Urban Parcel Grouping Method Based on Urban form and Functional Connectivity Characterisation

The grouping of parcel data based on proximity is a pre-processing step of GIS and a key link of urban structure recognition for regional function discovery and urban planning. Currently, most literature abstracts parcels into points and clusters parcels based on their attribute similarity, which produces a large number of coarse granularity functional regions or discrete distribution of parcels that is inconsistent with human cognition. In this paper, we propose a novel parcel grouping method to optimise this issue, which considers both the urban morphology and the urban functional connectivity. Infiltration behaviours of urban components provide a basis for exploring the correlation between morphology mechanism and functional connectivity of urban areas. We measured the infiltration behaviours among adjacent parcels and concluded that the occurrence of infiltration behaviours often appears in the form of groups, which indicated the practical significance of parcel grouping. Our method employed two parcel morphology indicators: the similarity of the line segments and the compactness of the distribution. The line segment similarity was used to establish the adjacent relationship among parcels and the compactness was used to optimise the grouping result in obtain a satisfactory visual expression. In our study, constrained Delaunay triangulation, Hausdorff distance, and graph theory were employed to construct the proximity, delineate the parcel adjacency matrix, and implement the grouping of parcels. We applied this method for grouping urban parcel data of Beijing and verified the rationality of grouping results based on the quantified results of infiltration behaviours. Our method proved to take a good account of infiltration behaviours and satisfied human cognition, compared with a k-means++ method. We also presented a case using Xicheng District in Beijing to demonstrate the practicability of the method. The result showed that our method obtained fine-grained groups while ensuring functional regions-integrity.