Urban Structure and the Environment

Urban form, heat, and air quality

Three-dimensional urban form and its relationship to heat, air quality, and ecological function.

World map of urban structure classes

Global distribution of dominant STURLA classes across 11,214 urban areas in 178 countries.

How does the way buildings, vegetation, and pavement combine at the block scale shape what residents breathe and the heat they experience? Most analyses of urban environments rely on flat, two-dimensional land cover and miss the vertical dimension entirely. With colleagues in Berlin, Leipzig, and Philadelphia, my lab developed the Structure of Urban Landscapes (STURLA) classification to capture three-dimensional urban form, and we now use it across cities to ask how composition shapes temperature, air quality, and ecological function.

What we do

Three interconnected lines of work:

  • Three-dimensional classification of urban form. The STURLA classification captures common compositions of buildings, vegetation, and pavement at the block scale. It was developed through a Berlin–New York City comparison, refined for New York City, extended to Philadelphia, and now applied via Google Earth Engine to more than 11,000 urban areas worldwide.
  • Urban form and the heat people experience. We link the structure of city blocks to surface and air temperature, including work that bridges remotely sensed surface temperature to the air temperature residents actually feel, and work that quantifies how the choice of analysis grid shapes conclusions.
  • Fine-scale urban air pollution. With Dr. Kabindra Shakya in my department, we built a mobile platform for monitoring air and noise pollution in Philadelphia neighborhoods, and use it to study how pollution exposure varies with urban form and along lines of environmental justice.

Funding

NSF Geography and Spatial Sciences: Multi-Dimensional Structure of Urban Landscape and the Supply and Distribution of Ecosystem Services. PI, with Shakya. 2018 to 2024. Established and extended the STURLA framework and the mobile air pollution monitoring program in Philadelphia.