Urban Conversations: A City Is Sometimes a Tree

In person only at the Plimpton Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge.

In his seminal 1965 article “A City Is Not a Tree,” design theorist Christopher Alexander argued that urban planners tend to design cities as efficient, hierarchical, tree-like structures, whereas successful traditional cities evolve naturally as messy, interconnected lattice structures. His paper was an influential landmark across the fields of urban design, transport planning, complex systems, and network science. In this talk, USC associate professor Geoff Boeing will reconsider this claim and argue that “successful” cities are, in fact, very often very tree-like. Boeing and Carole Voulgaris, an associate professor of urban planning at GSD, will also discuss how we can plan cities for more connected, sustainable futures.

Speakers:

Geoff Boeing, Associate Professor, Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analytics, and Director, Urban Data Labs, USC

Carole Voulgaris, Associate Professor of Urban Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Registration is required. Lunch will be provided.

Part of the Mahindra Humanities Center's Urban Conversations series; co-sponsored with the Center for Geographic Analysis, the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and the Department of Urban Planning and Design at GSD.