Place attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years?

Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution

Combinatorial Group Theory: COMBINATORIAL GROUP THEORY

The application of the network approach to the urban case poses several questions in terms of how to deal with metric distances, what kind of graph representation to use, what kind of measures to investigate, how to deepen the correlation between measures of the structure of the network and measures of the dynamics on the network, what are the possible contributions from the GIS community. In this paper, the author considers six cases of urban street networks characterized by different patterns and historical roots. The authors propose a representation of the street networks based firstly on a primal graph, where intersections are turned into nodes and streets into edges. In a second step, a dual graph, where streets are nodes and intersections are edges, is constructed by means of a generalization model named Intersection Continuity Negotiation, which allows to acknowledge the continuity of streets over a plurality of edges. Finally, the authors address a comparative study of some structural properties of the dual graphs, seeking significant similarities among clusters of cases. A wide set of network analysis techniques are implemented over the dual graph: in particular the authors show that the absence of any clue of assortativity differentiates urban street networks from other non-geographic systems and that most of the considered networks have a broad degree distribution typical of scale-free networks and exhibit small-world properties as well.

/pdf/the-network-analysis-of-urban-streets-a-dual-approach-57sq5ufcpd.pdf

The network analysis of urban streets: A dual approach

The network metaphor in the analysis of urban and territorial cases has a long tradition, especially in transportation or land-use planning and economic geography. More recently, urban design has brought its contribution by means of the ‘space syntax’ methodology. All these approaches-though under different terms like ‘accessibility’, ‘proximity’, ‘integration’ ‘connectivity’, ‘cost’, or ‘effort’-focus on the idea that some places (or streets) are more important than others because they are more central. The study of centrality in complex systems, however, originated in other scientific areas, namely in structural sociology, well before its use in urban studies; moreover, as a structural property of the system, centrality has never been extensively investigated metrically in geographic networks as it has been topologically in a wide range of other relational networks such as social, biological, or technological ones. After a previous work on some structural properties of the primal graph representation of...

The Network Analysis of Urban Streets: A Primal Approach:

This book explains how cities actually work. It will serve as a guide and inspiration for planners to re-humanize our cities using the latest technologies and recent understanding from science and mathematics. It addresses the needs of professional urbanists, students and teachers, who wish to understand how and why cities are successful or not, depending on their form, components, and substructure.

Principles of Urban Structure

Structural principles developed in biology, computer science and economics are applied here to urban design. The coherence of urban form can be understood from the theory of complex interacting systems. Complex large-scale wholes are assembled from tightly interacting subunits at many different levels of scale, in a hierarchy going down to the natural structure of materials. A variety of elements and functions at the small scale is necessary for large-scale coherence. Dead urban and suburban regions may be resurrected in part by reconnecting their geometry. If these suggestions are put into practice, new projects could even approach the coherence that characterizes the best-loved urban regions built in the past. The proposed design rules differ radically from ones in use today. In a major revision of contemporary urban practice, it is shown that grid alignment does not connect a city, giving only the misleading impression of doing so. Although these ideas are consistent with the New Urbanism, they come fr...

Complexity and Urban Coherence

Pattern languages help us to tackle the complexity of a wide variety of systems ranging from computer software, to buildings and cities. Each "pattern" represents a rule governing one working piece of a complex system, and the application of pattern languages can be done systematically. Design that wishes to connect to human beings needs the information contained in a pattern language. This paper describes how to validate existing pattern languages, how to develop them, and how they evolve. The connective geometry of urban interfaces is derived from the architectural patterns of Christopher Alexander.

/pdf/the-structure-of-pattern-languages-405c5non5c.pdf

The structure of pattern languages

ion creates a dangerous dehumanization. This point was previously made by Eric Darton in his prescient book on the World Trade Center (Darton, 2000). Darton raised the frightening prospect that the creation of giant tower buildings is related to the mindset of those who would wish to destroy them (Darton, 2000). His reasoning is as follows. It is impossible to contemplate killing thousands of people in a single building unless those people are viewed simply as an abstract class. They must not be considered as having any separate existence apart from the building’s geometry, which is itself defined abstractly. The geometry of huge, monumental, monofunctional office towers makes it difficult to imagine that they are full of people, hence it becomes possible and even rational for someone who thinks only in abstractions to contemplate their destruction (Darton, 2000).

/pdf/a-theory-of-architecture-2crdicjb1z.pdf

A Theory of Architecture

This paper identifies fundamental processes behind urban design. Rules are derived from connective principles in complexity theory, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. Any urban setting can be decomposed into human activity nodes and their interconnections. The connections are then treated as a mathematical problem (here in a qualitative manner). Urban design is most successful when it establishes a certain number of connections between activity nodes. Mathematics itself depends upon establishing relationships between ideas, this ability being a central component of the intelligence of human beings. The creation of the built environment is driven by forces analogous to those that lead us to do mathematics.

http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/Theory%20of%20the%20Urban%20Web.pdf

Nikos Angelos Salingaros

Papers

Principles of Urban Structure

Complexity and Urban Coherence

The structure of pattern languages

A Theory of Architecture

Theory of the urban web