Geographic space as a living structure for predicting human activities using big data

Jiang, Bin; Ren, Zheng

doi:10.1080/13658816.2018.1427754

Cited by 35 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Instead, the case studies do no more than count the number of centers, and compute scaling hierarchy of "far more small centers than large ones". Previous studies have illustrated that this simple way of computing degree of wholeness is good enough in particular for comparison purposes [35,36]. Anyone who is able to count can easily follow the case studies.…”

Section: Case Studies On Living Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Living Structure Down to Earth and Up to Heaven: Christopher Alexander

Jiang

2019

Urban Science

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Discovered by Christopher Alexander, living structure is a physical phenomenon, through which the quality of the built environment or artifacts can be judged objectively. It has two distinguishing properties just like a tree: "Far more small things than large ones" across all scales from the smallest to the largest, and "more or less similar things" on each scale. As a physical phenomenon, and mathematical concept, living structure is essentially empirical, discovered and developed from miniscule observation in nature-and human-made things, and it affects our daily lives in some practical ways, such as where to put a table or a flower vase in a room, helping us to make beautiful things and environments. Living structure is not only empirical, but also philosophical and visionary, enabling us to see the world and space in more meaningful ways. This paper is intended to defend living structure as a physical phenomenon, and a mathematical concept, clarifying some common questions and misgivings surrounding Alexander's design thoughts, such as the objective or structural nature of beauty, building styles advocated by Alexander, and mysterious nature of his concepts. For this purpose, we first illustrate living structure-essentially organized complexity, as advocated by the late Jane Jacobs -that is governed by two fundamental laws (scaling law and Tobler's law), and generated in some step by step fashion by two design principles (differentiation and adaptation) through the 15 structural properties. We then verify why living structure is primarily empirical, drawing evidence from Alexander's own work, as well as our case studies applied to the Earth's surface including cities, streets, and buildings, and two logos. Before reaching conclusions, we concentrate on the most mysterious part of Alexander's work-the luminous ground or the hypothesized "I"-as a substance that pervasively exists everywhere, in space and matter including our bodies, in order to make better sense of living structure in our minds.

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Section: Case Studies On Living Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Living Structure Down to Earth and Up to Heaven: Christopher Alexander

Jiang

2019

Urban Science

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“…The two examples are just for illustration purpose, and more empirical studies and evidence on living structure can be found in Jiang (2018a) and Jiang and Ren (2018). Figure 5: (Color online) Topological representation and analysis of two spatial configurations (Note: The 10 numbers -1, 1/2, 1/3, …, 1/10 -are assigned to random locations in a square space, generating two different spatial configurations in (a) and (d).…”

Section: Goodness Of Space As a Matter Of Fact Rather Than Opinionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This new view of space of Alexander differs fundamentally from Newtonian and Leibnizian views of space that are framed under the mechanical world view of Descartes (1637Descartes ( , 1954. Under the new, organic view of space, geography as a science of the Earth's surface has three fundamental issues regarding geographic space: how it looks, how it works, and what it ought to be (Jiang and Ren 2018). The first two issues are largely about understanding the Earth's surface, while the third issue about making and remaking better built environments with a high degree of goodness.…”

Section: Goodness Of Space As a Matter Of Fact Rather Than Opinionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A space is considered to be a living structure governed by the wholeness, being external, whereas the human experienced sense of space, being internal, arises directly from the living structure or wholeness. The three-folder contribution of this paper is more philosophical than empirical (which was cited when appropriate): (1) argues that mechanistic thinking in general -or mechanistic representation of GIS in particular -failed to recognize living nature of geographic space (see this Introduction briefly, yet more details in Jiang and Ren (2018)), (2) illustrates that space and place can be bridged together thought wholeness, rather than separated as currently conceived; and (3) demonstrates that goodness of space is a matter of fact rather than opinion or personal preference.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Recursive Definition of Goodness of Space for Bridging the Concepts of Space and Place for Sustainability

Jiang

2019

Sustainability

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In a good system, we would expect to find the following conditions: Any identifiable subsystems, we would hope, would be well -that is to say, in good condition. And we would hope that the larger world outside the complex system is also in good order, and well. Thus, the mark of a good system would be that it helps both the systems around it and those which it contains. And the goodness and helping towards goodness is, in our ideal complex system, also reciprocal. That is, our good system, will turn out to be not only helping other systems to become good, but also, in turn, helped by the goodness of the larger systems around it and by the goodness of the smaller ones which it contains. AbstractConceived and developed by Christopher Alexander through his life's work: The Nature of Order, wholeness is defined as a mathematical structure of physical space in our surroundings. Yet, there was no mathematics, as Alexander admitted then, that was powerful enough to capture his notion of wholeness. Recently, a mathematical model of wholeness, together with its topological representation, has been developed that is capable of addressing not only why a space is good, but also how much goodness the space has. This paper develops a structural perspective on goodness of space -both largeand small-scale -in order to bridge two basic concepts of space and place through the very concept of wholeness. The wholeness provides a de facto recursive definition of goodness of space from a holistic and organic point of view. A space is good, genuinely and objectively, if its adjacent spaces are good, the larger space to which it belongs is good, and what is contained in the space is also good. Eventually, goodness of space -sustainability of space -is considered a matter of fact rather than of opinion under the new view of space: space is neither lifeless nor neutral, but a living structure capable of being more living or less living, or more sustainable or less sustainable. Under the new view of space, geography or architecture will become part of complexity science, not only for understanding complexity, but also for making and remaking complex or living structures.

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“…Raster data is widely used in diverse domains such as cartography [1][2][3], remote sensing [4,5], computer graphics [6], geography [7,8], and landscape ecology [9,10]. The content of information contained in raster data is of use in many applications [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Calculating the Wasserstein Metric-Based Boltzmann Entropy of a Landscape Mosaic

Zhang

Lan

et al. 2020

Entropy

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Shannon entropy is currently the most popular method for quantifying the disorder or information of a spatial data set such as a landscape pattern and a cartographic map. However, its drawback when applied to spatial data is also well documented; it is incapable of capturing configurational disorder. In addition, it has been recently criticized to be thermodynamically irrelevant. Therefore, Boltzmann entropy was revisited, and methods have been developed for its calculation with landscape patterns. The latest method was developed based on the Wasserstein metric. This method incorporates spatial repetitiveness, leading to a Wasserstein metric-based Boltzmann entropy that is capable of capturing the configurational disorder of a landscape mosaic. However, the numerical work required to calculate this entropy is beyond what can be practically achieved through hand calculation. This study developed a new software tool for conveniently calculating the Wasserstein metric-based Boltzmann entropy. The tool provides a user-friendly human–computer interface and many functions. These functions include multi-format data file import function, calculation function, and data clear or copy function. This study outlines several essential technical implementations of the tool and reports the evaluation of the software tool and a case study. Experimental results demonstrate that the software tool is both efficient and convenient.

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Geographic space as a living structure for predicting human activities using big data

Cited by 35 publications

References 19 publications

Living Structure Down to Earth and Up to Heaven: Christopher Alexander

Living Structure Down to Earth and Up to Heaven: Christopher Alexander

A Recursive Definition of Goodness of Space for Bridging the Concepts of Space and Place for Sustainability

Calculating the Wasserstein Metric-Based Boltzmann Entropy of a Landscape Mosaic

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