The book presents a new theory of space: how and why it is a vital component of how societies work. The theory is developed on the basis of a new way of describing and analysing the kinds of spatial patterns produced by buildings and towns. The methods are explained so that anyone interested in how towns or buildings are structured and how they work can make use of them. The book also presents a new theory of societies and spatial systems, and what it is about different types of society that leads them to adopt fundamentally different spatial forms. From this general theory, the outline of a 'pathology of modern urbanism' in today's social context is developed.

Existing theories relating patterns of pedestrian and vehicular movement to urban form characterise the problem in terms of flows to and from 'attractor' land uses. This paper contains evidence in support of a new 'configurational' paradigm in which a primary property of the form of the urban grid is to privilege certain spaces over others for through movement. In this way it is suggested that the configuration of the urban grid itself is the main generator of patterns of movement. Retail land uses are then located to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the passing trade and may well act as multipliers on the basic pattern of 'natural movement' generated by the grid configuration. The configurational correlates of movement patterns are found to be measures of global properties of the grid with the 'space syntax' measure of 'integration' consistently found to be the most important. This has clear implications for urban design suggesting that if we wish to design for well used urban space, then it is not the local properties of a space that are important in the main but its configurational relations to the larger urban system.

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A series of recent papers (Hillier et al 1993, Hillier 1996b, Hillier 2000 have outlined a generic process by which spatial configurations, through their effect on movement, first shape, and then are shaped by, land use patterns and densities. The aim of this paper is to make the spatial dimension of this process more precise. The paper begins by examining a large number of axial maps, and finds that although there are strong cultural variations in different regions of the world, there are also powerful invariants. The problem is to understand how both cultural variations and invariants can arise from the spatial processes that generate cities. The answer proposed is that socio-cultural factors generate the differences by imposing a certain local geometry on the local construction of settlement space, while micro-economic factors, coming more and more into play as the settlement expands, generate the invariants. Movement: the strong forceThe urban grid, in the sense used in this paper, is the pattern of public space linking the buildings of a settlement, regardless of its degree of geometric regularity. The structure of a grid is the pattern brought to light by expressing the grid as an axial map 1 and analysing it configurationally. A series of recent papers have proposed a strong role for urban grids in creating the living city. The argument centres around the relation between the urban grid and movement. In Natural movement (Hillier et al 1993), it was shown that the structure of the urban grid has independent and systematic effects on movement patterns, which could be captured by integration analysis of the axial map. 2 . In Cities as movement economies (Hillier 1996b) it was shown that natural movement -and so ultimately the urban grid itself -impacted on land use patterns by attracting movement-seeking uses such as retail to locations with high natural movement, and sending non-movement seeking uses such as residence to low natural movement locations. The attracted uses then attracted more movement to the high movement locations , and this in turn attracted further uses, creating a spiral of multiplier effects and resulting in an urban pattern of dense mixed uses areas set against a background of more homogeneous, mainly residential development. In Centrality as a process (Hillier 2000) it was then shown that these processes not only responded to welldefined configurational properties of the urban grid, but also initiated changes in it by adapting the local grid conditions in the mixed movement areas in the direction of greater local intensification and metric integration through smaller scale blocks and more tripefficient, permeable structures.