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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
About 3.9 billion people presently live in cities, 1 billion of them in slums, and the worlds urban population is likely to double over the next century. Achieving sustained socioeconomic development from rapid worldwide urbanization relies critically on creating cities without slums. Slums are characterized by informal land settlement that results in most places of residence or work lacking an address and not being accessible by a vehicle. As a consequence, the provision of urban services, such as sanitation, health assistance or fire protection, is all but impossible creating conditions that cripple everyday life, exacerbate environmental stresses and magnify humanitarian crises. Here we show that the central problem of slums – lack of spatial accesses – can always be resolved by finding solutions to a sequence of constrained optimization problems that rely on specific changes to the topology of a neighborhood. Such solutions provide universal access to all places within a given neighborhood at minimal disruption and can be subsequently elaborated to provide greater ease of movement at additional cost. These spatial transformations are analogous to the historic evolution of the urban fabric of neighborhoods and show how the built space for any city is characterized by the same underlying topological structures.
Host: Sara Del Valle