Researching the morphology of the city’s internal micro structure: UPM Urban Parterre Modelling

[EN] As conventional cadastral maps only show building perimeters, they contain no information about the city’s internal structure—about the complex interplay of architecture and its socio-economical use. Thus urban planning seems to spare little thought for what really takes place inside the buildings lining a street, although we perfectly know that the potentials of ground floor use and the structure of the correlating public street space are directly related. The Urban Parterre Modelling UPM-method refers to the city’s “parterre” as a holistic urban system: it covers both built-up and non-built-up areas. Thus street, ground floor and courtyard are treated as entity, so that their interrelations can come to light. Technically the method represents the merging of a common 3D-city-model and a Comprehensive Ground Plan Survey CGPS—a researching technique used in the 1960s until the late 1990s (throughout Europe, but mostly in Italy, France and Switzerland)