New Article: Complexity in Urban Form and Design

My article, Measuring the Complexity of Urban Form and Design, is now in-press for publication at Urban Design International (download free PDF). Cities are complex systems composed of many human agents interacting in physical urban space. This paper develops a typology of measures and indicators for assessing the physical complexity of the built environment at the scale of urban design. It extends quantitative measures from city planning, network science, ecosystems studies, fractal geometry, statistical physics, and information theory to the analysis of urban form and qualitative human experience.

Metrics at multiple scales are scattered throughout diverse bodies of literature and have useful applications in analyzing the adaptive complexity that both evolves and results from local design processes. In turn, they enable urban designers to assess resilience, adaptability, connectedness, and livability with an advanced toolkit. The typology developed here applies to empirical research of various neighborhood types and design standards. It includes temporal, visual, spatial, scaling, and network-analytic connectivity measures of the urban form.

Urban design has evolved through eras of classicism, organicism, austere modernism, postmodernism, and neotraditionalism – each of which encounters the city’s physical complexity with different goals. Today, multiple synergies exist between urban design objectives and recent knowledge emerging from the complexity sciences as complexity theory. Prominent urban design movements such as the new urbanism and smart growth now openly embrace complexity. But to better foster the benefits of healthy complex adaptive systems, urban design must move beyond metaphor and inspiration to more precisely formalize what complexity is and how we can measure it to assess both the world as it is, and proposals for how it could be instead.

How does this knowledge lead to different or better urban design? First, this typology can help urban design theory and practice critically evaluate and normatively balance complexity goals based on local culture and politics. Urban design, as a channel of human self-organization, can produce various balances of order and variety in its streetscapes (anywhere from sterile monotony to bewildering overstimulation), circulation networks (from compact grids, to sprawling loops-and-lollipops, to dense meshes of interwoven paths), land uses (from single-use functional zoning to intermixed variety), and social character (from segregation and disconnection to integration, contact, and exchange).

Second, to critically evaluate these possible futures beyond metaphor and inspiration, this paper’s five dimensions of complexity and their attendant measures can ground debate and analysis. They organize and quantify characteristics of current and proposed urban design that shape circulation, contact, access, choice, resilience, adaptability, and equity. For example, this provides new ways to evaluate how thoroughly linked and permeable a network is, and how it can be resilient against floods, earthquakes, traffic collisions, congestion, and other disruptions. It grounds design decisions in science and theory to clarify goals and evaluate the outcomes of alternative plans. These measures help designers evaluate how well the physical built environment might adapt to expected – or unexpected – change. They offer a rubric for the continuing shift of design theory and practice away from a logic of top-down artificially constructed urban landscapes and towards a logic of organic growth, evolution, and resilience.

Portions of this work were previously presented at the Conference on Complex Systems in Tempe, Arizona. For more, check out the article.