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Register a new userA New Approach to Detecting and Designing Living Structure of Urban Environments
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Sustainable urban design or planning is not a LEGO-like assembly of prefabricated elements, but an embryo-like growth with persistent differentiation and adaptation towards a coherent whole. The coherent whole has a striking character - called living structure - that consists of far more small substructures than large ones. To detect the living structure, natural streets or axial lines have been previously adopted to be topologically represent an urban environment as a coherent whole. This paper develops a new approach to detecting the underlying living structure of urban environments. The approach takes an urban environment as a whole and recursively decomposes it into meaningful subwholes at different levels of hierarchy or scale ranging from the largest to the smallest. We compared the new approach to natural street and axial line approaches and demonstrated, through four case studies, that the new approach is better and more powerful. Based on the study, we further discuss how the new approach can be used not only for understanding, but also for effectively designing or planning the living structure of an urban environment to be more living or more livable. Keywords: Urban design or planning, structural beauty, space syntax, natural streets, life, wholeness
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Discovered by Christopher Alexander, living structure is a physical phenomenon, through which the quality of the built environment or artifacts can be judged objectively. It bears two distinguished properties just like a tree: far more small things than large ones across all scales, and more or less similar things on each scale. As a physical phenomenon, and mathematical concept, living structure is essentially empirical, discovered and developed from miniscule observation in nature- and human-made things, and it affects our daily lives in some substantial ways, such as where to put a table or a flower vase in a room, helping us to make beautiful things and environments. Living structure is not only empirical, but also philosophical and visionary, enabling us to see the world and space in more meaningful ways. This paper is intended to defend living structure as a physical phenomenon, clarifying some common questions and misgivings surrounding Alexanders design thoughts, such as the objective or structural nature of beauty, building styles advocated by Alexander, and mysterious nature of his concepts. We first illustrate living structure - essentially organized complexity, as advocated by the late Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) - that is governed by two fundamental laws (scaling law and Toblers law), and generated in some step by step fashion by two design principles (differentiation and adaptation) through the 15 structural properties. We then verify why living structure is primarily empirical, drawing evidence from Alexanders own work, as well as our case studies applied to the Earths surface including cities, streets, and buildings, and two logos. Before reaching conclusions, we concentrate on the most mysterious part of Alexanders work - the hypothesized I - as a substance that pervasively exists everywhere, in order to make better sense of living structure in our minds.
Understanding the localization properties of eigenvectors of complex networks is important to get insight into various structural and dynamical properties of the corresponding systems. Here, we analytically develop a scheme to construct a highly localized network for a given set of networks parameters that is the number of nodes and the number of interactions. We find that the localization behavior of the principal eigenvector (PEV) of such a network is sensitive against a single edge rewiring. We find evidences for eigenvalue crossing phenomena as a consequence of the single edge rewiring, in turn providing an origin to the sensitive behavior of the PEV localization. These insights were then used to analytically construct the highly localized network for a given set of networks parameters. The analysis provides fundamental insight into relationships between the structural and the spectral properties of networks for PEV localized networks. Further, we substantiate the existence of the eigenvalue crossing phenomenon by considering a linear-dynamical process, namely the ribonucleic acid (RNA) neutral network population dynamical model. The analysis presented here on model networks aids in understanding the steady-state behavior of a broad range of linear-dynamical processes, from epidemic spreading to biochemical dynamics associated with the adjacency matrices.
The quantitative study of traffic dynamics is crucial to ensure the efficiency of urban transportation networks. The current work investigates the spatial properties of congestion, that is, we aim to characterize the city areas where traffic bottlenecks occur. The analysis of a large amount of real road networks in previous works showed that congestion points experience spatial abrupt transitions, namely they shift away from the city center as larger urban areas are incorporated. The fundamental ingredient behind this effect is the entanglement of central and arterial roads, embedded in separated geographical regions. In this paper we extend the analysis of the conditions yielding abrupt transitions of congestion location. First, we look into the more realistic situation in which arterial and central roads, rather than lying on sharply separated regions, present spatial overlap. It results that this affects the position of bottlenecks and introduces new possible congestion areas. Secondly, we pay particular attention to the role played by the edge distribution, proving that it allows to smooth the transitions profile, and so to control the congestion displacement. Finally, we show that the aforementioned phenomenology may be recovered also as a consequence of a discontinuity in the nodes density, in a domain with uniform connectivity. Our results provide useful insights for the design and optimization of urban road networks, and the management of the daily traffic.
In the framework of the evolutionary dynamics of the Prisoners Dilemma game on complex networks, we investigate the possibility that the average level of cooperation shows hysteresis under quasi-static variations of a model parameter (the temptation to defect). Under the discrete replicator strategy updating rule, for both Erdos-Renyi and Barabasi-Albert graphs we observe cooperation hysteresis cycles provided one reaches tipping point values of the parameter; otherwise, perfect reversibility is obtained. The selective fixation of cooperation at certain nodes and its organization in cooperator clusters, that are surrounded by fluctuating strategists, allows the rationalization of the lagging behind behavior observed.
We examine a key component of human settlements mediating pollution and congestion, as well as economic development: roads and their expansion in cities, towns and villages. Our analysis of road networks in more than 850 US cities and rural counties since 1900 reveals significant variations in the structure of roads both within cities and across the conterminous US. Despite differences in the evolution of these networks, there are commonalities: newer roads tend to become less grid-like. These results persist across the rural-urban continuum and are therefore not just a product of urban growth. These findings illuminate the need for policies for urban and rural planning including the critical assessment of new development trends.
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