Suggested Citation:
Wheeler, Stephen M. (2015) Built Landscapes of Metropolitan Regions: An International Typology. Journal of the American Planning Association 81 (3), 167 - 190

The physical forms of 21st-century metropolitan areas are often confusing to the public. Nineteenth-century communities featured compact grids of streets or tightly knit organic patterns, but 20th-century technologies such as the motor vehicle enabled rapid growth and dispersion of development. New types of built landscapes proliferated. Postmodern culture with its diverse social and economic niches also led to different types of form. Rowe and Koetter (1978) famously termed the result “collage city.”

“Built landscape” refers to an area of consistent form at a neighborhood scale, often 1 square km or greater. This is an area large enough to determine much of a resident or user’s daily experience, and to have signiï¬cant influence on shaping resident behavior. Five main elements determine built landscape types: street and block patterns; patterns of parcelization and land use; building form, scale, and placement on lots; street and parking design; and typical relationships between “green” and “gray” landscape components. Street, block, and parcel patterns are most important. These affect travel and other behaviors, and tend to lock in urban form for decades, if not centuries. In residential areas particularly—which comprise nearly 80% of the land area of the 24 regions studied here—once streets are built, lots are created, and land is parceled out among many owners, it becomes economically and politically difï¬cult for societies to change these landscape types. In contrast, commercial, industrial, and institutional landscapes are more frequently retroï¬tted or replaced.

Built landscapes affect people every day in terms of their subjective experience of place; their ease of traveling by foot, bike, car, or public transit; their choice of housing forms, shopping, or recreational activities; their participation in civic life; and their proximity to natural features and open space. Built landscapes are also correlated with environmental performance measures such as motor vehicle use, greenhouse gas emissions, and urban heat island effects,as I discuss further below. Societies face important choices about which types of built landscapes to encourage and which to discourage, retroï¬t, or replace. Built landscape choices are thus central to the task of creating more sustainable urban regions.

I seek to determine the types and relative quantities of built landscapes within global metro regions in the early 21st century. After a discussion of related literature and preliminary observations on the implications of these types for sustainability, I describe the process through which I develop the typology and analyze the built landscapes of 24 global urban regions. I ï¬nd that 27 basic types of built landscape make up metropolitan regions worldwide, of which nine are very common. Traditional urban types now make up a small fraction of most metro areas. Suburban and exurban residential forms now exist worldwide, and comprise the vast majority of the land area within most regions. There are important differences in the mix of built landscape types between regions because of cultural, geo-graphical, institutional, economic, and political factors.

In the ï¬nal sections of this study, I consider how built landscape types relate to sustainability, suggest some planning implications, and outline further research directions. In particular, it seems important for planners to a) help the public and decision makers understand built landscapes and their implications; b) include built landscape elements, such as street patterns and green infrastructure networks, when framing urban development alternatives; c) ensure that local codes and design guidelines enable desired forms of built landscapes and discourage those that are problematic for sustainability; and d) encourage built landscape change that promotes sustainability wherever possible.