Moving Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Cities - CityLab
▻http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/11/moving-toward-an-evolutionary-theory-of-cities/381839
The study described in these articles goes something like this: Using data mostly from OpenStreetMap, French theoretical physicists Marc Barthelemy and Rémi Louf measured the size and shape of land blocks in 131 global cities, meaning the sections of land chunked out by the surrounding street network.
Then they charted the occurrence of those shapes and sizes within all of those cities. Some cities had lots of uniformly shaped blocks. Others had more tiny, curvy blocks. They compared the different distributions of blocks, and lumped them together into four different “groups”: