The evolution of cities is built upon interaction of people.

People meet friends or strangers on streets,

buy goods from markets or collaborate and form enterprises. The urban built environment is the arena
where these interactions takes places. One of the primary challenge of good city design is therefore to
maximize the interactions between people and places, while minimizing friction. Contemporary cities
volumes of data that offer unprecedented opportunities to address this challenge. These data can help
us understand how the human interactions that cities facilitate can deliver social, economic and
environmental rewards. Many urban activities can be shown in numbers by counting purchases in
stores, tallying traffic on streets, tracking real estate transactions or following business location patterns,
in addition to social activities, cities also have physical infrastructure which can also be abstractly
represented. A complex built environment can be reduced to 3 basic elements,

Links representing along wchih travel can occer

Nodes representing intersections of 2 links and public spaces form

And buildings where most human activities take place and where the movement of people, goods and
information begins or ends.

This frameworks allows us to describe spatial relationshiops people places and institutions using
powerful network analysis methods. How can we use this method to describe cities – The reach metric
for instance characterizes the number of particular destinations that can be reached from any location in
a city within a given access radius. If the destination describe the number of residents then the metric
tells us how many residents one can access around the building. W
The evolution of cities is built upon the interaction of people, people meet friends or strangers on
streets, buy goods from markets, or collaborate to form enterprises or businesses. The Urban built
environment is the arena where these interactions take place. One of the primary challenges of good
city design is therefore to maximise interactions between people and places, while minimising friction.
Contemporary cities generate volumes of data that offer unprecedented opportunities to address this
challenge. These data can help us understand how the human interactions that cities facilitate can
deliver social, economic, and environmental rewards. Many urban activities can be shown in numbers by
counting purchases in stores, tallying traffic on streets, tracking real estate transactions or following
business location patterns. In addition to social activities, cities also have physical infrastructure, which
can also be abstractly represented. A complex built environment can be reduced to three basic
elements, links, representing paths along which travel can occur, nodes representing the intersections
where two or more paths cross and public spaces form and buildings, where most human activities take
place, and where the movement of people goods and information begins or ends. This framework allows
us to describe spatial relationships between people, places and institutions using powerful network
analysis methods. How can we use this method to describe a city reach metric, for instance,
characterises the number of particular destinations that can be reached from any location in a city
within a given access radius. If the destinations describe the number of residents, and then the metric
tells us how many residents one can access around each building, we can specify a similar measure for
the number of jobs in each building and floor areas and perform the analysis with a different network
radius. And depending on what mode of travel, we assume the trips to take, if we add up all these travel
costs to individual destinations, and then we can also determine the closeness of each location, which
forms another metric, or consider the betweenness index, which estimates how in between other
locations a building is, if we know that in the morning peak hour commuting occurs from subway
stations to office buildings, and then the between this index can estimate the trajectories that such trips
are likely to take and tell us which buildings are past most often along the way. The different
specifications of network analysis yield a series of results describing proximities and adjacencies
between people and places, which can be important for locating a business and explaining traffic
patterns, or the value of land in different parts of a city. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for instance,
there are roughly 15,000 buildings. And to calculate any of these metrics requires exponentially has
many more calculations, it would be impossible to calculate these indices manually. That's why we are
introducing the urban network analysis toolbox that is designed to automate these calculations on a
computer. The toolbox is built on top of the GIS platform, which allows us to easily combine urban
network analysis with other types of data and spatial analysis approaches. Urban network analysis can
describe complex spatial problems and help us address fundamental questions of good city design. Can
the layout of a city facilitate equitable access to the city's resources? How does the form of a
neighbourhood affect the economic performance of its enterprises were our perception of its quality
and its livability and urban network analysis offers a useful framework that allows different professionals
to describe dense urban environments with clarity and precision and thereby address a critical step in
developing a better understanding of how we shape our cities. And how they in turn, shape us