"PRINCIPLES OF URBAN STRUCTURE"
an online book by Nikos A. Salingaros.
This book addresses the needs of professional urbanists who wish to understand how and why cities are successful or not, depending on their form, components, and substructure. It marks the beginning of a revolution in urban science. My approach has been to discover those principles underlying what we observe as phenomena, and to justify them on theoretical grounds. Although a scientific approach to urbanism is being undertaken by several groups of scholars, the discipline itself is mainly driven by unproven (and demonstrably false) principles that are taken on faith. This is a call to arms for those concerned with the built environment: mankind needs to shape and repair its cities following some proven logic, rather than dogma masquerading as rationality. A living city differs radically from what we have built in the twentieth century.
Each chapter consists of one of my papers in Architecture and Urbanism, each a publication in its own right. As I am receiving numerous requests right now for a textbook of urbanism based on my research, I am very happy to offer the community an on-line printable collection of these articles, organized into an overall whole. Until I can find the time to incorporate other material into a monograph, the present collection will serve as a coherent presentation of my ideas. The need is ever so pressing, as no such treatment of the underlying principles of urban form and structure exists at the present time. Many authors whom I know and have learned from offer insights into how cities develop; yet there is no single volume that serves the same function. That situation may soon change with the publication of Volume 3 of Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order.
PRINCIPLES OF URBAN STRUCTURE.
© 2001 Nikos A. Salingaros.Chapter 1. Theory of the Urban Web
Chapter 2. Complexity and Urban Coherence
Chapter 3. Fractals in the New Architecture
Chapter 4. Remarks on a City's Composition
Chapter 5. A Universal Rule for the Distribution of Sizes (with Bruce J. West)
Chapter 6. The Structure of Pattern Languages
Chapter 7. Pattern Language and Interactive Design -- still being revised
Chapter 8. Urban Space and its Information Field
Chapter 9. Pavements as Embodiments of Meaning for a Fractal Mind (with Terry M. Mikiten and Hing-Sing Yu)
Chapter 10. An Information Architecture Approach to Understanding Cities (with L. Andrew Coward) -- still being revised
Other material from my published papers, as well as material now being written that is relevant to this book, may be added in the future. For those who wish to print it out, each article is approximately 7 to 12 pages long, giving a rough estimate for the whole book at about 100 pages, depending on the font size.
E-mail: salingar@sphere.math.utsa.edu