Understanding the Mechanisms and Impact of Growth on the Urban Form and Functioning of Cities: An Application to the Case of Limassol

Abstract

In the great majority of cases cities have been steadily growing and becoming increasingly complex.Growth may have occurred at different times and its characteristics may vary depending on the geographical location of the city and its socio-economic context.However, it remains that common features, growth mechanisms and regularities are persistently found.These must be understood and exploited in our attempt to sustain better living environments.A key problem in our ability to analyze the complexity of the urban form is the long-standing isolation of analytical approaches developed in different countries and research environments.Even harder is to devise and agree on a system of analysis able to capture the universal mechanisms through which cities change and assess how such changes impact on the functioning of cities, providing the evidence base to manage, mitigate and exploit the impact of growth and urban transformation.This paper presents a transdisciplinary approach to urban analysis, which enables the deployment of multiple methods under a common framework.The approach is taken from the field of philosophy, specifically assemblage theory; within this, a combination of social research methods and urban analysis tools are integrated to provide a comprehensive methodology for diachronic analysis of city development, enabling the understanding and assessment of growth patterns.The approach was tested on Limassol, Cyprus: a diachronic analysis was carried out using historical research, interviews, space syntax, block size and land use analysis, mapping of contemporary census data, and illustrative case studies.The aim was to identify the mechanisms of growth which led to Limassol's specific urban form and identity.This paper presents the key research findings and discusses the extent to which the proposed approach enabled the identification of causal pathways of development and of how the growth processes led to specific morphological and functional characteristics of the city.