Nadia Charalambous

Building a timeline, developing a narrative: visualising fringe belt formation alongside street network development

The development of cities is influenced by many factors, the time of their foundation, their early development as centres of religious institutions, government administration, locations for trade and cultural exchange. Their geographical location often has an impact on their role within a specific region and their topography also plays a part in the way they develop. Historical events impact on their expansion or contraction and on their development or redevelopment, while formal planning by government authorities following industrialisation naturally plays a leading role, along with market demands and pressure from the real estate industry. Cities have a history, which is written into their urban form and built fabric; different periods manifest themselves in street patterns, architectural styles and the functional distribution of uses throughout the city. As a period follows another so the cityscape changes and the contemporary city ultimately is an accumulated historical record of all the factors that have shaped and influenced its development, however “it is an incomplete and confused record since the features created in one period are subjected to change in another in varying degree” (Conzen 1960, p.6). In most cases the existing fabric of cities tends to be adapted rather than replaced during successive Abstract. This project was developed as an attempt to assess the relationship between different morphogenetic processes, in particular, those of fringe belt formation as described by M.R.G. Conzen (1960) and Whitehand (2001), and of centrality and compactness as described by Hillier (1999; 2002). Different approaches focus on different elements of the city has made it difficult to establish exactly how these processes interact or whether they are simply different facets of development reflecting wider socio-economic factors. To address this issue, a visual, chronological timeline of Limassol’s development was constructed along with a narrative of the socio-economic context of its development. The complexity of cities, however, makes static visualisations across time difficult to read and assess alongside textual narratives. We therefore took the step of developing an animation of land use and configurational analyses of Limassol, in order bring to life the diachronic analysis of the city and shed light on its generative mechanisms. The video presented here shows that the relationship between the processes mentioned above is much stronger and more complex than previously thought. This related paper explores in more detail the links between fringe belt formation as a cyclical process of peripheral development and centrality as a recurring process of minimisation of gains in distance. The project’s outcomes clearly show that composite methods of visualisations are an analytical opportunity still little exploited within urban morphology.