The Nine Forms of the French Riviera: Classifying Urban Fabrics from the Pedestrian Perspective.
Résumé
Recent metropolitan growth produces new kinds of urban fabric, revealing different logics in the organization of urban space, but coexisting
with more traditional urban fabrics in central cities and older suburbs. Having an overall view of the spatial patterns of urban fabrics in a vast metropolitan area is paramount for understanding the emerging spatial organization of the contemporary metropolis. The French Riviera is a polycentric metropolitan area of 1500 km2 structured around the old coastal cities of Nice, Cannes, Antibes and Monaco. XIX century and early XX century urban growth is now complemented by modern developments and more recent suburban areas. A large-scale analysis of urban fabrics is carried out through the new geoprocessing protocol of Multiple Fabric Assessment (MFA). Nine families of urban fabrics, of decreasing urban intensity, are identified and correlated to the historical periods of their production. Projected in geographic space, each family stretches coherently over a whole morphological region. The spatial organization of morphological regions of the coastal cites of the French Riviera follows the same archetypical genotype, mixing concentric belts and sectors, interwoven by new connective fabrics. This data-driven bottom-up procedure is not intended to supersede traditional expert-base analysis of urban fabric. Rather, it should be considered as a complementary tool for large urban space analysis and as an input for studying urban form relation to socioeconomic phenomena.