With time going by, urban morphological structures of Beijing and Shanghai have dramatic changes during last decades. These changes often ignored by citizen, but have big influence for human daily life. And the changes of urban morphologies should be easily recognized by citizen. There are many previous comparative studies between these two Chinese cities, and these studies focus on types of areas, such as environment, traffic, city planning and cultures etc.. There are also many comparative studies about using space syntax theory and geometrical statistics to study urban morphologies. However, there are not direct comparison urban morphological study between Beijing and Shanghai, which from multiple perspectives. In order to gain a better understanding of urban morphologies, this thesis take street networks of two Chinese cites as a research object, based on space syntax theory, as well the combination of traditional geometrical statistics, comparative analysis methods to systematic quantitative analyze and comparative study the different street networks of urban space in Beijing and Shanghai. This project work analyzes hierarchy of axial lines, which automatically generated from street networks, to do a morphological comparison from topological perspective. And it analyzes frequency distribution of axial lines’ included angles and length of axial lines to study urban morphologies from geometrical perspective. Results in the project seem to empirical study that, the well-connected streets are minority part, which all most distributed in the sample cities’ ring structures and center areas. Street networks constitute an obvious regular grid pattern of Beijing and a curves pattern of Shanghai. Based on the hierarchical levels of street networks, research samples have same hierarchical levels but without the same number of street lines. The included angles of axial lines have an exceptionally sharply peaked bimodal distribution for both cities and number of most connected street’s length do not increase so much from ring1 to ring6 for Beijing, but they have much change for Shanghai.

This dissertation tests the proposition that the spatial structure of street networks affects the distribution of urban land use. Specifically, it examines patterns of commercial land use utilizing parcel based data on retail and service businesses location. While previous studies report a correlation between spatial structure and patterns of commercial land use, these studies do not typically control for the effect of key variables likely to contribute to the spatial distribution of retail and service establishments. In order to redress this balance, and using the City of Buenos Aires as a case study, this dissertation studies the correlation between commercial land use frontage and street connectivity measures, while controlling for street widths, density of population and employment, interstore externalities, zoning regulations, and distance to transit stations. Buenos Aires is chosen for its regular plan radiating from a well-defined CBD, a plan which would be expected to conform to standard urban attraction models of retail location. Results of multiple regression models indicate that, after controlling for these variables, measures of street connectivity account for key aspects of the distribution of retail, including linear distributions along major radial and peripheral streets at a distance from the CBD. Thus, the dissertation supports the thesis that "urban attraction" should not be conceptualized in terms of distances from a unique central location, or a number of central locations, but rather in terms of a model of distributed centrality governed by the structure of street networks.