Remarks on a city's composition
by Nikos A. Salingaros
J. of Design Research (JDR), Vol. 4, No. 1, 2004

Abstract: What needs to be done to fix inhuman urban form? There is a growing realization that we don't really understand how to build a living environment. I am convinced that the answer lies outside contemporary approaches that derive from architectural modes of thought, in techniques developed for the analysis of complex systems. A large complex system contains an enormous number of internal connections. It is put together from components of various sizes, which connect and interact in particular ways to create a coherent whole. How this occurs in different instances follows from very general rules that were derived in biology and computer science. So far, those results have remained outside mainstream urbanism. An important exception going the other way is the work of Christopher Alexander. Starting with the classic paper A City is Not a Tree (Alexander, 1965), the later book A Pattern Language (Alexander, Ishikawa et al., 1977), and his most recent book (Alexander, 2001), his results on architectural and urban form are now applied in computer science and biology. Alexander's work contains many solutions to problems in urban design. His paper originally appeared in 1965, and was hailed as a seminal statement on urban structure; yet despite being reprinted and translated into several languages, it has had little impact on how cities developed since that time. A Pattern Language was never adopted by mainstream architects, so the insights offered by Alexander and his coauthors would appear to have been ignored by the profession. It is time that we appreciated Alexander's mathematical approach for the immensely powerful tools it offers. Such tools provide access to many results in separate scientific disciplines that could be translated into terms relevant to urban structure. Furthermore, the clarity of scientific thought protects human sensibilities against irrational forces in design, which are driven by fashion and the mindless pursuit of novelty. Some of these have become enshrined into our present-day urban design canon, which is now based as much on ideology and ignorance as it is on human needs. Cities ought to be shaped according to some well-tested set of design principles. I would like to derive those rules. The discussion here will revolve around nodes and their interconnections; how nodes connect to form modules; and how modules connect to form a city. Connections may take various forms: geometrical coupling of structures next to each other (Salingaros, 2000a), visual coupling between a person and the information in a structure (Mikiten, Salingaros et al., 2000; Salingaros, 1999), interaction between human beings, pedestrian coupling of two geometrical or functional nodes via a footpath (Salingaros, 1998), transportation coupling via road or subway between widely separated nodes (Salingaros, 1998), etc. Although I am talking about distinct notions of connectivity, it turns out that they are all related. Geometrical edges, for example, provide both separation across the edge, and a possible conduit for connections along the edge. Urban interfaces act as transverse separators for one type of flow (e.g., cars) while encouraging pedestrian traffic across the interface. For the purposes of this discussion, therefore, I will simply refer to connections as a general, inclusive concept, and not specify exactly which type of connection is implied.

Online publication date: Wed, 10-Aug-2005

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