A Quanti-Qualitative Approach to Alexander’s Harmony-Seeking Computations

Harmony-seeking computations, as proposed by Christopher Alexander, offer a way to tackle complexity. Smart, free agents, facing uncertainty, look for order in context powered fifteen attractors, or patterns. would then be relatively guided path across those idealized patterns, towards wholeness and beauty. However, individuals acting change the city must combine circumstances imposed external inner urban forces with personal interpretations of one more patterns that could all time. Moreover, each action is intertwined others, an unpredictable outcome. This article explores possibility bringing together outer ingenious individuals’ actions hypothesizing: (a) structural attribute defined spatial centrality; (b) beauty meaning attached places, evolving either from historic accumulation individual assignment; (c) every meaningful approximation between them; (d) disaggregated description organism, based on multi-layered graphs, which possible record both morphological territorial characteristics (form, transport, infrastructure) semantic attributes (land uses, public image, remote associations, symbolic relationships); (e) set differentiation measures, mostly centrality, potentially able depict (by measuring effect component others) robustness derived any selected components). A multilayer graph-based approach algorithms provides framework description, analysis, performance evaluation component, well whole system, through quantitative qualitative representation.