Print Email Facebook Twitter Acting across scales: Describing urban surfaces as technical 'fields of action' Title Acting across scales: Describing urban surfaces as technical 'fields of action' Author Read, S.A. Faculty Architecture and The Built Environment Department Urbanism Date 2009-06-08 Abstract The relation between the global and the local is the traditional concern of space syntax. A ‘form’ and a ‘structure’ of urban fabrics can be represented in images and graph measures using space syntax techniques and these images and measures correlate with observations of how people use and organize those urban fabrics. The implication is that it is the relation between scales which is crucial to understanding how people act in the city and prepare the city for action. The city fabric is (and this has been suggested before) an apparatus for relating scales in action, and one which people use in not yet clearly specified ways in order to do things. Part of the project of space syntax is to build ever more refined descriptions of this constructed apparatus in order to understand better how this all works and to suggest better ways of planning and designing cities. One of the chief challenges facing city-building today is to understand how to plan and design at much larger scales than those of the central urban neighbourhood and area, and in order to do this we need to be clearer about what it is space syntax is actually doing at the scales of central urban fabrics so we can extend this understanding plausibly to descriptions of large metropolitan and megacity regions. The roles of technologies and technical systems in creating the kinds of spaces we act in is a topic of research and debate in discussion about urban form today, and is one we need to address more clearly in space syntax. I discuss these issues in order to show how we may adapt an interpretation of urban technical systems and their relations with one another, and the way this relates to human action, in order to build plausible descriptions of continuous urban surfaces. This paper initiates a project to model urban regions in the Netherlands and Brazil. Subject space syntaxglobal and localurban fabricsurban formurban structuregeographical information systems To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:fae08c50-4da0-4faf-a4b2-abb92041c2d8 ISBN 9789174153477 Source Proceedings of the 7th International Space Syntax Symposium, Stockholm, Sweden, June 8-10, 2009. Eds.: Koch, D., Marcus, L., Steen, J. Trita-ARK. Forskningspublikationer, 2009:1 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2009 The Authors Files PDF 092_Read.pdf 87.16 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:fae08c50-4da0-4faf-a4b2-abb92041c2d8/datastream/OBJ/view