Space syntax
It was conceived by Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson, and colleagues at The Bartlett, University College London in the late 1970s to early 1980s to develop insights into the mutually constructive relation between society and space.
It rests on three basic conceptions of space: The three most popular ways of analysing a street network are integration, choice and depth distance.
From these components it is thought to be possible to quantify and describe how easily navigable any space is, useful for the design of museums, airports, hospitals, and other settings where wayfinding is a significant issue.
Space syntax has also been applied to predict the correlation between spatial layouts and social effects such as crime, traffic flow, and sales per unit area.
[citation needed] In general, the analysis uses one of many software programs that allow researchers to analyse graphs of one (or more) of the primary spatial components.
One of the first cohorts of students on the MScAAS was Julienne Hanson who went on to co-author The Social Logic of Space (SLS) with Bill Hillier (CUP, 1984).
Many prominent design applications have been made by the architectural and urban planning practice Space Syntax Limited, which was founded at The Bartlett, University College London in 1989.
Over the past decade, Space syntax techniques have been used for research in archaeology, information technology, urban and human geography, and anthropology.
Since 1997, the Space syntax community has held biennial conferences, and many journal papers have been published on the subject, chiefly in Environment and Planning B.
This paradox was proposed by Carlo Ratti at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,[5] but comprehensively refuted in a passionate academic exchange with Bill Hillier and Alan Penn.
[6] There have been moves to combine space syntax with more traditional transport engineering models, using intersections as nodes and constructing visibility graphs to link them, by researchers including Bin Jiang, Valerio Cutini and Michael Batty.
