From urban form to information: Cellular configurations in different spatial cultures

Cities are different worldwide, but does this fact have any relation to culture? The idea that urban form embodies idiosyncrasies related to cultural identities captures the imagination of many in urban studies, but it is an assumption yet to be carefully examined. At its heart, the question of whether cities can be seen as cultural artefacts is informational: whether or not cultural traces can be encoded in the physical configuration of cities. Approaching spatial configuration as a proxy of urban culture, we investigate this possibility by focussing on buildings as the primary components shaping cities. Looking into how buildings aggregate in combinations and complexes, we explore Shannon’s information theory to introduce an entropy measure and analyse frequencies of cellular configurations of built form. We apply this method to downtown areas of 45 cities from different regions around the world. Assessing differences and similarities in cellular configurations, we identify clusters of cities potentially consistent with specific spatial cultures. Our findings suggest a classification scheme that sheds light on the ‘cultural hypothesis’: the possibility that different cultures and regions find different ways of ordering space. We conclude our analysis by arguing that the endless combinatorial possibilities of building configurations, missing from street network approaches, add complexity to cities and prompt a renewed interest in built form systems.