Cities as emergent models: the morphological logic of Manhattan and Barcelona

This paper is set to unveil several particulars about the logic embedded in the diachronic model of city \ngrowth and the rules which govern the emergence of urban spaces. The paper outlines an attempt to \ndetect and define the generative rules of a growing urban structure by means of evaluation techniques. \nThe initial approach in this regards will be to study the evolution of existing urban regions or cities which \nin our case are Manhattan and Barcelona and investigate the rules and causes of their emergence and \ngrowth. The paper will concentrate on the spatial aspect of the generative rules and investigate their \nbehaviour and dimensionality. Several Space Syntax evaluation methods will be implemented to capture \nthe change of spatial configurations within the growing urban structures. In addition, certain spatial \nelements will be isolated and tested aiming to illustrate their influence on the main spatial structures. \nBoth urban regions were found to be emergent products of a bottom up organic growth mostly \ndistinguished in the vicinities of the first settlements. Despite the imposition of a uniform grid on both \ncities in later stages of their development these cities managed to deform the regularity in the preplanned \ngrid in an emergent manner to end up with an efficient model embodied in their current spatial \narrangement. The paper reveals several consistencies in the spatial morphology of both urban regions \nand provides explanation of these regularities in an approach to extract the underlying rules which \ncontributed to the growth optimization process.