have seen dramatic changes of urban form with the process of urbanization in past three decades, especially large numbers of residential buildings for increasing population contribute to these changes, forming notable urban fabric, which provide good examples and mass data of all kinds of residential building types and plots to analyze. Therefore, this paper pays attention to residential plots, describes their morphological characteristics and reveals the relationship between plots and building pattern within generally, thus revising classic theories of urban morphology in China.In the light of Cozenian tradition, by investigating of 2056 residential plots within main urban area in Nanjing, this paper has firstly categorized morphological characteristics of residential plots and buildings separately, and described the basic rules of urban form through statistics. Then according to geometric characteristics of plots, such as plot shape, plot angle and area, the general rules of how building patterns change within plots have been examined. Finally, the relationship between residential plots and building patterns within is futher developed mainly under geometrical shapes of plots with plot angle and area together. At the same time, through several typical building patterns, how they are affected by geometrical characteristics of plot is demonstrated with boundary condition and historical stage of plots as well. All these discoveries are based on mass data collected by AutoCAD and ArcGIS, and through scientific statistics, the morphological characteristics of residential plots are revealed quantitatively and intuitively. This paper verifies that there exist relationship between plot and buildings within and leads to a complete summary of designing rules for residential plots, which are valuable for urban design reference and policy-making.The whole thesis contains about 64 000 words,215 pictures and charts.