The Mathematical Approach That’s Solving A Major Problem in Urban Planning

Every city in the world has its own soul. It breathes its own air, it creates its own life, and it has a unique distinction of people, buildings, flora, fauna, and everything else. That’s what gives every city its own identity, independent from one another. But what every city does need is a properly planned urban space that allows its citizens to be themselves. Urban Planning is one of the key aspects of cityscape architecture as well as space design. It is what enables citizens of an urban area to move around freely without ever feeling suffocated, crowded, or having other convenience issues.

However, the one problem that has remained a constant in a lot of urban areas around the globe is the existence of ‘Slums.’ Slums, in themselves, aren’t necessarily the biggest problem for a city’s planning. What becomes of it, with its transportation, communication, and structure, all within an enclosed, cramped area, poses a big problem to city planning.

So how did they manage to solve this problem? What mathematical approach did they use in this regard? Let’s find out.

Identifying the Problem With Urban Areas

More than buildings, people, cars, and traffic, what constitutes a city are its roads. Roads are the means of connecting one point to another, facilitating easy transportation and enabling the carriage of goods and other services.

What slums lack, essentially, are roads. They are usually poverty-stricken areas, where residential areas are densely packed and disorganized. There is no proper interconnectivity and no concrete roads to reach from one place to another. It’s not just roads that they lack. Slums are also lacking many of the infrastructure that accompanies roads. Street signs, building numbers, and vehicle access to building exteriors are also nowhere to be seen within a slum.

Slums, around the world, contain more than a billion people. And that lack of infrastructure commonly found in slums everywhere means that those people cannot complete their basic jobs. Tasks such as retrieving mail, getting to work, getting to the hospital on time, and attending to any other emergency tasks become extremely arduous for them. Not to mention the sanitation efforts required to remove trash and maintain a clean environment.

Now, scientists have developed a novel approach to address this growing problem using science.

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Topology – The Mathematical Approach to Urban Design

In Urban Design, Topology is described as a mathematical approach to analyzing and creating cities, focusing on the connectivity and relationships between urban elements, rather than their geometric shapes. It is a very effective way of Space Design in any urban context. It models any city as a network of nodes and the streets as links, allowing for and optimizing access. It helps identify the urban centers and improve informal settlements by finding optimal street layouts. As it turned out, Topology was the solution that slums needed.

Slums can essentially be broken down into two components. The first is Infrastructure, which includes homes and stores, and the second is Access networks that connect them. They would be the ‘Nodes’ and ‘Connections.’ Such a framework allows the ‘Connections’, i.e., access networks, can be optimized.

The result of the transformation was immediate and spectacular. Slums in many areas where this was implemented started showing signs of improvement. There was less trash lying around, accessibility to basic tasks eased up, and the city around which the slums lay became a far better place to inhabit and commute. This ingenious approach became a revolutionary way of Space Design.

A City That Displayed Positive Results

The Topology approach has already been tried and tested in two slums in Cape Town, South Africa. In one of the two slums, what they did was they designed a system where the most essential services provided by the city were lined up on the outskirts of the area, where road access existed. These services were water, electricity, toilets, trash removal, etc.

This way, the inner portions of the settlements where people lived and their sacrosanct entities, such as temples and churches, that remained, were cut off from the movement of such disposable items. The overall health of the slums and the movement around them improved as a result of this.

The scientists conducted the study with the aid of satellite data and detailed maps made by locals to diagram all the nodes and connections of the settlement. They then used their topological algorithm to figure out which areas were inaccessible by roads. After that, they came up with the most cost-effective ways to build the roads and connect them to outside services.

In Topology, since one block of buildings surrounded by roads is considered equivalent, settlements with a wide range of shapes and sizes, from the suburbs of Las Vegas to the slums of Mumbai, can be analyzed in the same way.

Conclusion

The scientists who designed the program wish to come up with a user-friendly interface that can be used by communities around the world. This would enable the decision-making power into the hands of locals in those communities, who can then determine that proposed access roads will accommodate their priorities, and then reroute them accordingly.

This way, they won’t have to deal with a solution that may turn out to be temporary and pose a separate problem later on. This user-friendly interface will keep the design template flexible, and the locals can then redesign according to any new problem that may or may not emerge. This way, the slums within cities will always remain well-designed and aid to the city’s overall space design and urban planning.

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