project 4:

"Fractals and Netwroks as Strategies in Urban Design*

INTRO 

This paper consists part of my research, which aims at discovering the forces shaping urban space, in accordance with urban life.
I am focusing on the factors contributing to the physical and symbolic form of the contemporary cities. I am looking closely at the 
underlying urban structures and the representational strategies, which determine the city’s viability, growth, and the experience 
of the inhabitants. As I see it, the spatial experience that emerges from engagement with space, does not occur only on the physical 
plane, but also on the representational, psychological and imaginary plane. Perception and cognition consist of the basic agents of 
engagement with the external environment, by allowing the external stimuli become readable by the human brain and encoded 
according to the individual’s cognitive system. 

In this paper I will not focus on the engagement of the inhabitant, through perception, cognition and other mechanisms; I will discuss 
the forces shaping the city and I will try to explore the structures, which should be taken into account when one proposes a viable
 contemporary urban structure. The paper particularly examines two aspects of the city, its fractality and its network structure. It is 
widely accepted that the city has appeared and evolved as a living organism. This conviction is founded upon the comparison between 
biological structures and urban paradigms. My concern is to define one of the biological principles and relate it to the urban structure. 
More specifically, the fractal element found in neural networks is also encountered in the visual culture of many civilizations and in the 
design of many cities. But we should first define the meaning of fractals.The paper starts by defining the term fractal in relation to the 
network structure. It continues by assigning these values to urban entities and concludes with proposing design strategies that include 
the fractal and network elements. Finally, for the technical part of this paper I try to implement those principles to create an abstract 
design of interconnected fractal entities, inspired by the fractal tree structures.

"the Powerpoint Presentation"