Each city has a unique fabric corresponding to the dominant modes of production, legal control, and guidance systems in which it operates. Any periodic alteration in the settled mode of housing supply, in this sense, potentially results in an intrinsic change in ‘typological diversity’ and ‘spatial continuity’ within the collective fabric. If not coordinated by design and development control, the emergent variation in the housing typology may result in spatial fragmentation through the collective urban fabric. To test that point, the paper aims to reveal the subtle relationship between the two phenomena on a morphological basis. Through rapidly changing socio-economic dynamics in the last century, the cities of Turkey are subject to different housing production forms, therefore, offering a relevant context to examine the issue.

Along with a planning system without effective development control tools to ensure spatial coherence responding to the dynamic nature of the housing sector, the residential fabric of Ankara comprises all the dominant housing typologies that emerged within different periods in Turkey. Accordingly, following a historical review of the housing supply forms in Turkey, the paper maps the emerging patterns of modern housing typologies through successive development zones of the city. It examines their internal typomorphological characteristics via a series of transects. Utilizing the GIS-based coherency analysis, the level of morphological continuity on each transect is calculated. Consequently, in light of the findings of the analysis, a critical perspective on housing production and development control creating different forms of spatial fragmentation through typological variation is suggested.@en

Despite being one of the most commonly used normative concepts in urban design, coherence still lacks a firm morphological definition. Without an explicit specification of its spatial attributes, coherence remains a vague and subjective notion of design implicitly referred to as one of the basic properties of good urban form. As a contribution to the link between urban design and morphology, this paper renders the normative concept objectively in terms of a set of quantifiable morphological indicators. Spatial proximity and consistency are suggested as the two key indicators for measuring the coherence of urban fabric. Based on the computational theory of coherence, originally put forward by Thagard, an analytical model is suggested to quantify the morphological coherence of actual urban fabrics. In this framework, three planned neighbourhoods in Rotterdam, the Netherlands are analysed to illustrate the changing nature of morphological coherence through different fashions of urbanism initiated in different periods of time.

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