About cityImage#

cityImage is developed by Gabriele Filomena, Geographic Data Science Lab, University of Liverpool.

The package originated from research on the computational formulation of Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City. Its development mainly took place during work at The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, and at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, under the supervision and support of Ed Manley and Judith Verstegen, respectively.

Purpose#

cityImage provides reproducible geospatial workflows for identifying computational analogues of Lynchian urban elements:

  • paths and nodes from street-network structure and graph measures;

  • edges from barriers such as water, railways, parks, and major roads;

  • districts from network partitions and gateway logic;

  • landmarks from structural, visual, cultural, and pragmatic salience;

  • imageability scores from composable cityImage indicators.

The package is not a replacement for GeoPandas, Shapely, OSMnx, NetworkX, iGraph, rasterio, or PyVista. Instead, it defines a semantic layer on top of those libraries. Generic data acquisition, spatial operations, graph algorithms, raster processing, and mesh/ray operations are delegated to specialised packages; cityImage keeps the schema, topology, Lynchian classification, and scoring semantics consistent across workflows.

Design after the refactor#

The current API separates cityImage-owned semantics from external-library responsibilities:

  • cityImage.io bridges local geospatial files into cityImage schemas.

  • cityImage.osm bridges OSMnx outputs into cityImage schemas.

  • cityImage.network and cityImage.network_topology preserve node/edge/topology semantics.

  • cityImage.landuse, cityImage.barriers, cityImage.regions, cityImage.landmarks, and cityImage.scoring implement the core urban-image logic.

  • cityImage.visibility3d remains optional because 3D sight-line computation requires heavier mesh and parallel-processing dependencies.

This design keeps the core installation lighter while retaining advanced optional workflows for plotting, building-height estimation, and 3D visibility.

Terms and conditions#

All content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.