Plenary by @binjiangxp at @PUARLuo 2018 Conference.
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Bin Jiang is a professor in the Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development, Division of Geoinformatics and Computational Geography at Högskolan i Gävle
Has been hooked by Christopher Alexander, and Nature of Order in particular
Wholeness
- Two fundamental laws: scaling law and Tobler’s law
- Two design principles: Differentiation and adaptation
- Wholeness accounting by other theories included
Motivation:
- City rebuilding based on a foundation of nonsense — Jacobs 1961
- Urban design accused of being pseudoscientific
- Alexander realized this back to the 1950s, so devoted his career to develop a scientific foundation of wholeness
Wholeness is pervasive, but hard to see
- No mathematics is powerful enough to capture the definition of wholeness, so he used pictures
- 15 properties are hard to understand
What is wholeness, life and beauty?
- Wholeness is a recursive structure
- Alexander says it’s real structure, not just appreciation
- Wholeness is made of many centers
- Life or beauty is a quality of space
Alexander’s view of space and 15 properties
- Spaces is living structure
- 15 properties
Physical character of living structure: A piece of paper with a tiny dot (that induces centers)
Scaling law (also called spatial heterogeneity)
- More small things than large things
Tobler’s law on spatial dependence: everything is related to everything else, by near things are more related than distant things
In brief. David Ing. 