Related papers: Why Can the Image of the City be Formed?
Two fundamental issues surrounding research on the image of the city respectively focus on the city's external and internal representations. The external representation in the context of this paper refers to the city itself, external to…
Kevin Lynch proposed a theory of the image of the city identifying five elements that make the city legible or imageable. The resulting mental map of the city was conventionally derived through some qualitative processes, relying on…
There is strong expectation that cities, across time, culture and level of development, share much in common in terms of their form and function. Recently, attempts to formalize mathematically these expectations have led to the hypothesis…
Cities are some of the most intricate and advanced creations of humanity. Most objects in cities are perfectly synchronised to coordinate activities such as jobs, education, transportation, entertainment, and waste management. Although each…
What people choose to see, like, or remember is of profound interest to city planners and architects. Previous research suggests what people are more likely to store in their memory - buildings with dominant shapes and bright colors,…
Assuming that the ultimate purpose of the city is to provide support to human interaction and that opportunities to that social interaction are unevenly distributed across the urban fabric, this paper reports some attempts to describe such…
Entropy relates the fast, microscopic behaviour of the elements in a system to its slow, macroscopic state. We propose to use it to explain how, as complexity theory suggests, small scale decisions of individuals form cities. For this, we…
The map of a city's streets constitutes a particular case of spatial complex network. However a city is not limited to its topology: it is above all a geometrical object whose particularity is to organize into short and long axes called…
The quest for a theory of cities that could offer a quantitative and systematic approach to manage cities is at the top priority, given the challenges humanity faces due to the increasing urbanization and densification of cities. If such a…
Cities are often compared through scaling laws, usually expressed as power-law relations between population size and aggregate urban quantities related to infrastructure, socioeconomic activity, or environmental impacts. These laws are…
Scaling has been proposed as a powerful tool to analyze the properties of complex systems, and in particular for cities where it describes how various properties change with population. The empirical study of scaling on a wide range of…
Structured internal representations (cognitive maps) shape cognition, from imagining the future and counterfactual past, to transferring knowledge to new settings. Our understanding of how such representations are formed and maintained in…
A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban properties scaling nonlinearly with population,…
Scaling laws are powerful summaries of the variations of urban attributes with city size. However, the validity of their universal meaning for cities is hampered by the observation that different scaling regimes can be encountered for the…
In this paper, we apply recent findings from urban scaling theory to evaluate how it could be applied to a one-dimensional archetypal city. Our focus is on how the simplicity of a one-dimensional model can provide intuitive insights that…
The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are…
Learning and interpreting the structure of the environment is an innate feature of biological systems, and is integral to guiding flexible behaviours for evolutionary viability. The concept of a cognitive map has emerged as one of the…
The things surrounding us vary dramatically, which implies that there are far more small things than large ones, e.g., far more small cities than large ones in the world. This dramatic variation is often referred to as fractal or scaling.…
A city is not a tree but a semi-lattice. To use a perhaps more familiar term, a city is a complex network. The complex network constitutes a unique topological perspective on cities and enables us to better understand the kind of problem a…
Understanding quantitative relationships between urban elements is crucial for a wide range of applications. The observation at the macroscopic level demonstrates that the aggregated urban quantities (e.g., gross domestic product) scale…