Urba Khroma: a tool for the analysis of spatial coherence in the city

The research is based on the development of a “colour metric” in a similar approach with the ones that were developed for analysing usual urban morphological features as form or building layout by analogy with the spatial and landscape metrics. Our method was tested through an application to 18 urban fragments of the city of Liège (Belgium). In the first step of the method, we present a protocol for chromatic characterization which provides a synthetic visualization of the colour distribution: the approach we have developed allows to synthesize the colour attribute of a street or a place, through visual graphic tools which revealed specific distributions of chromatic values ​​for the 18 urban areas. In a second part of the study, we use a K-means statistical clustering technique to produce chromatic types of building façades. The typological analysis of the 18 urban areas explains how colour is organized and how it developed its autonomous structure.