Figure-Ground Analysis

Figure-ground analysis is an urban-design technique that maps a city as a pattern of solids and voids — buildings rendered as black figure against the white ground of streets, squares, and open space (or vice versa) — to reveal the structure, density, and spatial quality of the urban fabric. Descended from Giambattista Nolli's 1748 map of Rome, it makes legible the relationship between built mass and open space that ordinary plans obscure. Roger Trancik's 1986 Finding Lost Space established it as a core method of contemporary urban-design theory, arguing that good cities are defined as much by the shape of their voids as by their buildings.