Fractals for urbanism?
This paper is based on a fractal analysis of the urban morphology of a border city: Strasbourg-Kehl. The main topic developed concerns the usefulness of fractal analysis to town planners and to town planning. Some classic results are presented, such as the computation of the general fractal dimension of Strasbourg and the designing of the city’s scaling behaviour curve. Some specific results are also discussed with regards to the characteristic fractal dimensions of certain specific urban morphologies, for instance downtown morphology, individual housing settlements and larger building areas (residential, commercial and industrial quarters). Finally, two new indicators are developed to improve the applications of fractal measures in urban town planning.