Cities as movement economies

Abstract

This paper is taken from the forthcoming book, Space is the Machine (Cambridge University Press, 1996) which brings together some of the recent developments in applying configurational analysis to issues of architectural and urban theory. The paper reports a fundamental research finding: that movement in the urban grid is, all other things being equal, generated by the configuration of the grid itself. This finding allows completely new insights into the structure of urban grids, and the way these structures relate to urban function. The relation between grid and movement in fact underlies many other aspects of urban form: the distribution of land uses such as retail and residence, spatial patterning of crime, the evolution of different densities and even the part-whole structure of cities. The influence of the fundamental grid-movement relation is so pervasive that cities are conceptualized here as ‘movement economies’, in which the structuring of movement by the grid leads, through multiplier effects, to dense patterns of mixed use encounter that characterize the spatially successful city.