Ancient and Modern People Followed Same Mathematical Rule To Build Cities 81
An anonymous reader writes with news of a study that shows similarities in how cities are built throughout time. "A study of archeological data from ancient Mexican settlements reveals remarkable similarities between pre-Colombian cities and modern ones, lending support to the idea that urban spaces are shaped by universal social behaviors. Sure, each city has its own local quirks, architecture, language and cuisine. But recently, some theoretical scientists have started to find there are universal laws that shape all urban spaces. And a new study suggests the same mathematical rules might apply to ancient settlements, too. Using archaeological data from the ruins of Tenochtitlan and thousands of other sites around it in Mexico, researchers found that private houses and public monuments were built in predictable ways."
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Re:where's the red light district? (Score:5, Funny)
A very large percentage of people inside that boundary will be whores.
The rest will be sex workers.
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I think this should be called the "Fat Dog Formula" :)
Exception... (Score:5, Funny)
And then there's Boston.
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Hell, there's a lot of exceptions...
Most towns in Utah are laid out on a strict grid wherever possible (and often even where it isn't), with any given address denoting it's position in yards relative to the nearest Mormon temple. My home address there always read like coordinates, no matter which home I lived in (e.g. 2240 E, 840 S ). Here in Portland, it's a semi-grid that quickly gets tangled once you get out of downtown (and in many cases, not even that far out).
Then again, TFA seems like they're just s
Re:Utah (Score:2)
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http://www.exploreutah.com/Get... [exploreutah.com]
*mic drop*
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One county follows a system of naming streets relative to one temple. Not the nearest, and not most cities. Your own link betrays your lack of reading comprehension. At the time it was founded, it probably made sense for the people to number their streets off the most culturally significant feature of town. Every city in Utah outside Salt Lake County names their streets relative to
Re:Exception... (Score:5, Informative)
And then there's Boston.
Funny, but also maybe relevant. Boston is one of many cities that resulted from the slow expansion and merger of a group of small towns that were essentially separate communities before the days of modern transportation. It has lots of "centers" that used to be separated by forest and farmland, but are now a continuous urban area.
It's not hard to find other cities that developed this way. Other cities grew from a specific original center, usually a port area, and were never a "merger of equals". I wonder if the study distinguished these two major cases, and has anything to say about what (if any) structural differences we might find between them.
Oh! (Score:5, Interesting)
Just like... Mexico City!
I am Mexican, living in Mexico City. My wife is an Argentinian, from a mid-sized province capital. She often finds it laughable how this city lacks any logic. Of course, until it becomes clear that most quirks come from agricultural, old villages that got slurped into the Blob. Then its shape is explainable... Not that it makes much sense, of course.
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Stockholm is like this, and it's been mostly planned this way, since the late 1940s or a bit later.
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That's why people live in the suburbs. Which take them three highways, two bridges and a tunnel to get to.
A universal rule (Score:1)
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Not profit = Raising your property price above its worth
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If they don't, the researchers naturally classify them as "not cities". The secret of impressive results is the carefully choice of initial data.
"Mathematical Rules" (Score:1)
I think they might be talking about logic.
People need roads. People put businesses next to well traveled roads. People who work for businesses build houses near their work. Cities form.
Who'da thought?
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I think you're right. AND a big part of it INITIALLY is the presence of natural resources. Villages - towns - cities - they all need water and food. So they start where those are available.
The weird part of TFA is how exact their numbers are.
"15 percent"
"about 83 percent"
I suspect that a LOT of averaging went on there. And more than a little bit of "toss out the 'data scatter'". Which gives them the "mathematical rule".
And what about suburbs? Do the poor people live further from the city center because they
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The weird part of TFA is how exact their numbers are.
"about 83 percent"
The actual article is available for free [plosone.org].
Basically, the "about 83 percent" thing comes from their (not-so-detailed) theoretical model that predicts an exponent of 5/6.
I suspect that a LOT of averaging went on there. And more than a little bit of "toss out the 'data scatter'". Which gives them the "mathematical rule".
Well, as mentioned, the exponent comes from a theoretical model, so it didn't come from averaging empirical data but rather an a priori model. You can judge the amount data fit going on in their scatterplots on page 8.
You can also see from there and various tables that the actual exponent varies quite a bit. (Even their model says it sho
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They are being a bit more specific than that. As in "when x increases by 1.00, y increases by 0.73".
Also, common sense thinking is a notoriously bad way to evaluate anything, as it is highly dependent on the selection and weight of initial premises. It is not at all a given that cities existing thousands of years before mass transportation, elevators, and combustion engines would work anything like modern cities.
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People need roads. People put businesses next to well traveled roads.
And then the Seattle City Fathers decree that roads are evil and are to be replaced with Light Rail. And Light Rail will not be placed where the people want to go. It is located near property that speculators bought up, evicted the poor residents and expect to make bundles of money when the rail line is built through their neighborhood.
And then some smart-ass steps in and proposes a transit system that goes where people already travel. And is designed to be financed by the riders of that system. So no more
Theoretical scientists (Score:3, Funny)
You mean... it's a theory that they are scientists?
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You mean... it's a theory that they are scientists?
No, this paper was obviously automatically generated by a random computer algorithm. Thus, the authors are purely "theoretical."
(In all seriousness, I think this is TFS's grammatically ambiguous attempt to point out that the authors had a theoretical model that predicted limits on city expansion, which they then attempted to project onto empirical data. That is, it was NOT a study where they simply measured a bunch of cities and tried to derive an empirical fit without prior assumptions.)
What? (Score:1)
Wait, you mean they were using the same equation? Did they discover it on stone tablets chiseled by ALIENS?
How about, ancient and modern cities follow same mathematical pattern? Because that could actually be true. Both ancient and modern cities weren't built from the same city planning manual, because most cities (even modern ones) aren't planned at all, except haphazardly and as they go.
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Prison?
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Unless BH is an AI, I'd assume that he's comprised of a multitude of cells.
remarkable similarities between cities (Score:3)
Obviously Atlantis seeded both Europe and America. That's soooo much more likely than common social behaviors leading to common social structures.
The title is misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
What they are actually saying is that ancient and modenr chities can *be described* by the same formula.
Referring to the article: When a modern city doubles its population, it grows 83% in size (ther than 100%); this seems to hold true for ancient cities.
When a moden city doubles its population, it's per-capita GDP (and wages) increase 15%. Using the number of monuments per-capita as a guide, the researchers found this also correlated with ancient cities.
It's an interesting article (I'd like more details) but, per Slashdot norms, a lousy title.
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Referring to the article: When a modern city doubles its population, it grows 83% in size (ther than 100%); this seems to hold true for ancient cities.
I don't know what they mean by modern, but that is certainly not true for British cities over the last 200 years - which is modern times as opposed to ancient times. Back in the early 1800's people lived very close together; merchants lived over their shops and the poor lived in slum apartments. The very wealthy lived elsewhere - in country mansions.
Then as the population increased with more people moving in from the countryside (which was getting mechanised) and immigration, the middle class moved out
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The article is vague on the details but, to me, the most likely error in your assumptions is "suberbs aren't cities".
Or, another variation: "Suberbs are seperate cities".
Do you believe that the population of London is less dense now than it was 200 years ago? How tall do you think the buildings were then?
Universal developer rule... (Score:3)
Re:Universal developer rule... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seeing how those tax payers have spent 100 years eating cheap food from that fertile flood plain, and the bill only amounts to a tiny fraction of their direct savings - much less the increased economic opportunities inherent in a more populous nation - it works out quite nicely to everyone. Until, that is, someone starts making noices about taxes being stealing, the city remains a ruin, and everyone starves.
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His "universal developer rule" has nothing do with agriculture. He's talking about developers putting up houses on flood plains.
In fact, that land was probably bought from the farmers leaving less food grown in that fertile plain. So yeah, turning farmland that can tolerate the occasional flood and produces cheap food into tracts of cheap housing that gets developers rich and costs the taxpayers after a predictable flood totally "works out nicely for everyone".
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the evil central business district (Score:3)
for NYC that means that ten million people commute into the same few square miles and all the subways run through manhattan. it results in daily delays and the need for a car for weekend driving unless you want to spend over an hour riding through manhattan for no reason
and the real estate barons kill any attempt to create smaller business districts outside of manhattan and to build a train route that does not touch manhattan
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However if your business is integrated with your home, then you have a different set of issues.
1. Customers will need to travel further to work with you, So we will need more expensive last mile infrastructure.
2. Large business will buy your home. If a business wants to expand, they will probably target your home more than they would if you live in a residential district. As well you get the issues of company owned housing. Where you are a slave to the company, as if you get fired or laid off you loose y
Universal Archetypes (Score:2, Insightful)
I bet if they further studied the ruins of Tenochtitlan (and other cities), they'd find that denizens held universally predictable opinions such as "Man, Tenochtitlan drivers are the worst!" and "If you don't like the weather in Tenochtitlan, wait 15 minutes."
Christopher Alexander (Score:5, Interesting)
One other AC posted this, but it will probably stay buried at zero.
If you're interested in why some spaces feel nice to you and others don't, there's a series of books you want to read, by "Christopher Alexander"
The first one is "The Timeless Way of Building". The next is "A Pattern Language"
This guy was writing about the human factors in architecture -- why certain spaces make all people feel good, and how that developed over human history, and how it's largely been lost in modern architecture.
His next book, "A Pattern Language", enumerates 253 patterns his team rediscovered that help resolve social problems in architectural spaces.
The problem he noticed is that people could understand if they felt good in a space or not, but it was difficult to predict ahead of time if a building would have this quality or not. And that's obviously a huge problem if you want to build things that people love, because buildings are expensive and stay around a long time. Just cloning old buildings that people like doesn't quite do it either - because people didn't really understand what made those spaces great.
This series of books is what the Gang of Four looked at, and one of them said "hey, this applies to building software also - when the problem looks like this, there's a pattern that can be implemented many different ways to address that problem".
Thus, the design patterns movement in software was born.
If you're at all interested in houses, cities, planning, design, etc, I really recommend the books.
However, read them before you buy/build your next house -- not right after you just moved. You'll start to find explanatinos about where you currently live that explain why you don't use or don't enjoy certain things, and you'll be frustrated and want to start changing things :)
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However, read them before you buy/build your next house -- not right after you just moved. You'll start to find explanations about where you currently live that explain why you don't use or don't enjoy certain things, and you'll be frustrated and want to start changing things :)
"As intelligence goes up, happiness often goes down. In fact, I made a graph. I make a lot of graphs.”
~ Lisa Simpson [youtube.com]
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The last quarter or so of the patterns deal with interior space, but i think you might find it problematic to just apply them in isolation.
The patterns are meant to be applied in order, from largest effect with least detail, to smallest effect and highest detail.
So, for instance, if you take room that doesn't have "light on two sides"
http://www.patternlanguage.com... [patternlanguage.com]
there may not be much you can do, interior design wise, to save the room, without first trying some of the suggestions he has for how to deal w
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Great referral, thanks.
What about urban sprawl in the ancient times? (Score:2)
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Most likely they were 'vacation' houses, for the weekend.
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I think "weekend" is a more recent development. More likely, they traveled out to the villa in the 'burbs when the smell in the city got to be too much or there was sweltering heat. I wonder if people who owned slaves back then even thought in terms of "workday" or "vacation".
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Well, the idea of taking at least one day off every 7 is a pretty old one. I am sure it's not limited to one particular nation state or culture.
It's a pleasant fantasy that you can drive labor indefinitely but the physical universe (and human bodies) has finite limits.
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I think you misunderstand my meaning. The people who had slaves were not worrying about taking Saturday and Sunday off because they had slaves. It was a seven-day weekend for them.
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But yeah, as PopeRazzo said, the wealthy probably used their slaves a lot as messengers and to run errands so being physically present at the heart of the city would not have been necessary but for the most important business.
Let's not forget Slimemold does the same thing (Score:2)