ISF Workshop: Urban innovation through
walkability and spatial cognition
September 19-21, 2022, Tel Aviv University
Prof. Bin Jiang
Biosketch of the speaker Dr. Bin Jiang is Professor of GeoInformatics at the University of Gävle, Sweden. His research interests center on geospatial analysis and modeling, for example, topological analysis and scaling hierarchy applied to buildings, streets, and cities, or geospatial big data in general. Over the past years, he has developed a series of novel concepts, methods, and tools, which are all complexity science oriented, such as natural cities, natural streets, head/tail breaks, ht-index, and scaling law, not only for better understanding city structure and dynamics, but also for effectively transforming cities and communities to become living or more living. He formulated three fundamental issues of urban science about a city: how it looks, how it works, and what it ought to be. In other words, urban science should study not only how cities are, but also – probably more importantly – what cities ought to be, that is, urban planning and design towards a sustainable society. Inspired by the great architect Christopher Alexander, he developed a mathematical model of beauty – or beautimeter – which helps address not only why a city is beautiful, but also how beautiful the city is.
To what extent walkability and walking behavior are influenced by the livingness of space?
Abstract:
Any space or any part of space has some degree of livingness (L), and it is determined by two factors: the number of subspaces (S) and their inherent hierarchy (H), that is, L = S * H. The livingness of space is also called structural beauty, meaning that the more substructures the more structurally beautiful, and the higher hierarchy of the substructures the more structurally beautiful. In this presentation, I will first introduce the notion of living structure (Alexander 2002–2005), which is a physical phenomenon that pervasively exists in any part of space, and which is a mathematical structure that consists of numerous substructures with an inherent hierarchy. Across the hierarchical levels, there are far more substructures than large ones, yet on each hierarchical level, substructures are more or less similar in size. I will then present the concept of structural beauty as a measure of living structure, and how it can be computed using various examples such as paintings, city plans, nighttime imagery, and ordinary images. I will then argue that the livingness of space is essentially vitality or organized complexity advocated by Jane Jacobs (1961) through her classic book, or imaginability and legibility of cities pioneered by Kevin Lynch (1960) in this classic work. I will discuss how the livingness of space resembles the central place theory of Walter Christaller (1933), and further discuss to what extent walkability and walking behavior (even beyond including perception, cognition, and consciousness) are influenced by the livingness of space. In this regard, I may draw space syntax (Hillier and Hanson 1984) into the discussion as well.
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References:
Alexander C. (2002–2005), The Nature of Order: An essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe, Center for Environmental Structure: Berkeley, CA.
Christaller W. (1933, 1966), Central Places in Southern Germany, Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs.
Hillier B. and Hanson J. (1984), The Social Logic of Space, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Jacobs J. (1961), The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House: New York,
Jiang B. and de Rijke C. (2022), Representing geographic space as a hierarchy of recursively defined subspaces for computing the degree of order, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 92(1+2), 101750.
Jiang B. and de Rijke C. A. (2021), Structural beauty: A structure-based approach to quantifying the beauty of an image, Journal of Imaging, 7(5), 78.
Jiang B. and Huang J. (2021), A new approach to detecting and designing living structure of urban environments, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 88, 1–10.
Lynch K. (1960), The Image of the City, The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
(Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022, 16:00-17:00 IL)
