Kiril Stanilov

Entropy relates the fast, microscopic behaviour of the elements in a system to its slow, macroscopic state. We propose to use it to explain how, as complexity theory suggests, small scale decisions of individuals form cities. For this, we offer the first interpretation of entropy for cities that reflects interactions between different places throug...

Urban morphology has presented significant intellectual challenges to mathematicians and physicists ever since the eighteenth century, when Euler first explored the famous Königsberg bridges problem. Many important regularities and scaling laws have been observed in urban studies, including Zipf's law and Gibrat's law, rendering cities attractive s...

Urban morphology has presented significant intellectual challenges to mathematicians and physicists ever since the eighteenth century, when Euler first explored the famous Konigsberg bridges problem. Many important regularities and allometries have been observed in urban studies, including Zipf's law and Gibrat's law, rendering cities attractive sy...

This chapter summarizes the main features of postsocialist suburbanization on the basis of the evidence presented in our seven cases studies. It highlights the commonalities of the phenomenon as they relate to its historical evolution, growth dynamics and trends, and spatial patterns. The chapter discusses further the presence of intraregional vari...

This chapter lays out theoretical argument, linking suburbanization to key structural forces and factors that underlies the transition of the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe to a capitalist socioeconomic order. It highlights the decisive influence of neoliberal ideology in this process of societal transformation and the imp...

We pose the central problem of defining a measure of complexity, specifically for spatial systems in general, city systems in particular. The measures we adopt are based on Shannon’s (in Bell Syst Tech J 27:379–423, 623–656, 1948) definition of information. We introduce this measure and argue that increasing information is equivalent to increasing...

We study the growth of London's street network in its dual representation, as the city has evolved over the past 224 years. The dual representation of a planar graph is a content-based network, where each node is a set of edges of the planar graph and represents a transportation unit in the so-called information space, i.e., the space where informa...

This chapter presents the evolution of the suburban periphery of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. It shows that the intense suburbanization processes that Sofia has recently experienced fit well into the broader context of postsocialist spatial restructuring - a phenomenon observed in other large East European urban centers. The chapter also highlight...

This chapter discusses the impact of public policies and planning at national, regional, and local levels of governance on the spread of postsocialist suburbanization. Using the evidence presented in the case studies, it highlights similarities and differences in the ways in which the patterns of urban growth have been influenced by the policy choi...

In this paper we study the statistical properties of urban street networks. We show that urban and non-urban street networks can be differentiated through their statistical properties, suggesting at a transition between two phases. We introduce a definition of city boundaries based on the percolation properties of the network in the street intersec...

We investigate the growth dynamics of Greater London defined by the administrative boundary of the Greater London Authority, based on the evolution of its street network during the last two centuries. This is done by employing a unique dataset, consisting of the planar graph representation of nine time slices of Greater London's road network spanni...

This paper analyzes the patterns of urban growth and land-use change in metropolitan Prague since the collapse of the socialist regime in 1989. The discussion is focused on the growth and dispersal of single-family development as the most clearly pronounced shift in the spatial evolution of the Czech capital in the last two decades. The observed pr...

The chapter offers an overview of the issues related to the integration and representation of space in agent-based models (ABMs), with a focus on those models that can be considered spatially explicit. Key aspects of space in ABM are highlighted, related to: the role of space as an attribute of agents and the environment; as an interaction componen...

The article presents the results of a study investigating the growth of metropolitan London from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. A high-resolution longitudinal land-use database, assembled from historical Ordnance Survey maps, is used to trace the patterns of land development in a 200 km2 area of West London from 1875 to t...

By analysing the evolution of the street network of Greater London from the late 1700s to the present, we are able to shed light on the inner mechanisms that lie behind the growth of a city. First we define an object called a city as a spatial discontinuous phenomena, from clustering the density of street intersections. Second, we find that the cit...

Abstract We have adapted METRONAMICA, an established cellular automata (CA) modelling system, to simulate the historical growth of a section of a large world city. Our model is tuned to reflect the morphology of land use patterns more accurately than traditional CA models, which abstract those patterns to more aggregate spatial scales. We explore t...

The demise of the socialist economic system and its subsequent restructuring has led to profound changes in the spatial patterns of non-residential urban activities in cities of Central and Eastern Europe. The most important and visible trend of urban development during the transition period has been the decentralization of economic activities, a p...

The introductory chapter to this section of the book provides an overview of the housing trends in cities of Central and Eastern Europe during the crisis of the transition period in the early and mid-1990s and the subsequent boom of the housing construction industry. An overview of the market fluctuations since the late 1980s is followed by a discu...

Fifteen years after the sudden collapse of the socialist system, half of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that bravely toppled their communist regimes announced the successful completion of their transition to market-oriented democratic societies. This historical moment was officially sealed by the signatures of the heads of these s...

The collapse of the political system in the Eastern Block countries during the second half of 1989 ushered in a new period, commonly referred to as postsocialism. Similarly to the terms post-industrialism and post-modernism, already quite popular at the time, this expression signified a condition that was defined primarily by the disintegration of...

In the large body of literature produced during the last fifteen years on the transformation of Eastern European societies after the fall of communism, studies investigating changes in urban form and structure have been quite rare. Yet a profound reorganization of the manner in which urban space is appropriated has taken place, impacting the life o...

The paper explores the morphological transformations of Bulgarian towns at the end of the nineteenth century. These transformations occurred as a result of massive restructuring of existing towns through the implementation of new modernist principles of town planning popularized during that period. Informal rules that governed development patterns...

This paper explores the relationship between land use and accessibility through analysis of changing land use covers in the suburban areas of Greater Seattle over a period of 30 years. Two simple interpretations of accessibility are employed. Relative accessibility is used to investigate changes in suburban growth patterns relative to the distance...

A primary objective of this research is to enhance our understanding of the dynamic and complex patterns of suburban growth and to explore the spatial characteristics of land-use distribution during the last few decades of metropolitan expansion. Traditionally, studies of distribution of activities within metropolitan regions have been carried out...

Research findings are summarized regarding the relationship between site design and pedestrian travel in mixed-use, medium-density environ- ments, and recommendations are set forth for improving pedestrian facil- ities in suburban neighborhoods. A quasi-experimental method is used to study pedestrian volumes into 12 neighborhood commercial centers...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1998. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [310]-331). Photocopy. s

Whether high or low incidence of pedestrian travel in mixed-use, medium-density environments is due to site design characteristics, and specifically to presence of direct, continuous, and safe pedestrian systems, is examined. Twelve neighborhood centers or sites in the Puget Sound area of Washington were selected by matching gross residential densi...

The potential role of “intelligent transportation systems” (ITS) in influencing metropolitan form and household behavior is reviewed. First, a portrait is drawn of the broad economic, social, and political forces that are expected to govern the evolution of urban settlement and transportation. Next, three ITS technologies are evaluated. Traveler in...

The proliferation of advanced urban modeling techniques during the last two decades have been centered in large part on the application of cellular automata (CA) and agent-based systems (ABS). Advances in these fields, however, have failed to address one of the main challenges of these conceptualizations - their reliance on highly restrictive assum...

Thesis (Master of Community Planning)--University of Cincinnati, 1992. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-137). Includes abstract.