Exploring urban street types and their impact on spatial people's aggregation in Nanjing

In the field of urban morphology, there is a lot of understanding of how cities have evolved over time by descriptive and deductive approach. Recently, some studies introduce more rigorous quantification method and link such types to their performance though developing and testing urban types, and a few convincing conclusions achieved in European cities. However, whether this is suitable for Chinese cities with different development processes and different political and cultural issues. This study uses the similar approach to get a better understanding of relationship between street configuration and people’s aggregation in Nanjing--a typical Chinese mega-city. There are two parts in this study. The first part is to generate urban types based on integration from space syntax and cluster analysis, because it has been proven to provide reliable and efficient. The second part is to test the types developed from first part. Density of surrounding block is obtained by measuring FSI and GSI, which it captures how spatial form structures people and things. People's aggregation in the space and time dimensions use telecom data for wide coverage. This study found that the types are robust based on cluster analysis. The types were able to explain the intensity of aggregation well and the trend of type is consistent with that of FSI and GSI.