Quite right Alan, it was a sloppy way of expressing my point. I was
thinking of the fact that each axial line only touches the physical fabric
at two points and thus has a very limited relationship to the geometry
of the buildings. The geometry of covisibility is tangential to the
geometry of the buildings, quite literally. The axial map does not look
much like a building plan because it is in fact a diagram of co-visibility,
not a map at all.
This is not to suggest that architecture does not matter socially, but
that the relationship found by Space Syntax is a very specific
abstraction of built form, which is why you can reduce the complexities
of a city to the clarity of a graph. But it is not a graph of built form – it is
a graph of co-visibility (as constrained by built form). It is an important
distinction.
regards, Tom
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