Finding an ideal model for compact cities with Multipole networks

With diachronic changes in the philosophy surrounding urban planning, Japanese cities seem to have transformed dramatically. However, many conventional rules remain the same and continue to be inherited. Residents may remember the location of the original downtown area and their narratives reveal their city’s history to their descendants, showing that the collective senses cannot be demolished easily. When analysing a city, we may observe some spatial layouts for which we cannot find any rationale from the perspective of mathematical analysis. However, if we read these layouts more carefully and study their background in the evolutionary process, we may find a rationale for them. Some such layouts are caused by the collective senses, and have worked as an implicit norm. This norm, to be defined as an ‘urban kernel’, is an important keyword when reading a city morphologically. However, there seems to have been little discussion to date about Japanese local cities from a morphological perspective.

The purpose of this study is to investigate a contentious issue in Japanese local cities – compact cities with multipole networks – by means of space syntax, and discuss the plausibility of such cities from the viewpoint of urban morphology.

In Japan, a new system of urban planning has been proposed by the government and is spreading rapidly; this new system aims to establish compact cities with multipole networks, rather than the conventional compact city, which contains a single pole. In space syntax analysis, local integration is distributed across multipole networks, while global integration comprises unipolar networks. By using these characteristics in the distribution of numerical values, we examine the urban kernel and explore the ideal form of the compact city with a multipole network.