IN-PERSON London. Section A

Abstract

Cities are complex systems that are agglomerations of a variety of components (Batty 2009). A city’s physical characteristics are often collectively labelled ‘urban form’ (Anderson, Kanaroglou, and Miller 1996), ‘urban typology’ (Cataldi, Maffei, and Vaccaro 2002), or ‘urban pattern’ (Lynch 1981), and its combination of street patterns, buildings, and plots is known as ‘urban grain’ (Kropf 2018). The elements of urban form not only include buildings, street patterns, and land parcels, but also consist of urban blocks, green infrastructure, and the layout of public spaces. However, one critical component, alleyways, has been marginalized in definitions and analyses of urban form, despite alleys’ major role in shaping many cities’ network systems. Alleys have been neglected in the definition of urban form even though they have existed since antiquity and have served a variety of purposes. This paper identifies alleys as a critical space, especially at the neighbourhood scale. Neighbourhood samples belonging to different growth phases in Abu Dhabi and Dubai are taken as case studies to document the changing morphologies of alleys. Morphological mapping identified ten typologies of alleys. Findings indicate that sometimes alleys are equivalent to streets in terms of occupied land, pattern, density, and length, and in rare occasions, their physical attributes even surpass those of neighbourhood streets.