At the edge of the city center

Abstract

Cities are structured into sub-units such as the city center or business districts and peripheral areas. From a spatial perspective, discrimination or delineation of the city center is a very challenging task as there exist numerous ways to characterize city centers: besides functional characteristics, also morphological features can be used. In this paper, we present a study which links the floor area ratio (FAR) with individual perception of citizens to investigate the correlation between perception and morphology. Urban morphology from large-area digital surface models from Cartosat-1 and socio-economic panel data is used to identify a potential perceptional border between the city center and the periphery when the FAR drops below 50% in relation to the center.