Urban Conversations Breakfast event with Geoff Boeing

Please join us for "Universality in Urban Form," an Urban Conversations event with speaker Geoff Boeing. 

Urban street networks shape city form, accessibility, mobility, and resilience. Prior work has emphasized differences between cities' street network forms, but this talk instead argues that they actually exhibit remarkable universality across urban areas. We model the street networks of every urban area in the world and calculate street network form indicators. We then compare these indicators' statistical dispersion to that of other urban characteristics unrelated to network form. Despite vast differences in geography and planning history, cities converge on a consistently narrow and homogeneous set of street network forms. That is, street networks' geometric and topological forms show remarkable universality across cities of drastically different origins and planning paradigms, which we argue is due to physical constraints, urbanization processes, and optimization.

Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall 112, 48 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA 02138

Sponsored by Harvard HMUI, and special thanks to GSD and JCHS.

Geoff Boeing is an Associate Professor in USC’s Department of Urban Planning and
Spatial Analysis, the Director of USC’s Urban Data Lab, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow
at the Brookings Institution. His research and teaching focus on geospatial data science,
urban networks, and information landscapes. His work has won the Nobel Sustainability
Award and the Stough-Johansson Springer Award, and is regularly featured in the media
including The Economist, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. He
developed and maintains the OSMnx street network modeling software and has served as a
consultant for several planning, policymaking, and public health organizations. He has
never played a round of golf or drunk a cup of coffee in his life.