The Influence Of Cars, Growth and Bad Ideas On Urban Form

In this week's PLANetizen Op-Ed, physicist Nikos Salingaros writes that living cities have intrinsically fractal properties, in common with all living systems. The pressure to accommodate both the automobile and increased population growth led twentieth-century urbanists to impose anti-fractal geometrical typologies. The fractal properties of the Traditional City were erased, with disastrous consequences for the urban fabric... The challenge for the Contemporary City is how to superimpose competing connective networks in an optimal manner... By selectively applying successful prototypes from the past, together with insights from the science of networks, we can generate an entirely new type of living Contemporary City.

Thanks to Connie Chung