1  Foundations and Frontiers

A chapter that is meant to provide an update on the state of the field as well as a structured description of current sub-fields and types of analysis. This will be reflected the structure of the next section.

This chapter explores emerging frontiers in urban morphology: urban morphometrics, spatial morphology, and spatial data science. Urban morphometrics is a quantitative field aiming at extracting patterns from large amounts of morphological data; spatial morphology expands the field to the analysis of unbuilt space mostly using space syntax theory and landscape ecology principles; spatial data science as a cross-cutting field increasingly adopts urban morphological information to enrich the understanding of spatial phenomena of environmental, social and economic kind.

VOSviewer visualization of keyword co-occurrence from a dataset exported from Scopus on 30 October 2025 using the query “urban morpho*“.

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