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Abstract
This article delves into the post-war urban planning of Racibórz (Ger. Ratibor), a mid-size city in Poland, shedding light on the socialist city's historical roots and its adherence to socialist urbanism models. Using planning maps and other archival documents, it examines the reconstruction process that aimed at creating green spaces and quality housing, while at the same time revealing its medieval past. The article also investigates the city's deviation from known recovery patterns and highlights a lesser known approach to creating a city with a national form and socialist content. Overall, this research offers a comprehensive exploration of a reconstruction process in a mid-size city, enriching the understanding of European post-war urban history.

Book reviewed in this article:Esping‐Andersen, Gosta (ed.) 1993 Changing classes: stratification and mobility in post‐industrial societies.Fainstein, Susan S. 1994: The city builders: property, politics, and planning in London and New York.Heinelt, Hubert and Margit Mayer (eds) 1992: Politik in europäischen Städten: Fallstudien zur Bedeutung lokaler Politik.Mollenkopf, John Hull 1992: The phoenix in the ashes: the rise and fall of the Koch coalition in New York City politics.Fainstein, Susan S. (1994) The city builders: property, politics and planning in London and New York.Power, Anne 1993: Hovels to high rise: state housing in Europe since 1850.Rothblatt, D.N. and A. Sancton (eds) 1993: American‐Canadian metropolitan intergovernmental governance perspectives.Squires, Gregory D. (ed.) 1992: From redlining to reinvestment: community responses to urban disinvestment.

The field of Town and Planning must face up to a severe challenge in its part of the task of recreating chilean democracy. The cities of Chile and most especially Santiago, show the results of a more than ten year binge on the part of neoliberal policies under the military dictatorship. The consequences of this could not but have been bad for the city and the greater part of its people in a good number of their activities. The paper gives a synthetizing track of this ' liberalizing» process as to the governing of Santiago, likewise a detailing of the effect on a vast number of lives of this. An attempt is then made to gauge the magnitude of the task facing the city's newly elected democratic government. ; La tarea de la reconstrucción de la democracia en Chile plantea un gran desafío en el ámbito de la planificación del desarrollo urbano. Las ciudades chilenas, y en particular la ciudad de Santiago, han sufrido las consecuencias de la implantación de una política neoliberal por un período de más de diez años por parte de un gobierno militar. El balance resulta muy negativo para la ciudad y sus habitantes en muchos ámbitos de la vida urbana. El propósito de este artículo es el de hacer una síntesis del itinerario de este proceso de liberalización en el gobierno de la ciudad de Santiago, de las consecuencias que ha tenido sobre vastos contingentes de población y de la magnitud de la tarea que enfrenta el recientemente electo gobierno democrático.

1) The paper discusses a perspective for analyzing urban transitions of modern China. 2) The perspective focuses on the reconciliation process of bottom-up public needs and top-down politico-economic goals, and the process can be partially observed through the transformation of local economic organizations. 3) The perspective helps to understand how a particular city region has adapted to past tran-sitions, which may help the city region in adapting to new development paradigms.

The spatial concentration of socioeconomic disadvantage as a result of discriminatory practices presents a challenging scenario for policy intervention. In this paper I examine the European Union (EU) social exclusion approach in addressing socioeconomic disadvantage in deprived urban areas. I look at the Greek city of Komotini, a society fragmented along ethnic lines. I focus on the Turkish minority community and explore the creation of local governance structures aiming at tackling exclusion through enhanced participation in decision making. The concept of citizenship rights that guided local 'exclusion' policies exposes the differences in the de jure and the de facto rights of different groups in the city. The governance mode of participation, however, puts emphasis on coordination and consensus at the expense of local realities. EU participatory principles that take local networking dynamics for granted do not travel well in centralized governance frameworks.

This book concerns the Beijing Hutong and changing perceptions of space, of social relations and of self, as processes of urban redevelopment remove Hutong dwellers from their traditional homes to new high-rise apartments. It addresses questions of how space is humanly built and transformed, classifi ed and differentiated, and most importantly how space is perceived and experienced. This study elaborates and expands Lefebvre's "trialectic" of space on a theoretical level. The ethnography presented is a conversation with Tim Ingold's argument about "empty space". This research employs the ethnographic technique of participant-observation to secure a finely textured, detailed and micro-social account of local experience. Then, these micro-social insights are contextualized within macro-social structures of Chinese modernism by speaking to geographical concerns, orientalism and history. Qingqing Yang has a captivating narrative style; its deceptively light personal touch causes the reader to see as she does and to learn with her, and we come to appreciate the habitual round of Beijing life amid forces of radical change. From the Foreword, by Nigel Rapport, Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies, University of St. Andrews Space. Modernization and Social Interaction is a truly intriguing and original piece of work. The aim of the book is to compare conceptualizations of living space in Beijing: on one hand in traditional Chinese courtyards referred to as Hutong, and on the other hand in modern high-rise apartments. This is prompted by a dramatic relocation by the government of residents from Hutong to apartments as a part of a city-planning scheme, in which some of the Hutongs are replaced by new wide roads. Other Hutongs are maintained and equipped with modern facilities such as natural gas pipes in kitchens and bathrooms. It was in the latter type of traditional Hutong with modern facilities, that Yang did her main fieldwork for altogether fourteen months between July 2009 and September 2012. She also spent four months in a high-rise apartment compound outside the city. It is obvious that her fieldwork was most successful. From Professor Helena Wulff, Stockholm University

Der menschliche Umgang mit den natürlichen Ressourcen der Erde hat dramatische ökologische (und soziale) Folgen: Hierzu gehören der Klimawandel, der degradierte Zustand unserer Ökosysteme sowie der damit einhergehende hohe Verlust der Biodiversität. Trotz aller Bemühungen um eine nachhaltige Entwicklung konnte in diesen Bereichen bisher keine Trendwende erzielt werden. Der Wissenschaftliche Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen (WBGU) fordert daher eine "Große Transformation" von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, die dazu führt, dass planetarische Grenzen dauerhaft eingehalten werden können. In unseren Städten treffen wirtschaftliche Aktivität, das Potenzial zur Entwicklung technischer und sozialer Innovationen sowie die Möglichkeit der ressourcenschonenden Befriedigung gesellschaftlicher Bedürfnisse auf einen hohen Ressourcenverbrauch und starke Pfadabhängigkeiten in den bestehenden Bau- und Infrastrukturen. Die Krise der Ökosysteme stellt daher eine Schlüsselherausforderung einer nachhaltigen Stadtentwicklung dar. Die Arbeit widmet sich dem Potenzial von theoretischen Konzepten, die eine nachhaltige Entwicklung nach dem Vorbild der Natur erreichen wollen. Der Vergleich von dreizehn natur-inspirierten Strategien zeigt, dass sieben Strategien die Natur als Vorbild und Partner einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung betrachten: Cradle to Cradle, Permakultur, Regeneratives Design, Regenerative Stadt, Symbiosis in Development, Transition Towns sowie der niederländische Ansatz der Circular Economy verfolgen den Anspruch, Kreisläufe aus für Mensch und Umwelt unbedenklichen Stoffen aufzubauen und lokale Ökosysteme zu regenerieren. Ihrer Logik zufolge können aus dieser ökologischen Basis vielfältige soziale und wirtschaftliche Mehrwerte erzeugt werden (ökologie-basierte Nachhaltigkeitsstrategien). In den Niederlanden werden Cradle to Cradle, Symbiosis in Development und die Circular Economy bereits in der Quartiersentwicklung angewendet. Für den empirischen Teil der vorliegenden Arbeit wurden daher in drei Beispielprojekten, die sich jeweils auf unterschiedliche Theorien beziehen, insgesamt 16 Interviews mit den Planungsbeteiligten, der Kommune und den Nutzern geführt. Drei Themen werden in der Analyse behandelt: Das erste Thema vergleicht die untersuchten Strategien und Fallbeispiele mit den "Zielen nachhaltiger Stadtquartiersentwicklung" des Bundesinstituts für Bau-, Stadt- und Raumforschung (BBSR), um hieraus Stärken und Schwächen abzuleiten. Das zweite Thema überprüft, inwieweit der Anspruch, unbedenkliche Stoffkreisläufe aufzubauen sowie die lokalen Ökosysteme zu regenerieren, in der Praxis eingelöst wurde und dazu beitragen konnte, soziale und wirtschaftliche Mehrwerte zu erzielen. Im dritten und letzten Analysekapitel wird die Transformationsleistung der Fallbeispiele anhand verschiedener Konzepte aus der Transformationsforschung eingeordnet. Insgesamt komme ich zu der Einschätzung, dass die transformativen Stärken der ökologie-basierten Nachhaltigkeitsstrategien einer integrierten nachhaltigen Quartiersentwicklung wichtige Impulse verleihen und ihre Schwächen durch eine hierfür sensibilisierte Planung ausgeglichen werden können. Hierzu werden am Ende der Arbeit Herausforderungen benannt, weiterer Forschungsbedarf skizziert und Handlungsansätze aufgezeigt. ; Human engagement with natural resources has dramatic ecological (and social) impacts. This involves climate change, degraded ecosystems and a significant loss of biodiversity. Despite many efforts to achieve sustainable development humans have not been able to disrupt the destructive forces on our natural environment. The German Advisory Council on Global Change has called for "A Great Transformation" in order to sustain our environment. As centres of economic and societal activity cities have great potential to innovate and meet societal demands in a resource-efficient way. At the same time they currently consume natural resources at a high rate and encompass significant lock-in effects on their built environment. The degraded state of our ecosystems therefore presents a great challenge for sustainable urban development. In this doctoral thesis I examine the potential of nature-inspired design strategies that pursue the goal of sustainable development. The comparison of thirteen strategies reveals that seven strategies regard nature as a model and partner for sustainable development. Cradle to Cradle, Permaculture, Symbiosis in Development,Regenerative Design, Regenerative City, Transition Towns as well as the Dutch Approach of the Circular Economy aim to establish resource cycles from benign materials and renewable energy as well as to regenerate local ecosystems. Added social and economical value is expected to arise from this ecological basis (ecology-based strategies). In this thesis I articulate the common mindset of the ecology-based strategies that is based on their understanding of nature. Cradle to Cradle, Symbiosis in Development and the Circular Economy are used in neighbourhood development in the Netherlands. Neighbourhoods qualify for integrated development due to their manageable size and their significance for every day activities. In three case studies that refer to different strategies I therefore conducted 16 Interviews with stakeholders, the municipality and users. The analysis encapsulates three topics. In the first instance I compared the strategies with a German concept "objectives of sustainable urban neighbourhood development" from the The Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR) to reveal strenghts and weaknesses. Secondly I looked at the logic of the ecology-based strategies to find out if and to what extent resource cycles were closed in the projects as well as measures taken to regenerate local ecosystems. What added value did this approach deliver? The final topic analyses the transformative potential of applying the ecology-based approach to neighbourhood development. I come to the conclusion that the transformative forces of the ecology-based strategies hold a great potential for integrated sustainable neighbourhood development. Weaknesses have to be taken into account by a sensitised neighbourhood development. Finally I identify challenges, further research and outline action approaches.

In keeping with past experiences, 2005 produced a rich range of 70 theses that address urban history topics. Equally, as in past years, the topics the theses address are marked by diversity that itself is reflective of the nature of the urban experience. As usual the theses reviewed here are drawn from the Index of Theses located at http://www.theses.com/, which now also features Irish theses, and Dissertations International located at http://wwwli.umi.com/dissertations. This year's crop of theses has proved somewhat easier to categorize than has been the case in previous years and has seen the emergence of some new topics. In particular there is a noticeable interest in what might be called the urban environment and its functioning, which leads to interest in the infrastructural aspects of the city. This is not a new agenda for urban historians but it does also reflect the growth of environmental history and seems to represent an intersection of the two areas. It is also a consequence of the dominance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in urban history, which of itself tends to bring infrastructure to the historian's notice. Another interesting area of study that is emerging as the result of the opening of Soviet era archives is that of city planning, reconstruction and history in the former Soviet Union and eastern bloc countries. Theses from American universities continued to predominate with 68 per cent being drawn from their institutions. The proportion from Great Britain dropped to 21 per cent but the percentage from other countries, predominantly Canadian universities, increased to 11 per cent. The earlier production of this article may be the reason for the reduction in the British proportion rather than a real decline in numbers. There were noticeable clusters of theses coming from Stanford University (7.6 per cent of the total), with the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University each producing 6.1 per cent of the theses produced. In Britain there was a small cluster that emerged from the Open University and among the 'other' group, Toronto University was the only institution to produce more than one thesis.

AbstractIn the 1930s, the attention of Turkey's politicians shifted back from Ankara and Anatolian cities to İstanbul. In 1932, the Governorship-Municipality of İstanbul organized an urban design competition for İstanbul, and four foreign city planners were invited. In the meantime, Martin Wagner came to İstanbul for the preparation of urban reports. In 1937, Henri Prost, the prominent urbanist of Paris, was invited to İstanbul and prepared the first master plan of the city. In Turkey and in İstanbul, town planning processes have been significantly influenced by "Western" planning principles, cultures, and experiences while gaining a local meaning in the context of Turkish politics and the state-formation process. The aim of this study is to describe the urban design competition of 1933 and the first master plan of 1937. Beyond references to Western European cities as in the "city-beautiful" planning approach, this study, based on a series of official documents, plan reports and their rhetoric, investigates in particular the role of foreign planners/urbanists in İstanbul in the context of the construction of a nation-state. The analysis of these foreign planners' work suggests that urban planning in Republican Turkey was closely linked to the construction of the nation state.

"This book explores how the city was transformed to accommodate different political ideologies in the period from 1870 to the end of World War II. It offers a new approach to understanding the sophisticated relationships between archeology, urban planning, and politics within the city of Rome"--

Deals with theories and technologies for longevity, maintenance, disaster prevention, risk management, renovation and recycling of infrastructure as well as historical and cultural approaches to city and architectural planning. This book is suitable for working architects, civil engineers, city planners, and government officials

Pensando en la planificación urbana a la luz de la equidad social, revisando los cambios en los métodos y poniendo el foco en los procesos participativos. ¿Qué ha cambiado en las formas de hacer planificación en América Latina durante el último medio siglo? ¿Cómo juegan la política, la economía y el mercado en la construcción de las ciudades contemporáneas? Más aún, ¿cómo entra en juego la participación ciudadana en estos procesos? Tras varias décadas de experiencia, todavía tenemos mucho que aprender. Hoy, algunos profesionales e instituciones están dispuestos a enfrentar los desafíos necesarios para asegurar la inclusión, el acceso a los derechos y la igualdad, al tiempo que abren cada vez más canales de participación. ¿En qué medida puede esta apertura contribuir a las transformaciones necesarias?. SUMMARYThinking urban planning in the light of social equity, reviewing the changes in methods, and placing the focus on participatory processes: What has it changed in the ways to do planning in Latin America over the last half century? How do politics, the economy and the market play in the construction of contemporary cities? Moreover, how does citizen participation enter into play within these processes? After several decades of experience, we still have a lot to learn. Today, some professionals and institutions are willing to confront the challenges to secure inclusion, access to rights, and equality while opening ever more channels for participation. To what extent can this opening-up help generate the necessary transformations?.

Mit dem deutlichen Anstieg der Zuwanderung Geflüchteter seit Mitte der 2010er-Jahre stehen die Städte und Gemeinden mit ihrer kommunalen Ausländer- und Migrationspolitik vor neuen Herausforderungen der gesellschaftlichen Integration. Die Bewältigung dieser Herausforderungen erfolgt im Zusammenspiel verschiedener, zum Teil neuer lokaler Akteure aus dem öffentlichen (z. B. kommunale Verwaltung, Wohlfahrtsorganisationen), privatwirtschaftlichen (z. B. Arbeitgeber) und zivilgesellschaftlichen Bereich (z. B. ehrenamtliche Initiativen). In diesem Beitrag werden die verschiedenen Logiken zentraler, am Integrationsprozess beteiligter Akteure beleuchtet, um aufzuzeigen, wer unter welchen Voraussetzungen die Integrationsbedingungen vor Ort in welcher Weise gestaltet und steuert. Die Untersuchung wurde in zwei unterschiedlichen lokalen Kontexten, der Stadt Köln und dem Kreis Heinsberg, mit dem Ziel durchgeführt, Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten lokaler Governance aufzuzeigen. Die Ergebnisse beruhen auf 29 Experteninterviews mit Vertretern der Stadt- und Kreisverwaltungen, der Stadtgesellschaften und der Landesebene, die im Rahmen beruflicher oder ehrenamtlicher Tätigkeit am Integrationsprozess Geflüchteter beteiligt sind. Im Ergebnis zeigen sich bei einigen Maßnahmen der Integrationspolitik verschiedene Handlungslogiken. Dies trifft erstens für das Verhältnis zwischen staatlichen Akteuren der Bundes- und Landesebene und kommunalen Akteuren zu. Dies trifft zweitens aber auch auf das Verhältnis zwischen kommunalen und zivilgesellschaftlichen Akteuren zu. Dabei spielen die räumlichen und situativen Kontexte eine differenzierende Rolle.

Within the methodological framework of the academic research, this study focuses on the urban development specific to shrinking cities. This interest raised from a broader interrogation on the professional practice of urban architects and the making of the city ongoing in this early XXIth century, with regards to contemporary debates about cities that are resilient, economical, self sufficient toward ecological, socio-economical and political crises. The shrinking city offers thus an interesting framework to study architects-urban planners reactions to such contexts and constraints adaptation. Furthermore the German programm Shrinking Cities and the reflexions raised by the German architect and researcher Philipp Oswalt have been a trigger component. He claims that the shrinking city was a new playground to explore new architectural and planning thoughts. He demonstrates it from a gathering of experiences around the world. Today, we suggest to follow this reflexion and raise the following issue: which lessons are to be learned from those experiences for today's professional practice and imagine the city of tomorrow ?From this initial questioning, we took for granted that those new ways of seeing architecture and urban project (concepts, architectural languages, urban shape, etc.) lead to new leaving standards territories (uses, urban patterns, landscape, leaving conditions, etc.), changing thus the making of the city in this beginning of XXIth century. Indeed, those processes would be influential in the identification of favourable lands for a reasoned gestion of the city and the development of new tools and acting processes imagined by architects and urban planners.To answer to our hypothesis, we focus more specifically on projects initiating a deep mutation of the urban fabric, on its form and its uses that we would call here urban reshaping. Our analysis is based on six processes meant to be "innovative", realized or no, one of them being built by inhabitants. They illustrate this practice in different shrinking cities since the 20 past years. Those case studies are located in different urban fabrics contexts to illustrate the diversity of situations that one can be facing. In parallel of two French case studies (Saint-Etienne, Livradois-Forez), we will observe other experiences in two foreign contexts, pioneers in terms of local initiatives and urban policy: Germany (Halle-Neustadt, Dessau) and the United states (Detroit). The diversity of projects, in terms of approach and scale does not constitute a comparative study. We suggest instead a more relevant approach consisting in questioning them to understand the political, socioeconomic and environment consequences on the process of project making and the capacity of those projects to initiate a transformation of urban fabric and of the city.Our goal will be to understand the originality and specifies of those initiatives, but also potential contributions to the contemporary debates on the city and its evolutions. This approach seeks bringing a prospective dimension about the shrinking city. ; Dans le cadre de la recherche, nous nous intéressons à la pratique du projet urbain dans les villes en décroissance (ou ville rétrécissante), plus connues sous le terme anglophone de shrinking cities. Cet intérêt est né d'un questionnement plus large sur la pratique de l'architecte-urbaniste et la fabrique de la ville en ce début du XXIe siècle, où les débats se multiplient sur la ville résiliante, économe, autosuffisante face aux crises écologiques, socio- économiques et politiques actuelles. La ville en décroissance offre ainsi un cadre intéressant pour nous confronter à cette problématique où l'architecte-urbaniste se retrouve à devoir s'adapter et se réinventer face à de multiples contraintes. Par ailleurs, le programme allemand Shrinking Cities et les réflexions portées par l'architecte-chercheur allemand Philipp Oswalt ont été un élément déclencheur. Ce dernier revendiquait l'idée que la ville en décroissance était le nouveau terrain de jeu pour explorer de nouvelles pensées architecturales et urbanistiques. Il le démontre à partir d'un travail de collecte d'expériences à travers le monde. Aujourd'hui, nous proposons de poursuivre cette réflexion et de nous poser la question suivante: quels enseignements pouvons-nous tirer de ces expériences pour notre pratique et imaginer la ville de demain ? À partir de ce questionnement, nous faisons l'hypothèse que ces nouvelles pensées architecturales et urbaines (concepts, langages architecturaux, formes urbaines, etc.) participeraient à la formulation de nouvelles formes d'habiter les territoires (usages, modèles urbains, paysage, modes de vie, etc.), permettant d'envisager différemment la fabrique urbaine en ce début du XXIe. Ces démarches seraient par ailleurs actrices dans la reconnaissance de terrains favorables pour une gestion urbaine raisonnée et dans le développement de nouveaux outils et protocoles d'action imaginés par les architecte-urbanistes.Pour répondre à notre hypothèse de recherche, nous nous intéressons plus spécifiquement aux projets impulsant une mutation profonde du tissu urbain, dans sa forme comme dans ses usages que nous nommons ici par remodelage urbain. Notre analyse se base sur six démarches dites « innovantes », théoriques et réalisées, dont un cas est mis en œuvre par des habitants. Elles illustrent cette pratique dans différentes villes en décroissance depuis ces vingt dernières années.Ces cas d'étude sont situés dans des tissus urbains différents (habitat dense en centre-ville et dans les bourgs ruraux, grands ensembles, habitat pavillonnaire) pour montrer la diversité des terrains auxquels l'architecte-urbaniste peut être confronté. Parallèlement aux deux cas français (Saint-Étienne, Livradois-Forez), nous observerons d'autres expériences dans deux contextes étrangers, précurseurs en termes d'initiatives locales et de politiques urbaines : l'Allemagne (Halle- Neustadt, Dessau) et les États-Unis (Detroit). La diversité des approches et des échelles de réflexion de ces projets ne permet pas de conduire une étude comparative. Plus adaptée à notre démarche, nous proposons leur mise en discussion pour comprendre l'impact du cadre politique, socio-économique et de l'environnement urbain sur le processus de projet ainsi que la capacité de ces projets à amorcer une transformation du tissu urbain et de la ville.Notre objectif sera ainsi de comprendre l'originalité et les spécificités de ces démarches, mais aussi leurs apports potentiels dans les débats actuels sur la ville et ses évolutions. Cette démarche cherche à apporter une dimension prospective sur le sujet de la ville en décroissance.

Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the science of networks. Much of this research has been stimulated by advances in statistical physics and the study of complex systems – that is, systems that comprise many interrelated components whose interactions produce unpredictable large-scale emergent behavior. Cities are complex systems formed both through decentralized, bottom-up, self-organizing processes as well as through top-down planning interventions. Humans shape their urban ecosystems (the built environment, institutions, cultures, etc.) and are in turn shaped by them. Cities comprise numerous interdependent components that interact through networks – social, virtual, and physical – such as street networks.This dissertation examines urban street networks, their structural complexity (emphasizing density, connectedness, and resilience), and how planning eras and design paradigms shape them. Interventions into a complex system often have unpredictable outcomes, even if the intervention is minor, as effects compound or dampen nonlinearly over time. Such systems' capacity for novelty, through emergent features that arise from their components' interactions, also makes them unpredictable. These interactions and the structure of connections within a system are the subject of network science. In cities, the structural characteristics of circulation networks influence how a city's physical links organize its human dynamics. Urban morphologists have long studied the built form's complexity and, following from scholars such as Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander, various urban design paradigms today speak both directly and indirectly to the value of complexity in the built environment. However, these claims are often made loosely, without formally connecting with theory, implications, or evaluation frameworks.This dissertation develops an interdisciplinary typology of measures for assessing the complexity of urban form and design, particularly emphasizing street network analytic measures. Street network analysis has held a prominent place in network science ever since Leonhard Euler presented his famous Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem in 1736. The past 15 years have been no exception as the growth of interdisciplinary network science has included numerous applications to cities and their street networks. These studies have yielded new understandings of urban form and design, transportation flows and access, and the topology and resilience of urban street networks. However, current limitations of data availability, consistency, and technology have resulted in four substantial shortcomings: small sample sizes, excessive network simplification, difficult reproducibility, and the lack of consistent, easy-to-use research tools. While these shortcomings are by no means fatal, their presence can limit the scalability, generalizability, and interpretability of empirical street network research.To address these challenges, this dissertation presents OSMnx, a new tool to download and analyze street networks and other geospatial data from OpenStreetMap for any study site in the world. OSMnx contributes five capabilities for researchers and practitioners: first, the downloading of political boundaries, building footprints, and elevation data; second, the scalable retrieval and construction of street networks from OpenStreetMap; third, the algorithmic correction of network topology; fourth, the ability to save street networks as shapefiles, GraphML, or SVG files; and fifth, the ability to analyze street networks, including projecting and visualizing networks, routing, and calculating metric and topological measures. These measures include those common in urban design and transportation studies, as well as measures of the structure and topology of the network. This study illustrates the use of OSMnx and OpenStreetMap to consistently conduct street network analysis with extremely large sample sizes, with clearly defined network definitions and extents for reproducibility, and using non-planar, directed graphs.This study collects and analyzes 27,000 U.S. street networks from OpenStreetMap at metropolitan, municipal, and neighborhood scales – namely, every U.S. city and town, census urbanized area, and Zillow-defined neighborhood. It presents wide-ranging empirical findings on U.S. urban form and street network characteristics, emphasizing measures relevant to graph theory, urban design, and morphology such as structural complexity, connectedness, density, centrality, and resilience. We find that the typical American urban area has approximately 26 intersections/km2, 2.8 streets connected to the average node, 160m average street segment lengths, and a network that is 7.4% more circuitous than straight-line streets would be. The typical city has approximately 25 intersections/km2, 2.9 streets connected to the average node, 145m average street segment lengths, and a network that is 5.5% more circuitous than straight-line streets would be. The typical Zillow neighborhood has approximately 46 intersections/km2, 2.9 streets connected to the average node, 135m average street segment lengths, and a network that is 4.4% more circuitous than straight-line streets would be. At all three scales, 3-way intersections are by far the most prevalent intersection type across the U.S.We find a strong linear relationship, invariant across scales, between total street length and the number of nodes in a network. This contradicts some previous findings in the literature that relied on smaller sample sizes and different geographic contexts. We also find that most networks demonstrate a lognormal distribution of street segment lengths. However, an obvious exception to lognormal distribution lies in those networks that exhibit substantial uniformity network-wide. At the neighborhood scale, examples include downtown neighborhoods with consistent orthogonal grids, such as that of Portland, Oregon. At the municipal scale, examples include towns in the Great Plains that have orthogonal grids with consistent block sizes, platted at one time, and never subjected to sprawl. These spatial signatures of the Homestead Act, successive land use regulations, urban design paradigms, and planning instruments remain etched into these cities' urban forms and street networks today. Nebraska's cities have the lowest circuity, the highest average number of streets per node, the second shortest average street segment length, and the second highest intersection density. These findings illustrate how street networks across the Great Plains developed all at once and grew little afterwards – unlike, for instance, cities in California that were settled in the same era but were later subjected to substantial sprawl.The characteristics of a city street network fundamentally depend on what "city" means: municipal boundaries, urbanized areas, or certain core neighborhoods? The first is a political/legal definition, but it captures the scope of city planning jurisdiction and decision-making for top-down interventions into a street network. The second captures the wider self-organized human system and its emergent built form, but tends to aggregate multiple heterogeneous built forms together into a single unit of analysis. The third captures the nature of the local built environment and lived experience, but at the expense of a broader view of the urban system and metropolitan-scale trip-taking. In short, multiple scales in concert provide planners a clearer view of the urban form and the topological and metric complexity of the street network than any single scale can.The emerging methods of computational data science, visualization, network science, and big data analysis have broadened the scope of urban design's traditional toolbox. Such methods may yield new insights and rigor in urban form/design research, but they may also promulgate the weaknesses of reductionism and scientism by ignoring the theory, complexity, and qualitative nuance of human experience crucial to urbanism. The tools we use shape the kinds of questions we can even ask about cities. Today, the dissemination of quantitative network science into the social sciences offers an exciting opportunity to study the dynamics and structure of cities and urban form, but paths forward must consider cities as uniquely human complex systems, inextricably bound up with politics, privilege, power relations, and planning decisions.This dissertation comprises six substantive chapters bookended by introductory and concluding chapters. As a whole, the dissertation is divided into two primary parts. The first comprises chapters 2 and 3 and develops the theoretical framework. Chapter 2 introduces the background of the nonlinear paradigm by discussing systems, dynamics, self-similarity, and the nature of prediction in the presence of nonlinearity. These foundations set up the complexity theories of cities and the study of networks presented in chapter 3. This first part of the dissertation emphasizes the dynamics of complex urban systems before we turn our attention to their structure in the second part. Urban circulation networks serve as a physical substrate that underlies and organizes the city's complex human interactions. Chapter 4 collates various indicators of complexity from multiple research literatures into a typology of measures of the complexity of urban form, emphasizing the scale of urban design practice. In particular, it presents several measures of network complexity and structure that we then operationalize in chapters 5, 6, and 7. Methodologically, chapter 5 introduces OSMnx, a new tool to acquire, construct, correct, visualize, and analyze complex urban street networks. Chapter 6 applies OSMnx empirically in a small case study of street networks in Portland, Oregon. Chapter 7 then expands the empirical application of OSMnx to a large study of 27,000 urban street networks at various scales across the U.S. These street networks and measures data sets have been shared in a public repository for other researchers to re-purpose.