The Mathematics of Urban Morphology

Description

This edited volume provides an essential resource for urban morphology, the study of urban forms and structures, offering a much-needed mathematical perspective. Experts on a variety of mathematical modeling techniques provide new insights into specific aspects of the field, such as street networks, sustainability, and urban growth. The chapters collected here make a clear case for the importance of tools and methods to understand, model, and simulate the formation and evolution of cities. The chapters cover a wide variety of topics in urban morphology, and are conveniently organized by their mathematical principles. The first part covers fractals and focuses on how self-similar structures sort themselves out through competition. This is followed by a section on cellular automata, and includes chapters exploring how they generate fractal forms. Networks are the focus of the third part, which includes street networks and other forms as well. Chapters that examine complexity and its relation to urban structures are in part four.The fifth part introduces a variety of other quantitative models that can be used to study urban morphology. In the book’s final section, a series of multidisciplinary commentaries offers readers new ways of looking at the relationship between mathematics and urban forms. Being the first book on this topic, Mathematics of Urban Morphology will be an invaluable resource for applied mathematicians and anyone studying urban morphology. Additionally, anyone who is interested in cities from the angle of economics, sociology, architecture, or geography will also find it useful. "This book provides a useful perspective on the state of the art with respect to urban morphology in general and mathematics as tools and frames to disentangle the ideas that pervade arguments about form and function in particular. There is much to absorb in the pages that follow and there are many pointers to ways in which these ideas can be linked to related theories of cities, urban design and urban policy analysis as well as new movements such as the role of computation in cities and the idea of the smart city. Much food for thought. Read on, digest, enjoy." From the foreword by Michael Batty Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii On Urban Morphology and Mathematics (Luca D’Acci)....Pages 1-18 Front Matter ....Pages 19-19 Fractal Dimension Analysis of Urban Morphology Based on Spatial Correlation Functions (Yanguang Chen)....Pages 21-53 Central Place Theory and the Power Law for Cities (Wen-Tai Hsu, Xin Zou)....Pages 55-75 Distribution of City Size: Gibrat, Pareto, Zipf (Marco Bee, Massimo Riccaboni, Stefano Schiavo)....Pages 77-91 The Signature of Organic Urban Growth (Leonard Nilsson, Jorge Gil)....Pages 93-121 A Fractal Approach to Explore Australian Urban Form and Its Impacting Factors at Neighbourhood Scale (Mengyuan Jia, Yan Liu, Scott N. Lieske, Tian Chen)....Pages 123-144 Front Matter ....Pages 145-145 Geographic Cellular Automata for Realistic Urban form Simulations: How Far Should the Constraint be Contained? (Jean-Philippe Antoni, Gilles Vuidel, Hichem Omrani, Olivier Klein)....Pages 147-162 Mathematical Foundations of Cellular Automata and Complexity Theory (Keith C. Clarke)....Pages 163-170 Front Matter ....Pages 171-171 Assessing Complexity of Urban Spatial Networks (Dimitri Volchenkov)....Pages 173-197 Space Syntax: A Network-Based Configurational Approach to Studying Urban Morphology (Mahbub Rashid)....Pages 199-251 Applied Mathematics on Urban Space (A. van Nes)....Pages 253-270 The Morphology and Circuity of Walkable and Drivable Street Networks (Geoff Boeing)....Pages 271-287 Front Matter ....Pages 289-289 Emergence of Complexity in Urban Morphology (Segun Goh, Keumsook Lee, M. Y. Choi)....Pages 291-314 On the Complex Interaction Between Mathematics and Urban Morphology (Nicola Bellomo, Pietro Terna)....Pages 315-333 A Topological Representation for Taking Cities as a Coherent Whole (Bin Jiang)....Pages 335-352 Front Matter ....Pages 353-353 A Multiscale Clustering of the Urban Morphology for Use in Quantitative Models (Patrick M. Schirmer, Kay W. Axhausen)....Pages 355-382 An Urban Morphogenesis Model Capturing Interactions Between Networks and Territories (Juste Raimbault)....Pages 383-409 Continuum Percolation and Spatial Point Pattern in Application to Urban Morphology (Hoai Nguyen Huynh)....Pages 411-429 Urban Compactness: New Geometric Interpretations and Indicators (Stephen Marshall, Yi Gong, Nick Green)....Pages 431-456 Using Google Street View for Street-Level Urban Form Analysis, a Case Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Xiaojiang Li, Carlo Ratti)....Pages 457-470 Examining Spatial Structure Using Gravity Models (Martijn Burger, Frank van Oort, Evert Meijers)....Pages 471-479 Front Matter ....Pages 481-481 Urban Morphogenesis: Putting Mathematics in Its Place (Roger White)....Pages 483-489 Not Only … But Also: Urban Mathematical Models and Urban Social Theory (Trevor Barnes)....Pages 491-497 Urban Morphology or Townscape? Wholes Made of Many Parts (Ron Johnston)....Pages 499-502 Extending Urban Morphology: Drawing Together Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches (Peter J. Larkham)....Pages 503-515 Mathematics and Cities: A Long-Standing Relationship Fit for the Future? (Christopher D. F. Rogers)....Pages 517-522 Mathematics and/as Humanities–Linking Humanistic Historical to Quantitative Approaches (Tino Mager, Carola Hein)....Pages 523-528 Urban Forms, Agents, and Processes of Change (Vítor Oliveira)....Pages 529-535 Future of Streets (Andres Sevtsuk, Diane E. Davis)....Pages 537-546 Understanding and Quantifying Urban Density Toward more Sustainable City Form (Steffen Lehmann)....Pages 547-556 To Not Talk Past Each Other: An Immodest Proposal for Cross-Conceptual Research in Urban Morphology (Michael P. Conzen)....Pages 557-564