Calculating Cities

Abstract

Places exercise imagination and exert power. Measuring and representing places was privileged and highly guarded in the antiquity. The rise of quantification and global mercantile traffic that ushered in the Renaissance in Europe fostered development of increasingly unambiguous and detailed representations of space and urban environments. The rise of increasingly sophisticated and precise measures at various points in time and place underpinned descriptive representations (i.e. records of how things are), concretized meanings (i.e. set forth ideals for how things could be in future), and provided instrumental prescriptions (i.e. codes to be conformed to). This chapter provides a very brief overview of selected developments in urban modeling to highlight changing roles of representations and purposes they served with a view to contextualise many lineages that inform the very notion of virtual urban modelling.