An Overview of Fractal Geometry Applied to Urban Planning
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since computing advances in the last 30 years have allowed automated calculation of fractal dimensions, fractals have been established as ubiquitous signatures of urban form and socioeconomic function. Yet, applications of fractal concepts in urban planning have lagged the evolution of technical analysis methods. Through a narrative literature review around a series of “big questions” and automated bibliometric analysis, we offer a primer on fractal applications in urban planning, targeted to urban scholars and participatory planners. We find that developing evidence demonstrates linkages between urban history, planning context, and urban form and between “ideal” fractal dimension values and urban aesthetics. However, we identify gaps in the literature around findings that directly link planning regulations to fractal patterns, from both positive and normative lenses. We also find an increasing trend of most literature on fractals in planning being published outside of planning. We hypothesize that this trend results from communication gaps between technical analysts and applied planners, and hope that our overview will help to bridge that gap.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it