From urban form to the city as information

Abstract

This article has two aims. First, it provides an initial overview of research on urban form in Brazil and Rio de Janeiro. To this end, it discusses some characteristics of the approaches developed in this context, as well as indicating possibilities for the field, including conceptual and methodological expansions capable of recognizing the connections between urban form, cognition and social dynamics. Second, the article illustrates these possibilities with a new approach to urban form as “information”. This approach explores the ways in which social agents preserve information in the physical and semantic environment of cities, and how they use this environmental information to act and make decisions about actions and interactions to be carried out. Thus, to understand the role of environmental information in social action and cooperation, the approach brings computational models of cities and behaviour, as well as information and entropy measures in the physical and semantic structures of cities. These measures make it possible to examine cities in great detail and to interpret differences between urban environments as “information signatures” potentially consistent with different spatial cultures. Finally, the approach makes it possible to assess the impact of different urban environments on actions and degrees of cooperation between agents.

Keywords:
Urban form; Information; Built environment; Entropy; Cognition