Assessing green space structure through urban morphological analysis: the Çağlayan neighbourhood in Northern Nicosia, Cyprus

Abstract

As cities are growing rapidly and more than half of the world’s population is living in urban areas, the quality of urban settlements has become a vital issue. The significant role of urban green spaces and vegetated areas has received attention from ecologists, environmentalists and planners. However, urban morphologists have only recently begun considering green space, and morphological analyses of green space are still rare. This study addresses this gap in historico-geographical and process typological approaches in order to examine the possibility of identifying ‘Green Space’ (GS) as an individual element in the urban structure. It proposes a systematic framework for assessing GS structure based on existing hierarchical theories in urban morphology that were introduced by M. R. G. Conzen, Caniggia, Kropf and Osmond. The framework is tested on the case study of the Çağlayan neighbourhood in Northern Nicosia to assess the opportunities provided by the framework, its limitations and factors that played a role in its successful implementation.