The art of place and the science of space

Cities are large physical objects animated and driven by human behaviour. How do the two connect? How do cities come into existence emerging from centuries of human acyivity as a well-ordered system? And how do they work to relate the physical patterning to the economic, social and cognitive life of humans who inhabit it? The fact that cities exist and function as physical wholes at the lobal scale, but are experienced a bit at a time at another, seems to trap us between an objectivist and rather abstracted view of the city as a whole and a subjectivist and phenomenological view of its parts. This paper aims to build up a theory of the city-creating preocess through the space syntax approach to overcome these two polarisations. The standing point is it treats cities as spatial networks and regards space as the common medium of the physical city and the experiential city, as well as of the socio-economic city and the cognitive city. So seen spatially, the physical city and the experiential city seem to merge into one.How should we talk about cities as space then? I will first explain my approach to space- the space syntax approach and how it has come to be used in research and design, both as a method and as a theory of space. Secondly, I will then show how we can use the method and the theory to bring to light certain key features of how human beings understand, experience and manipulate space. Armed with a theory of space itself, and a theory of the human understanding of space, a theory of the city-creating process in two stages will be outlined. One is a theory of how characteristically urban patterns of space are created by the aggregation of built forms and objects; the other is how collections of buildings become living cities by shaping human activity in them.In conclusion, it is argued that cities are human products in a very strong sense. In their very form and function they reflect ehat we are and how we can be. Perhaps this is why cities are the greatest artefact.