A Topological Representation for Taking Cities as a Coherent Whole

Abstract

A city is a whole, as are all cities in a country. Within a whole, individual cities possess different degrees of wholeness, defined by Christopher Alexander as a life-giving order or simply a living structure. To characterize the wholeness and in particular to advocate for wholeness as an effective design principle, this paper develops a geographic representation that views cities as a whole. This geographic representation is topology-oriented, so fundamentally differs from existing geometry-based geographic representations. With the topological representation, all cities are abstracted as individual points and put into different hierarchical levels, according to their sizes and based on head/tail breaks - a classification scheme and visualization tool for data with a heavy tailed distribution. These points of different hierarchical levels are respectively used to create Thiessen polygons. Based on polygon-polygon relationships, we set up a complex network. In this network, small polygons point to adjacent large polygons at the same hierarchical level and contained polygons point to containing polygons across two consecutive hierarchical levels. We computed the degrees of wholeness for individual cities, and subsequently found that the degrees of wholeness possess both properties of differentiation and adaptation. To demonstrate, we developed four case studies of all China and UK natural cities, as well as Beijing and London natural cities, using massive amounts of street nodes and Tweet locations. The topological representation and the kind of topological analysis in general can be applied to any design or pattern, such as carpets, Baroque architecture and artifacts, and fractals in order to assess their beauty, echoing the introductory quote from Christopher Alexander. Keywords: Wholeness, natural cities, head/tail breaks, complex networks, scaling hierarchy, urban design

13 pages, 7 figures, and 3 tables

References in corpus (9)

• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• Self-organized Natural Roads for Predicting Traffic Flow: A Sensitivity Study
• The Evolution of Natural Cities from the Perspective of Location-Based Social Media
• Head/tail Breaks for Visualization of City Structure and Dynamics
• Mapping parcel-level urban areas for a large geographical area
• Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space
• Spatial Distribution of City Tweets and Their Densities
• A Complex-Network Perspective on Alexander's Wholeness
• A City Is a Complex Network

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Geographic Space as a Living Structure for Predicting Human Activities Using Big Data
• Living Structure Down to Earth and Up to Heaven: Christopher Alexander
• A New Approach to Detecting and Designing Living Structure of Urban Environments
• Why Topology Matters in Predicting Human Activities
• A Recursive Definition of Goodness of Space for Bridging the Concepts of Space and Place for Sustainability