On Urban Morphology and Mathematics

Cities are ultimately the results of human behaviour whose understanding might be reductive if solely framed within a strictly ‘mathematical’ confine1 . Human behaviour “is so complex and influenced by such a wide range of factors that any claim to provide precise, deterministic prediction is unrealistic” (Inglehart 2018, p. 10). But there is another side of the coin: quantification and mathematical modelling are means enabling us to discover partially predictable macro paths of our behaviours otherwise unreadable. Even if “not deterministic […,] some trajectories are more probable than others” (Inglehart 2018, p. 11): the mathematical language helps both in seeing these trajectories and in quantifying these probabilities