Understanding urban form using quantitative analysis

 

My research focuses on understanding the social behaviours in urban spaces using quantitative and qualitative methods and theories. Space syntax, as one of the quantitative methods, originated in the early 1970s from research by Bill Hillier and colleagues at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. The theory attempts to understand why, from a spatial point of view, the built environment takes its shape in relation to corresponding socio-cultural activities (Hillier and Hanson, 1997). Hillier argues that the urban grid is a record of a historical process of evolution rather than a static spatial framework holding human activities (Hillier et al., 2007). Although a society creates the spatial system that it uses, it is affected and influenced by the spaces it inhabits (Dalton and Holscher, 2006). Therefore, the relationship between the spatial and the social is a two-way interaction. Consequently, there is a fundamental link between the structures and functions of cities, as the configuration of the network is the primary shaper of the pattern of movement.