Date

2022-5

Author

Shurdhi, Sabrina

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The insight that complexity theories have brought into the light has evidently changed the way scientific problems are approached and solved. Complex processes are profoundly involved with city-shaping phenomena, and once the complex nature of cities is disregarded while making decisions pertaining to urban development, the resulting urban fabric fails to host and generate life within a strictly imposed pure geometry. Modern cities embody the dynamics of machines with economically motivated optimization dismissing thus pedestrians’ experience and consequently having detrimental effects on urban life. Radical ruptures in the development and transformation processes of the modern city during the 20th century ended up with the loss of positive spatial qualities indicating a desirable urban form. Organic forms where life manifests its growth and change in the most natural way are characterized by the coherence of parts into an organized whole. Spatial coherence, abundantly present in natural forms, is the primary indicator of the geometry that enables life and determines the ideal condition for successful complex systems. Christopher Alexander, for whom ‘wholeness’ is interchangeably considered as coherence, developed fifteen geometrical principles of the coherent wholes. However, these principles remain on a conceptual level concerning urban design. To that end, the thesis aims to concretize the abstract principles of Christopher Alexander in the context of traditional urban fabric by addressing morphological conditions generating spatial coherence. To collect an inventory from which we can derive knowledge on how to connect the nonliving geometry of the built environment and by focusing on human scale, this study explores spatial components and patterns that produce urban space with coherency, specifically in streets within traditional settlements. The main objective is to analyze spatial coherence of the street environments by tracing conditions that favor urban life in public space.

Subject Keywords

spatial coherence, urban complexity, traditional urban fabric, street environment, urban life

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/97624

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis