A Complex-Network Perspective on Alexander's Wholeness

Abstract

The wholeness, conceived and developed by Christopher Alexander, is what exists to some degree or other in space and matter, and can be described by precise mathematical language. However, it remains somehow mysterious and elusive, and therefore hard to grasp. This paper develops a complex network perspective on the wholeness to better understand the nature of order or beauty for sustainable design. I bring together a set of complexity-science subjects such as complex networks, fractal geometry, and in particular underlying scaling hierarchy derived by head/tail breaks - a classification scheme and a visualization tool for data with a heavy-tailed distribution, in order to make Alexander's profound thoughts more accessible to design practitioners and complexity-science researchers. Through several case studies (some of which Alexander studied), I demonstrate that the complex-network perspective helps reduce the mystery of wholeness and brings new insights to Alexander's thoughts on the concept of wholeness or objective beauty that exists in fine and deep structure. The complex-network perspective enables us to see things in their wholeness, and to better understand how the kind of structural beauty emerges from local actions guided by the 15 fundamental properties, and by differentiation and adaptation processes. The wholeness goes beyond current complex network theory towards design or creation of living structures. Keywords: Theory of centers, living geometry, Christopher Alexander, head/tail breaks, and beauty

12 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, minor text revision

References in corpus (6)

• Cooperative Game Theory Approaches for Network Partitioning
• Geospatial Analysis Requires a Different Way of Thinking: The Problem of Spatial Heterogeneity
• Head/tail Breaks for Visualization of City Structure and Dynamics
• Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space
• Defining Least Community as a Homogeneous Group in Complex Networks
• A City Is a Complex Network

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• Measuring the Complexity of Urban Form and Design
• Geographic Space as a Living Structure for Predicting Human Activities Using Big Data
• A Topological Representation for Taking Cities as a Coherent Whole
• Living Structure Down to Earth and Up to Heaven: Christopher Alexander
• Spatial Heterogeneity, Scale, Data Character, and Sustainable Transport in the Big Data Era
• A Recursive Definition of Goodness of Space for Bridging the Concepts of Space and Place for Sustainability
• Structure Entropy, Self-Organization, and Power Laws in Urban Street Networks: Evidence for Alexander's Ideas