Shortly before the end of the year, while many of us were preparing for the Christmas break, our colleague Henri Debray submitted his doctoral thesis, “Characterizing Urban Morphology at a Global Scale: Geospatial Perspectives,” to the Technical University of Munich, where his PhD project is based.
The thesis builds on several of Henri’s scientific publications examining the morphology and spatial patterns of the built environment worldwide. It brings together analyses of the socio-political contexts in which intra-urban forms evolve, as well as the diversity of urban morphology and its geographical distribution — topics that are investigated here consistently at the global scale for the first time.
The work was supervised by Prof. Zhu at the Technical University of Munich and our head of the Chair of Global Urbanization and Remote Sensing at EORC, Prof. Taubenböck. Many elements of the thesis emerged from close collaboration between DLR, the University of Würzburg, and the Technical University of Munich..
The date of Henri’s doctoral defense in Munich will be announced soon.








