Mathematize urbes by humanizing them. Cities as Isobenefit Landscapes: Psycho-Economical distances and Personal Isobenefit Lines

The city reading proposed is a modern postmodern urbanism approach which quantifies but by passing through subjectivism. The isobenefit lines shown translate cities into benefit landscapes, subjective and continually changeable according to personal moods needs preferences and urban transformations. They read attractiveness and how they flow throughout the city. Doing it for each urban point and for each urban attraction, we obtain the isobenefit orography of the city, namely a map of its urban attractions and of their flows. This is a liquid surface rather than solid, as it varies across time and people. It is in this liquidness where resides the complexity of cities, their bottom up spirit and the dynamicity of equilibriums and networks. People do not necessarily go in the most accessible points, but where they need and want to, and, they flow through paths they need or choose to pass through. It is also introduced the likeability of places and paths: in addition to the usual parameters currently used, which weight distances in terms of physical distance, cost, time or mental easiness representations, psycho-economical distances used in the isobenefit lines proposed here, also consider how a place and a path pleases us. According to the Underground Hedonic Theory, this pleasure to pass through or to stay in agreeable areas has an underground and an inertia effect too which contributes to delight our lives. The final purpose of the science of cities and urban design is to understand cities and make them efficient and attractive to please our lives in them.Comment: 32 pages, 20 figure

Aesthetical cognitive perceptions of urban street form. Pedestrian preferences towards straight or curvy route shapes

ABSTRACTHuman perception of space is not purely metric. Route angularity and complexity-minimizing paths suggest that pedestrians, consciously or not, tend to reduce the number and the angle of tur..

Orientational versus esthetical urban street morphology parameterization in Space Syntax

ABSTRACTCurrent topological and geometrical distances in Space Syntax are based on the premise that each change of direction along a path is a mental cost because one loses orientation. This paper ..

Preferring or Needing Cities? (Evolutionary) psychology, utility and life satisfaction of urban living

Abstract What does city life do to us? We start this discussion introducing the sociologists Tonnies, Durkheim, Simmel, Park, Weber, Wirth, Fisher, Foucault, Gans, Gieryn, Hagerstrand, Stokols, Lowry and Harvey; the philosophers Aristotle, Aristippus, Epicurus, Augustine, Aquinas, Epictetus, Kant, Mandeville, Bentham; the economists, among many, Mill, Stigler, Glaeser, Frey, Easterlin; the psychologists Kahneman, Diener and many others; and evolutionary psychology hints. Empirical evidence suggests a causal link between mental health and urbanicity level. Idem for life satisfaction and stated preferences, both resulting higher at lower urbanicity levels. Despite this, more and more people are deciding to spend their lives in cities (85–90% by 2100). Why? Urban life pros and cons pose individuals subjective spatial dis-equilibrium to face life-time and daily-life decisions, rationally/irrationally balancing advantages and disadvantages in short (current utility) and long term (lifetime utility) perspectives. People trade-off antagonistic arguments of their lifetime/current utility functions when deciding where to live, and some of them end up having to sacrifice a preferred environment to enjoy other types of benefits. Future technological advances (robots, artificial intelligence, hologram communication, telework, teleservices, hyperloops …) and urban-territorial design will radically transform our socio-economic systems and free us up to live where we truly prefer, which might either be an electronic cottage in the wild, a picturesque rural settlement, a romantic town, a beautiful city, a sparkling megacity, or a combination of them