A new approach to detecting and designing living structure of urban environments

Abstract

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, this paper develops a new approach for uncovering 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. This approach helps us not only better understand an urban environment as a living structure, but also better plan or transform the urban environment to be living or more living, or equivalently to be beautiful or more beautiful.