Persistence in the Urban Environment : 2 Portland Oregon Buildings and experimental clustering

Areas of the Mutlnomah County, Oregon grouped into 5 clusters based on patterns of building age.
Each building is plotted individually using the colour assigned to its own cluster.
(data from City of Portland Open Data Initiative, background OSM)

A few months ago I wrote about how different parts of cities have radically different development patterns. I illustrated this with examples from three cities which I am familiar with, but all my interpretation was subjective. I was therefore very interested in a blog post by MapBox about the Open Data building footprints for the metro area of Portland, Oregon. Apart from the fact that this is a comprehensive data set the most interesting thing is that most (around 87%) of the buildings have a data associated with them. It therefore seemed like a perfect data set to see if one could classify areas of a city in terms of the profile of building activity.

My basic idea was to do something along the following lines:

• Partition the buildings into contiguous equal sized groups
• Create some kind of time-series for each group reflecting building history
• Run a clustering algorithm against the latter data
• See if it produced interesting results

June Nottingham OpenStreetMap Pub meet-up

A mix of late 19th/early 20th century terraced houses
on Foxhall Street, Forest Fields, Nottingham.
At the S end there are substantial villas near The Forest itself.

  After a hiatus of two years I decided it was time for another pub meet-up in Nottingham. 

We followed the formula from the past: an hour of mapping before adjourning to the pub. I've set dates for the next few months: the next meeting is on Tuesday 9th July.

Here's what we got up to in June.