This online book addresses the needs of professional urbanists who wish to understand how and why cities are successful or not, depending on their form, components, and substructure. It marks the beginning of a revolution in urban science. My approach has been to discover those principles underlying what we observe as phenomena, and to justify them on theoretical grounds. Although a scientific approach to urbanism is being undertaken by several groups of scholars, the discipline itself is mainly driven by unproven (and demonstrably false) principles that are taken on faith. This is a call to arms for those concerned with the built environment -- mankind needs to shape and repair its cities following some proven logic, rather than dogma masquerading as rationality. A living city differs radically from what we have built in the twentieth century.
Each chapter consists of one of my papers in Architecture and Urbanism, each a publication in its own right. As I am receiving numerous requests right now for a textbook of urbanism based on my research, I am very happy to offer the community an on-line printable collection of these articles, organized into an overall whole. Until I can find the time to incorporate other material into a monograph, the present collection will serve as a coherent presentation of my ideas. The need is ever so pressing, as no such treatment of the underlying principles of urban form and structure exists at the present time. Architects and urbanists whom I know and have learned from offer insights into how cities develop; I can strongly recommend Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order, and Léon Krier's Architecture: Choice or Fate.

  Introduction
  Chapter 1. Theory of the Urban Web
  Chapter 2. Urban Space and its Information Field
  Chapter 3. A Universal Rule for the Distribution of Sizes
  Chapter 4. Pavements as Embodiments of Meaning for a Fractal Mind
  Chapter 5. The Structure of Pattern Languages
  Chapter 6. Complexity and Urban Coherence
  Chapter 7. Fractals in the New Architecture
  Chapter 8. Remarks on a City's Composition
  Chapter 9. The End of the Modern World
  Chapter 10. Pattern Language and Interactive Design
  Chapter 11. Connecting the Fractal City
  Chapter 12. An Information Architecture Approach to Understanding Cities