Path and Place: A Study of Urban Geometry and Retail Activity in Cambridge and Somerville, MA.

2 Review and synthesis of literature A field of configurational studies of the built environment developed among architects, planners, and transportation researchers in the 1960s and 70s. The work is characterized by attempts to understand the societal forces that shape settlement patterns and to develop analytic methods that outline meaningful properties of environmental geometry (See March and Steadman 1971; Martin and March 1972; Anderson 1978; Hillier and Hanson 1984; Habraken and Teicher 1998; Porta, Crucitti et al. 2005). This work has also investigated effects that environmental geometry might have on the performance and quality of cities (Weeks 1960; Proshansky, Ittelson et al. 1970; Tabor 1976; Lynch 1984; Ellingham and Fawcett 2006) by analyzing the relationship between social behavior and spatial configuration using both quantitative and qualitative methods, which range from mathematical geometry and graph theory to ethnographic surveys and comparative analysis. Scholars of this field have a deep understanding of environmental geometry and are primarily interested in understanding or measuring the social significance of architectural and urban form.

Around the same time, land use location theory, a different field, but equally concerned with urban space, emerged in economics. The scholars of location theory focus on the spatial distribution of land uses, firm location choices, and land values (LĂśsch 1954; Isard 1956; Alonso 1964; Mills 1967; DiPasquale and Wheaton 1996). They seek to understand how various individuals and groups with different interests and requirements compete for locations and produce the observed urban land use pattern. Whereas configurational studies are predominantly concerned with the geometry of the environment, urban economics centers on the efficiencies that result from a spatial interaction between land uses. Configuration of the environment is of interest to urban economics insofar as it constitutes the spatial stage where market competition occurs, imposing transportation and time costs for interaction. Details of spatial configuration have typically been of minor interest in the these studies: “The city is viewed as if it were located on a featureless plain, on which all land is of equal quality, ready for use without further improvements, and freely bought and soldâ€?

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