Connectivity and morphology

His critical recognition was that the population as a whole is the foremost consideration in urban planning, and therefore he focused his urban research on population density and its distribution — in a more demographic perspective. In X-ray the City! he indicated that misconceptions drawn from an insufficiently critical appraisal of statistical data had been extensively applied. The 'urban decay' issue was demonstrated as clear example of the misuse of facts (as ‘data’).

The emergence of the Internet and ‘big data’ affords architects and urban designers with the opportunity to access and analyse information with a complexity at an order of speed and depth such that those of the 1940s could not have conceived as being possible. Nevertheless, the unprecedented data-bombardment that we face today may confuse us or worse and, in particular cases, even make things more difficult to read. Web applications such as Mapbox, CartoDB and MapZen are readily accessible to people even with limited mapping experience, who can directly download urban meta-data and create visual analyses based on it. It therefore becomes especially important today for digital tool users to understand not only how to manipulate software but also grasp the intrinsic meaning of data flow; how to interpret data and how data can be used to inform today with a profunditythat Fooks was able to presume instinctively, whereas there is an accessibility today that borders on the democratic.