“The Image of the City” by Kevin Lynch is a landmark planning theory of lasting influence; its scientific rigor and relevance in the digital age were in dispute. The rise of social media and other digital technologies offers new opportunities to study the perception of urban environments. Questions remain as to whether social media analytics can provide a reliable measure of perceived city images? If yes, what implication does...

Wide access to large volumes of urban big data and artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools allow performing new analyses that were previously impossible due to the lack of data or their high aggregation. This paper aims to assess the possibilities of the use of urban big data analytics based on AI-related tools to support the design and planning of cities. To this end, the author introduces a conceptual framework to assess the...

Christopher Alexander, a British-American scholar, differentiated an old (natural) city from a new (planned) one by structure. The former resembles a “semilattice”, or a complex system encompassing many interconnected sub-systems. The latter is shaped in a graph-theoretical “tree”, which lacks the structural complexity as its sub-systems are compartmentalized into a single hierarchy. This structural distinction explains why, or...