mit/thesis/dual/usp candidate
using serendipity and experiential analysis to measure urban quality
potential structure
Thesis: Urban Quality in the Experiential City
Claim: The most livable cities balance efficiency (structured access) and serendipity (unplanned, meaningful experiences), especially in a post-COVID context where work decentralizes and everyday experience becomes central to urban value.
Gap
Most urban design frameworks (e.g. 15-minute city) optimize for efficiency but neglect serendipity.
There is no operationalized, data-driven way to measure or map serendipity at scale.
The emerging “experiential city” demands new metrics that account for pleasure, discovery, ambiguity, and play.
Hypothesis
Urban well-being emerges from a dynamic balance between efficiency and serendipity.
Cities over-optimized for proximity and predictability lose the social and creative value that comes from structured unpredictability.
Theoretical Foundations
Jon Kleinberg: navigable systems require a balance of local links (efficiency) and long-range randomness (serendipity).
Jane Jacobs, William Whyte: complexity and spontaneity as civic virtues.
Urban morphologies (CNU, space syntax): form constrains or enables experiential sequences.
Post-COVID shift: city as platform for culture, leisure, learning—not just work.
Place typologies: importance of 1.5 and 2.5 places as zones of porousness and hybrid use.
Method Overview
Define and operationalize two axes of urban quality:
Efficiency: proximity to amenities, transit coverage, walkability (using OSM, GTFS, Walk Score, etc.)
Serendipity: POI diversity, semantic adjacency, ambiguous use, temporal variance, street network entropy
Use publicly available or purchasable datasets:
OpenStreetMap
SafeGraph / Veraset / Cuebiq
Yelp, Foursquare, Google Places
GTFS feeds and transit APIs
Facebook or Eventbrite event data
Map and score neighborhoods on both axes
Identify spatial typologies and performance quadrants:
High-efficiency / high-serendipity
High-efficiency / low-serendipity
Low-efficiency / high-serendipity
Low-low zones
Analyze across scales: block, neighborhood, district
Interpret role of 1.5 / 2.5 places in enabling rich experience
Expected Contributions
A reproducible framework to measure and compare urban serendipity
A new way to conceptualize and design for quality in the experiential city
Grounded recommendations for planners to support both accessibility and spontaneous urban joy
related
urban serendipity