what I am secretly trying to get at visualizing is a view of cities as space stations in some conceptual interstellar space, where the more dense+technological they are, the further away they are
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dense/technological on what metric? Further they are away from each other or dispersed from their Central core?
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I shoulda threaded my thoughts on this... I have a bunch of scattered thoughts on my TL from last night.
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Graph I’d like to see: x-axis, log population of urban region, y-axis, measure of tech built-up-ness (per capita weighted index of electricity+water+concrete+steel+gasoline+diesel). Preferably with data points plotted as tiny little city skylines against dark starry backdrop.
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hmm I would look at "global cities metrics" (dumbed down from Soja's theorizing) because they try to incorporate this stuff, otherwise you may need to see who has summarized satellite land-use / land cover data (search phrase: NVLD) and/or combined it with industrial zoning.
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That would be of interest to quants, but metrics-based legibilization of techno-urbanism always hits a wall. For me, the metrics are just a means to a sort of narrative/qualitative end: getting a more poetic rather than wonky/quant sense of what "urbanization" means. A portrait.
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Really what urbanism needs is the kind of thing Wolfram called a computational essay. Somewhere between the narrative poetry of say Caro's book on Moses and the endless slicing and dicing with metrics. A right-brained way to grok the nature of the beast.
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lol do you want some links, lots of links, or even more links?
It's been done and redone over 50 years and it also doesn't help you end-run politics or any of the wicked problems in planning and urban issues.
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Oh that doesn't interest me at all. I'm not trying to actually solve any problems. Besides perhaps making up interesting views of cities for some of my science fiction experiments.
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That's the sort of thing I find interesting. Something that gets at the organic+artificial anatomy of a city, in the context of more than its spatial context. Spatio-economic context perhaps. And evolving in time. Almost a game-of-life type thing.
Look at Michael batty's work / research group at UCL. Citylab has a maps newsletter that you can delve through. 'urban form' another keyword.

