About

Cities seem to come in two kinds: the organic, with their irregular patterns of space; and the geometric, with their regular grids. The former we take to be the bottom-up products of everyday life, the latter the top-down constructs of rational minds. But which actually works best? New kinds of spatial analysis developed at UCL show that organic cities have their own kind of ‘probabilistic’ geometry, which is also imposed by human minds, though in a step-by-step way, and which leads to emergent forms in many ways better than regular grids at doing what cities do.