From form to information: Analysing built environments in different spatial cultures

Abstract: Cities are different around the world, 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. Approaching spatial configurations in the built environment as a proxy of urban culture, this paper searches for differences potentially consistent with specific regional cultures or cultures of planning in urban development. It does so focusing on the elementary components shaping cities: buildings and how they are aggregated in cellular complexes of built form. Exploring Shannon's work, we introduce an entropy measure to analyse the probability distribution of cellular arrangements in built form systems. We apply it to downtown areas of 45 cities from different regions of the world as a similarity measure to compare and cluster cities potentially consistent with specific spatial cultures. Findings suggest a classification scheme that sheds further light on what we call the "cultural hypothesis": the possibility that different cultures and regions find different ways of ordering space.