Principles of Urban Structure

Description

This book explains how cities actually work. It will serve as a guide and inspiration for planners to re-humanise our cities using the latest technologies and recent understanding from science and mathematics. It addresses concepts such as the urban web and fractals to try and envision the connections that make up the city in new ways.

The dogma of mainstream urbanism cannot cope with the changes in technology, culture and science of the last decades. The heritage we are left with is often an overly asphalted and sterile concrete environment. This book addresses the needs of professional urbanists, students and teachers, who wish to understand how and why cities are successful or not, depending on their form, components, and substructure. Most of the needs are related to the urgent search for new instruments of urban planning and design, to which this book contributes conceptually by showing how to connect the fractal city on multiple levels.

There is an increasing awareness that a city needs to be understood as a complex interacting system. Different types of urban systems overlap to build up urban complexity in a living city. This raises the need for using concepts such as coherence, emergence, information, self-organisation and adaptivity. This book relates these concepts to the city, shows how to put them into operation, and hopefully marks the beginnings of an urban science.