'Urban Form and Locality' by Hugh Barton

Reading URBAN FORM AND LOCALITY by Hugh Barton

Barton indicates due to the complexity of our social, political, economic structures, analysing and urban form planning can be quite difficult.

Barton discusses four dimensions of urban form

1) degree of dispersal or concentration
       Barton position is that concentration has greater advantages
       where as dispersal encourages further urbanisation of the countryside

2) degree of segregation or inter-mixture of urban activities 
        Barton states that local density plays a big part in the viability of different services and the scale of
        the services themselves (e.g. local school and regional hospital) as well as the level of diversity and
       density of mixed use

3) settlement density
       Barton argues for a density gradient that responds to arguments for high density adjacent public
       transport and issues of accessibility, and for low density in response to solar power, food, water and
       urban wildlife. This allows for density diversification to gain maximum benefit of both strategies, creating
       suburban variety

4) shape
     Barton argues for a compact linear form as this allows for density variety, high density along infrastructure
     such as water, transportation  while providing access to low density countryside, and services can
     distributed along public transport lines in local centre and major facilities clustered at nodes


These ideas provide a flexible and broad framework for analysing urban form, however; further work is
needed in developing framework for developing strategies for implementing these ideas