This thesis investigates factors which influence the physical form of the urban environment at the micro-scale. Three aspects of form are considered. These are configuration, separation, and consistency. A method of assessing the form of a property from a public place with respect to these aspects is outlined. The technique breaks each aspect into a scale of form types as a tool for measuring the formal characteristics of the environment. These form types are used to describe an urban environment. A comparison of this description with the physical attributes of the area identifies four factors which may have affected the patterns and distributions of the forms observed in the description. These are land use, land ownership patterns, time, and regulatory controls. Detailed studies of these factors in five particular areas reveals that relationships between each of the factors and the incidence of the various form types exist. Correspondences which suggest that the factor probably has an influence on the forms identified are evident in varying degrees depending on the factor considered.

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This study uses complexity theory to examine the space of the street. In a morpho-ecological city, process creates form just as form creates process. The process of movement is a critical form generator within the urban system. In this thesis, the urban system comprising streets/ car/pedestrian is examined. If this collection of urban modes of mobility is a complex system capable of selforganising behaviour, what effect does the ordering imposed by traffic engineering have on this system? I look at the driving body and the walking body as co-creating the city by their movement through urban space. I suggest that, through attention to the fragments of interactions enacted during these movements, we can, through design, allow for the emergence of selforganising behaviour. Urban shared streets, descendants of the ‘woonerf’, appear to function more efficiently than engineered streets, without the usual traffic ordering. The counterintuitive success of these streets implies a self-organising behaviour that is generated by the density of interaction between the inhabitants of the street. These designs potentially work as a change agent, a catalyst, operating within a complex system. This has the potential to move systems from one attractor state to another. A city built with these spaces becomes a city of enfilades; an open system of spaces that are adaptable to uses that fluctuate with time and avoid thickening the palimpsest of traffic engineering. I look at siting shared streets in Wellington, based on jaywalking, a transgressive use of the streetspace that prefigures a shared space, and changes to urban networks associated with such designs. Interaction within the city is a creative force with a structure. City design needs to consider and address this infrastructure and design for it. The infrastructure of interaction has been subsumed by the infrastructure of movement. Shared streets indicate there may not be a need for this – they can be integrated. The process of movement creates instances of interaction; therefore designing spaces of/for movement must be designed to enhance the infrastructure of interaction. The result of such interaction is not just somewhat better; it may be a phase change - catalytically better .