Our direct environment affects our lives directly. Christopher Alexander saw that we are able to feel or see if an object or structure is natural through the characteristics of them. He also saw that we generally feel better near these living, natural structures as it more closely resembles ourselves. Our bodies and our surroundings are made up of far more smaller than large things. When structures follow this pattern they are considered to be more natural, and when they move away from this pattern they are considered to be less natural and thus often boring or ugly. This scaling law is used to analyse the complex networks within cities. By analysing underlying structures instead of direct geometry it becomes possible to identify how living they are.This study applies these theories to analyse urban morphology within different cities. By identifying living structure within cities comparisons can be made between different types of cities. Specifically artificial and historical cities are analysed as they are counterparts in livingness. Following the identification of the living structure within these different types of cities an assessment can be made on what kind of an effect this has on our wellbeing based on Alexander’s theory. To see how living structure evolves over time a second analysis is performed which compares a city with its own evolution through time.Firstly natural cities and natural streets are identified in a bottom up approach based on the underlying structures of OpenStreetMap road data. Thereafter historical cities are compared with artificial cities because historical cities generally have living structure while artificial cities lack this. Then the developments of a historic city are identified and compared temporally. This research finds that current usage of concrete, steel and glass combined with very fast development speeds is detrimental to living structure within cities currently. Newer city developments should be performed in symbiosis with older city structures and the structure of the development should inhibit scaling as well as the buildings themselves. It is not sufficient to look only at geometry when managing cities, the importance of the fractal geometry, which is initially invisible must not be underestimated.

This thesis aims to gain an insight to the properties that make a living structure and examine these properties and the concept of living structure in traditional Kastamonu Houses in the light of Christopher Alexander&amp / #8217 / s theories of wholeness and centers. Especially in the last century, building activity has become a significant field with the developments in the construction techniques and technology. In this way, human life is being shaped also, beside the earth. The traditional housing fabric, which is the heritage of years of experience and the reflection of the lifestyle of a particular society, is being neglected. In any part of the world, the number of the buildings, resembling each other so much, increases / and most of the time, they lack the values that support the quality of life. Within the scope of this thesis, first of all, Alexander&amp / #8217 / s definition of order, theories of wholeness and centers, concept of living structure are studied. Then, traditional Kastamonu houses are analyzed, both visually and spatially / and properties that make a living structure are examined. The relation between living structure and expression of self and the importance of belonging to own time and place are put forward. Then, how different centers are united together by the help of these features is seen. This study helps to understand, how to create more sensitive environments to live by studying and understanding traditional housing concepts before losing them totally. Moreover, it emphasizes the values of traditional Kastamonu houses, which support the quality of life.

Geographic space is not neutral or lifeless, but an intricate living structure composed of numerous small features and a few large ones across all scales. The living structure is crucial for comprehending how geographic space shapes human activities. With the emerging geospatial big data, researchers now have unprecedented opportunities to study the relationship between geographic space and human behaviour at a finer spatial resolution. This thesis leverages multisource geospatial big data, including Twitter check-in locations, street networks from OpenStreetMap, building footprints, and night-time light images, to explore the fundamental mechanisms of human activities that underlie geographic space. To overcome the limitations of conventional analytics in this era of big data, we propose the topological representation and living structure based on Christopher Alexander's conception of space. We utilize scaling and topological analyses to reveal the underlying living structure of geographic space with various big datasets. Our results demonstrate that tweet locations or human activities at different scales can be accurately predicted by the underlying living structure of street nodes. We also capture and characterize human activities using big data and find that building footprints and tweets show similar scaling patterns in terms of sizes of their spatial clusters. We also propose an improved spatial clustering method to increase the processing speed of geospatial big data. Finally, we adopt topological representation to identify urban centres by the fusion of multi-source geospatial big data. The living structure, together with its topological representation can help us better understand human activities patterns in the geographic space at both city and country levels.