Ruth Graham at Boston Globe: “What does a city look like? If you’re walking down the street, perhaps it looks like people and storefronts. Viewed from higher up, patterns begin to emerge: A three-dimensional grid of buildings divided by alleys, streets, and sidewalks, nearly flat in some places and scraping the sky in others. Pull back far enough, and the city starts to look like something else entirely: a cluster of molecules.
At least, that’s what it looks like to Franz-Josef Ulm, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ulm has built a career as an expert on the properties, patterns, and environmental potential of concrete. Taking a coffee break at MIT’s Stata Center late one afternoon, he and a colleague were looking at a large aerial photograph of a city when they had a “eureka” moment: “Hey, doesn’t that look like a molecular structure?”
With colleagues, Ulm began analyzing cities the way you’d analyze a material, looking at factors such as the arrangement of buildings, each building’s center of mass, and how they’re ordered around each other. They concluded that cities could be grouped into categories: Boston’s structure, for example, looks a lot like an “amorphous liquid.” Seattle is another liquid, and so is Los Angeles. Chicago, which was designed on a grid, looks like glass, he says; New York resembles a highly ordered crystal.
So far Ulm and his fellow researchers have presented their work at conferences, but it has not yet been published in a scientific journal. If the analogy does hold up, Ulm hopes it will give planners a new tool to understand a city’s structure, its energy use, and possibly even its resilience to climate change.
Ulm calls his new work “urban physics,” and it places him among a number of scientists now using the tools of physics to analyze the practically infinite amount of data that cities produce in the 21st century, from population density to the number of patents produced to energy bill charges. Physicist Marta González, Ulm’s colleague at MIT, recently used cellphone data to analyze traffic patterns in Boston with unprecedented complexity, for example. In 2012, a theoretical physicist was named founding director of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, whose research is devoted to “urban informatics”; one of its first projects is helping to create the country’s first “quantified community” on the West Side of Manhattan.
In Ulm’s case, he and his colleagues have used freely available data, including street layouts and building coordinates, to plot the structures of 12 cities and analogize them to existing complex materials. In physics, an “order parameter” is a number between 0 and 1 that describes how atoms are arranged in relationship to other atoms nearby; Ulm applies this idea to city layouts. Boston, he says, has an “order parameter” of .52, equivalent to that of a liquid like water. This means its structure is notably disordered, which may have something to do with how it developed. “Boston has grown organically,” he said. “The city, in the way its buildings are organized today, carries that information from its historical evolution.”…
