What are cities for? and how does it relate to their spatial form?

In this paper, we ask what cities are for, and how this relates to their spatial form. This is an issue on which space syntax so far has said nothing. It is routine to say cities exist to create contact, but this seems at least over-generalised, since cities are also often noted for their anonymity. Here we argue that cities exist to create not contact in general, but two very specific kinds of contact, and these relate to the dual form of what syntax has called the generic city – the idea that the urban grid is made up of two interlocking grids, each with its own metric and geometric properties: a foreground grid structured by and serving micro-economics, and a background grid structured by socio-cultural factors and serving mainly residence, the two being linked by a pattern of pervasive centres. These different spatial structures generate fundamental differences in social networks which in the foreground grid serve the need for morphogenesis, and in the background grid, the need for stability. The co-existence of microeconomic morphogenesis and socio-cultural stability is what the city is for, and it is both reflected in and created by the dual form of the generic city

Is architectural form meaningless: a configurational theory of generic meaning in architecture, and its limits

This paper is about meaning. Its aim is to outline something like a ‘configurational’ theory of meaning in architecture. It can be thought of as a theory of generic meaning, by analogy with the theory of generic function in architecture, outlined in Chapter 8 of Space is the Machine (1996, p.216-261). Generic function meant the basic acts that people carry out in buildings before we consider the contents or purposes of their acts, so occupying space and moving in space are generic functions. Generic meaning is equally basic, and refers to certain simple social ideas that the masses and elements that make up the physical form of a building, especially its façade, can convey by being configured in one way rather than another. There is a caveat. A theory of meaning, generic or otherwise, does not take us very far. Perhaps the most useful outcome of the paper would be to set limits of the idea of meaning in architecture. It aims to identify these limits by distinguishing the idea of meaning from the idea of the aesthetic in architecture – or even its poetics, though, as we will see, using this term in a technical rather than rhetorical sense. These concepts, it will be argued, have a far greater potential than ‘meaning’ to clarify what can be conveyed to human minds by the manipulation of architectural form

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 space-time, 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

Syntactic Analysis of Settlements

This paper introduces a model for the representation, analysis and interpretation of settlement space: syntactic analysis. The model of analysis sees a settlement as a bi-polar system, arranged between the entrances to buildings and the world outside the settlement. The structure of space between these two domains is seen as a means of interfacing two kinds of relations: those among the inhabitants of the settlement and those between inhabitants and strangers. The essence of the method of analysis is that it establishes a way of dealing with the global physical structure of a settlement without losing sight of its social structure; and second - a function of the first - it establishes a method of describing space in such a way as to make its social origins and consequences a part of that description. It is proposed that it is precisely in the relations between local and global structure that traditional and vernacular settlements can be characterized and classified spatially

From Exhibits to Spatial Culture: An Exploration of Performing Arts Collections in Museums

In recent years, museums have have increasingly explored a style of display that emphasises the visitors’ multisensory experience of exhibits, as much as their cognitive understanding. At the same time, there has been growing acknowledgement of the significance of the intangible aspects of heritage as dimensions to be understood and nurtured. Against this background, the display of exhibits related to performing arts and the presentations of their ephemeral and intangible aspects in museums become particularly intriguing. This paper seeks to explore the different ways in which performing arts collections are displayed, and how they are affected by, and affect, the spatial and architectural properties of the museum settings. Using the space syntax analysis of space types in association with the framework from the Francophone museological literature of the exhibition as a medium, and of the exhibition space as a ‘synthetic space’ (espace synthétique), we will analyse six museum settings that have clear spatial and architectural intentions with respect to performing arts collections. Their comparative analysis will bring to the surface intriguing common tendencies which relate both to the organisation of the display and to the nature of the spaces in which it is realised. These commonalities, it is suggested, can be thought of as outlining a generic spatial culture through which it is possible to create, in the museum, dimensions of the circumstances in which performances are realised, transmitting some of the living richness of their experience

Normalising least angle choice in Depthmap - and how it opens up new perspectives on the global and local analysis of city space

Depthmap embodies a theory of the city, as well as being a method for analysing the city. By solving outstanding problems of the normalisation of measures, most notably syntactic choice (mathematical betweenness), to permit comparison of cities of different sizes, we can gain new theoretical insights into their spatial structuring

Metric and topo-geometric properties of urban street networks: some convergencies, divergencies and new results

The theory of cities, which has grown out of the use of space syntax techniques in urban studies, proposes a curious mathematical duality: that urban space is locally metric but globally topo-geometric. Evidence for local metricity comes from such generic phenomena as grid intensification to reduce mean trip lengths in live centres, the fall of movement from attractors with metric distance, and the commonly observed decay of shopping with metric distance from an intersection. Evidence for global topo-geometry come from the fact that we need to utilize both the geometry and connectedness of the larger scale space network to arrive at configurational measures which optimally approximate movement patterns in the urban network. It might be conjectured that there is some threshold above which human being use some geometrical and topological representation of the urban grid rather than the sense of bodily distance to making movement decisions, but this is unknown. The discarding of metric properties in the large-scale urban grid has, however, been controversial. Here we cast a new light on this duality. We show first some phenomena in which metric and topo-geometric measures of urban space converge and diverge and in doing so clarify the relation between the metric and topo-geometric properties of urban spatial networks. We then show how metric measures can be used to create a new urban phenomenon: the partitioning of the background network of urban space into a network of semi-discrete patches by applying metric universal distance measures at different metric radii, suggesting a natural spatial area-isation of the city at all scales. On this basis we suggest a key clarification of the generic structure of cities: that metric universal distance captures exactly the formally and functionally local patchwork properties of the network, most notably the spatial differentiation of areas, while the topo-geometric measures identifying the structure which overcomes locality and links the urban patchwork into a whole at different scales