Assessing Spatial Information in Physical Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new measure of spatial information in physical environments, applying it to twenty cities worldwide to identify cultural differences in spatial configurations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel methodology for quantifying spatial information in built environments and demonstrates its effectiveness across diverse urban contexts.

Findings

The methodology successfully classifies cities based on spatial configurations.

Identifies cultural and regional differences in urban spatial structures.

Opens new avenues for understanding cultural influences on urban design.

Abstract

Many approaches have dealt with the hypothesis that the environment contain information, mostly focusing on how humans decode information from the environment in visual perception, navigation, and spatial decision-making. A question yet to be fully explored is how the built environment could encode forms of information in its own physical structures. This paper explores a new measure of spatial information, and applies it to twenty cities from different spatial cultures and regions of the world. Findings suggest that this methodology is able to identify similarities between cities, generating a classification scheme that opens up new questions about what we call "cultural hypothesis": the idea that spatial configurations find consistent differences between cultures and regions.