From urban form to information: Cellular configurations in different spatial cultures

Vinicius M Netto, Edgardo Brigatti and Caio Cacholas

Environment and Planning B, 2023, vol. 50, issue 1, 146-161

Abstract: Cities are different worldwide, but does this fact have any relation to culture? The idea that urban form embodies idiosyncrasies related to cultural identities captures the imagination of many in urban studies, but it is an assumption yet to be carefully examined. At its heart, the question of whether cities can be seen as cultural artefacts is informational: whether or not cultural traces can be encoded in the physical configuration of cities. Approaching spatial configuration as a proxy of urban culture, we investigate this possibility by focussing on buildings as the primary components shaping cities. Looking into how buildings aggregate in combinations and complexes, we explore Shannon’s information theory to introduce an entropy measure and analyse frequencies of cellular configurations of built form. We apply this method to downtown areas of 45 cities from different regions around the world. Assessing differences and similarities in cellular configurations, we identify clusters of cities potentially consistent with specific spatial cultures. Our findings suggest a classification scheme that sheds light on the ‘cultural hypothesis’: the possibility that different cultures and regions find different ways of ordering space. We conclude our analysis by arguing that the endless combinatorial possibilities of building configurations, missing from street network approaches, add complexity to cities and prompt a renewed interest in built form systems.

Keywords: Spatial information; cellular configurations; entropy; built form; randomness; Shannon information theory; spatial cultures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23998083221107382 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirb:v:50:y:2023:i:1:p:146-161

DOI: 10.1177/23998083221107382

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning B
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().