32,096 research outputs found
Between social physics and phenomenology
In recent years, both phenomenology and social physics, which might be thought of asoccupying the humanistic and scientific poles of urban discourse, have taken an interestin space syntax as a means of furthering their academic aims. Here we suggest that thiscould presage a far deeper theoretical integration of the multi-disciplinary study of citiesthan either currently envisage
Scaling and Universality in City Space Syntax: between Zipf and Matthew
We report about universality of rank-integration distributions of open spaces
in city space syntax similar to the famous rank-size distributions of cities
(Zipf's law). We also demonstrate that the degree of choice an open space
represents for other spaces directly linked to it in a city follows a power law
statistic. Universal statistical behavior of space syntax measures uncovers the
universality of the city creation mechanism. We suggest that the observed
universality may help to establish the international definition of a city as a
specific land use pattern.Comment: 24 pages, 5 *.eps figure
What do we need to add to a social network to get a society? answer: something like what we have to add to a spatial network to get a city
Recent years have seen great advances in social network analysis. Yet, with a few exceptions, the
field of network analysis remains remote from social theory. As a result, much social network
research, while technically accomplished and theoretically suggestive, is essentially descriptive.
How then can social networks be linked to social theory ? Here we pose the question in its simplest
form: what must we add to a social network to get a society ? We begin by showing that one reason
for the disconnection between network theory and society theory is that because it exists in spacetime,
the concept of social network raises the issue of space in a way that is problematical for social
theory. Here we turn the problem on its head and make the problem of space in social network
theory explicit by proposing a surprising analogy with the question: what do you have to add to an
urban space network to get a city. We show first that by treating a city as a naïve spatial network in
the first instance and allowing it to acquire two formal properties we call reflexivity and nonlocality,
both mediated through a mechanism we call description retrieval, we can build a picture of the
dynamics processes by which collections of the buildings become living cities. We then show that
by describing societies initially as social networks in space-time and adding similar properties, we
can construct a plausible ontology of a simple human society
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