Christopher Alexander and the Mathematical Modeling of Urban Patterns

Abstract

In the history of urban planning, mathematics has always been set apart. Geography, economics, and even social sciences, which predate it in their theoretical formality, do not predate it in their practical reality. Lewis Mumford criticized the notion of cities as complex machines (Mumford, 1967). For him, it was determinism the one that damaged the modeling of cities. In that sense, the first treaty on scientific urban planning was written in 1867 by Ildefonso Cerdà as a result of the first complete urban expansion project in Spain (Choay, 1980). It was not until 1960 that Christopher Alexander, a mathematician and architect who studied at Cambridge and Harvard, proposed that it was possible to mathematize the urban reality by understanding two things: interactions and patterns. In two projects, a highway in Pittsburgh and a village in India, Alexander raised this possibility for the first time in urban planning.