Space syntax is a set of techniques for analyzing urban settlements and buildings, as well of theories linking space and society, developed originally by Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson and colleagues at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College of London (UCL), since the 1970s. Their innovative approach was condensed in three landmark books:
The Social Logic of Space (Hillier and Hanson 1984),
Decoding Homes and Houses (Hanson 1998) and
Space is the machine (Hillier 2007).
Prolog is a Logic Programming language concerned with
Artificial Intelligence. Developed in the 1970’s by Alain Colmerauer, Philippe Roussel and Robert Kowalski to process natural languages, Prolog can deal easily with simple declarations of facts like the connection (or permeability) between
convex spaces or
axial lines. Readily available on-line through the
SWISH platform, in a fancy format inspired by Jupyter Notebooks,
SWI-Prolog may help to understand the recursive nature of urban processes, given some elementary generators, or to describe the structure (e.g. concentric) of some village. Mostly important, Prolog can compute space syntax measures such connectivity, control or integration in a comprehensive, transparent and attractive way, namely, for students and researchers on space syntax.
Thus, the aim of this website is to provide a unique access point and companion for all that want (or need) to calculate space syntax measures for the buildings and settlements that illustrate the above-mentioned books, by asking about facts and rules stored on-line at
SWISH. Examples of queries (?-) are provided for each building or settlement, including a multi-condition query that can compute, with a single command, the metrics of
connectivity (AC),
control (E), controllability (F),
total depth (TD),
mean depth (MD), integration (I = 1/MD),
relative asymmetry (RA),
real relative asymmetry (RRA) and Hillier and Hanson's
integration (IHH = 1/RRA) for some space.
Several learning resources are provided, including a set of programs for settlements located in the Lisbon Area (Portugal), as well as the paper 'Space Syntax with Prolog', presented in the
13th International Space Syntax Symposium, Bergen, Norway, June 20-24, 2022.