This book offers state-of-the-art ‘tools for thinking’ for urban designers, planners and decision-makers. Thematically it focuses on the contexts of problems in urban design and places community spaces at the heart of urban design research. The book provides practicable tools for network modelling and visualization in urban design research. Step-by-step examples take readers through methods for tracing the evolution of road networks, and their impacts on contemporary community spaces. Easy-to-follow guides to programming show how to process and plot community data sets as network graphs. They reveal how these can help to observe and represent the different ways in which community spaces are inter-connected. This book places these technological methods in the context of current theories of community formations. It considers how these cutting-edge tools for thinking in urban design research – comprising both theories and methods – could transform our understanding of community spaces as being complex, inter-dependent and socially meaningful assets. This book is pioneering in its analysis of the urban contexts to community formations, and in its argument for professional integration between urban and knowledge practitioners. Academics and professionals within the fields of design research, urban studies, spatial analysis, urban geography and sociology will benefit from reading this book.

This book, which resulted from an intensive discourse between experts from several disciplines – complexity theorists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, urban planners and urban designers, as well as a zoologist and a physiologist – addresses various issues regarding cities. It is a first step in responding to the challenge of generating just such a discourse, based on a dilemma identified in the CTC (Complexity Theories of Cities) domain. The latter has demonstrated that cities exhibit the properties of natural, organic complex systems: they are open, complex and bottom-up, have fractal structures and are often chaotic. CTC have further shown that many of the mathematical formalisms and models developed to study material and organic complex systems also apply to cities. The dilemma in the current state of CTC is that cities differ from natural complex systems in that they are hybrid complex systems composed, on the one hand, of artifacts such as buildings, roads and bridges, and of natural human agents on the other. This raises a plethora of new questions on the difference between the natural and the artificial, the cognitive origin of human action and behavior, and the role of planning and designing cities. The answers to these questions cannot come from a single discipline; they must instead emerge from a discourse between experts from several disciplines engaged in CTC.

Michael Batty offers a comprehensive view of urban dynamics in the context of complexity theory, presenting models that demonstrate how complexity theory can embrace a myriad of processes and elements that combine into organic wholes.

Urban design is a process of establishing a structural order within human settlements; responding to dynamic emergent meanings and functions in a constant state of flux. The planning/design process is complex due to the myriad of ongoing (urban) organizational and structural relationships and contexts. This book reconnects the process with outcomes on the ground, and puts thinking about design back at the heart of what planners do. Mixing accessible theory, practical examples and carefully designed exercises in composition from simple to complex settings, Urban Design is an essential textbook for classrooms and design studios across the full spectrum of planning and urban studies fields. Filled with color illustrations and graphics of excellent projects, it gives students tools to enable them to sketch, draw, design and, above all, think. This new edition remains focused on instructing the student, professional and layperson in the elements and principles of design composition, so that they can diverge from conventional and packaged solutions in pursuit of a meaningful and creative urbanism. This edition builds upon established design principles and encourages the student in creative ways to depart from them as appropriate in dealing with the complexity of culture, space and time dynamics of cities. The book identifies the elements and principles of compositions and explores compositional order and structure as they relate to the meaning and functionality of cities. It discusses new directions and methods, and outlines the importance of both buildings and the open spaces between them.

This open access textbook is a comprehensive introduction to space syntax method and theory for graduate students and researchers. It provides a step-by-step approach for its application in urban planning and design. This textbook aims to increase the accessibility of the space syntax method for the first time to all graduate students and researchers who are dealing with the built environment, such as those in the field of architecture, urban design and planning, urban sociology, urban geography, archaeology, road engineering, and environmental psychology. Taking a didactical approach, the authors have structured each chapter to explain key concepts and show practical examples followed by underlying theory and provided exercises to facilitate learning in each chapter. The textbook gradually eases the reader into the fundamental concepts and leads them towards complex theories and applications. In summary, the general competencies gain after reading this book are: – to understand, explain, and discuss space syntax as a method and theory; – be capable of undertaking various space syntax analyses such as axial analysis, segment analysis, point depth analysis, or visibility analysis; – be able to apply space syntax for urban research and design practice; – be able to interpret and evaluate space syntax analysis results and embed these in a wider context; – be capable of producing new original work using space syntax. This holistic textbook functions as compulsory literature for spatial analysis courses where space syntax is part of the methods taught. Likewise, this space syntax book is useful for graduate students and researchers who want to do self-study. Furthermore, the book provides readers with the fundamental knowledge to understand and critically reflect on existing literature using space syntax.

This book is thematically positioned at the intersections of Urban Design, Architecture, Civil Engineering and Computer Science, and it has the goal to provide specialists coming from respective fields a multi-angle overview of state-of-the-art work currently being carried out. It addresses both newcomers who wish to obtain more knowledge about this growing area of interest, as well as established researchers and practitioners who want to keep up to date. In terms of organization, the volume starts out with chapters looking at the domain at a wide-angle and then moves focus towards technical viewpoints and approaches.

A proposal for a new way to understand cities and their design not as artifacts but as systems composed of flows and networks. In The New Science of Cities, Michael Batty suggests that to understand cities we must view them not simply as places in space but as systems of networks and flows. To understand space, he argues, we must understand flows, and to understand flows, we must understand networks—the relations between objects that compose the system of the city. Drawing on the complexity sciences, social physics, urban economics, transportation theory, regional science, and urban geography, and building on his own previous work, Batty introduces theories and methods that reveal the deep structure of how cities function. Batty presents the foundations of a new science of cities, defining flows and their networks and introducing tools that can be applied to understanding different aspects of city structure. He examines the size of cities, their internal order, the transport routes that define them, and the locations that fix these networks. He introduces methods of simulation that range from simple stochastic models to bottom-up evolutionary models to aggregate land-use transportation models. Then, using largely the same tools, he presents design and decision-making models that predict interactions and flows in future cities. These networks emphasize a notion with relevance for future research and planning: that design of cities is collective action.

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

Material Mobilities explores the material dimension of various forms of mobilities and its implications for society, politics and everyday experiences as well as investigates how materials themselves are on the move. Together the different contributions and perspectives on material mobilities illustrate how materialities are critical components within mobilities but also shape how mobilities are produced and consumed within contemporary mobile societies. This insight may potentially influence the ways disciplines of mobilities understand and approach mobilities in the future. This book exemplifies how the new Mobilities turn may profit from foregrounding materials, the material, and materiality as a common pivot for social analysis. During the last decade of research affiliated to the ‘new mobilities turn’ the societal repercussions of intensive mobilities has been in focus. The ‘turn’ has documented the social, environmental, economic, and cultural effects of the contemporary patterns of movement of people, vehicles, goods, data and information. In parallel with this work new ideas and concepts about the human/non-human and the ‘material dimension’ of the social world has surfaced within a wide array of fields such as philosophy, anthropology, and cultural studies. Material Mobilities offers a materially sensitive and focused attention to the new Mobilities turn. The ‘turn to the material’ opens up a new set of research questions related to how artefacts and technologies facilitating and affording mobilities are being designed, constructed, and instituted. The new material interest furthermore points at new ways of comprehending the political and the power-dimensions of mobilities and infrastructural landscapes. The turn to the material furthermore problematizes the Modern binary distinctions between humans and non-humans, subjects and objects, culture and nature.

How we can invent—but not predict—the future of cities. We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them. Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems that are more like organisms than machines. Neither the laws of economics nor the laws of mechanics apply; cities are the product of countless individual and collective decisions that do not conform to any grand plan. They are the product of our inventions; they evolve. In Inventing Future Cities, Michael Batty explores what we need to understand about cities in order to invent their future. Batty outlines certain themes—principles—that apply to all cities. He investigates not the invention of artifacts but inventive processes. Today form is becoming ever more divorced from function; information networks now shape the traditional functions of cities as places of exchange and innovation. By the end of this century, most of the world's population will live in cities, large or small, sometimes contiguous, and always connected; in an urbanized world, it will be increasingly difficult to define a city by its physical boundaries. Batty discusses the coming great transition from a world with few cities to a world of all cities; argues that future cities will be defined as clusters in a hierarchy; describes the future “high-frequency,” real-time streaming city; considers urban sprawl and urban renewal; and maps the waves of technological change, which grow ever more intense and lead to continuous innovation—an unending process of creative destruction out of which future cities will emerge.