Compare methods

	Urban Canyon Analysis	Urban Form Morphometrics
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1988	2019
Originator	Timothy R. Oke	Quantitative urban-morphology tradition; momepy toolkit by Martin Fleischmann
Type	Pipeline for characterising street-canyon geometry and its microclimatic effects	Systematic quantitative measurement of urban form across buildings, plots, blocks, and streets
Seminal source	Oke, T. R. (1988). Street design and urban canopy layer climate. Energy and Buildings, 11(1-3), 103–113.	Fleischmann, M. (2019). momepy: Urban Morphology Measuring Toolkit. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1807.
Aliases	Street Canyon Analysis, Canyon Aspect Ratio Analysis, Urban Canopy Layer Analysis, H/W Ratio Analysis	Urban Morphometrics, Quantitative Urban Morphology, Morphometric Analysis of Urban Form, Built-Form Morphometrics
Related	4	4
Summary	Urban canyon analysis characterises a street flanked by buildings as a 'canyon' and studies how its geometry — chiefly the ratio of building height to street width — governs airflow, radiation, temperature, and pollutant dispersion within it. The single most important descriptor is the aspect ratio H/W, which determines whether wind skims over the top, recirculates inside, or interacts between adjacent canyons. The framework was set out by Timothy Oke's 1988 paper on street design and the urban canopy layer, which tied canyon geometry to the microclimate of the air below roof level.	Urban form morphometrics is the systematic, quantitative measurement of the physical form of cities — the dimensions, shapes, spatial arrangement, intensity, and connectivity of buildings, plots, blocks, and streets. Rather than describing morphology in words, it computes hundreds of reproducible numerical characters on each morphological element and its local context, turning the qualitative tradition of urban morphology into a measurable science. The open-source momepy toolkit, introduced by Martin Fleischmann in 2019, standardized this workflow, building a morphological tessellation from building footprints and computing dimension, shape, distribution, intensity, and connectivity characters at scale.