Sustainable urban design or planning is not a LEGO-like assembly of prefabricated elements, but an embryo-like growth with persistent differentiation and adaptation towards a coherent whole. The coherent whole has a striking character – called living structure – that consists of far more small substructures than large ones. To detect the living structure, natural streets or axial lines have been previously adopted to be topologically represent an urban environment as a coherent whole. This paper develops a new approach to detecting the underlying living structure of urban environments. The approach takes an urban environment as a whole and recursively decomposes it into meaningful subwholes at different levels of hierarchy (or scale) ranging from the largest to the smallest. We compared the new approach to natural street and axial line approaches and demonstrated, through four case studies, that the new approach is better and more powerful. Based on the study, we further discuss how the new approach can be used not only for understanding but also – probably more importanly – for effectively designing or planning an urban environment to be living or more living.

可持续的城市设计或规划不是类似于乐高的预制组件，而是像胚胎一样的生长，具有持续的差异性和对整体的适应性。连贯的整体具有惊人的特征-称为生活结构-由小的子结构比大的子结构组成。为了检测居住结构，先前已采用自然街道或轴线来拓扑地表示城市环境作为一个连贯的整体。本文提出了一种新的方法来检测城市环境的基本生活结构。该方法将整个城市环境作为一个整体，然后将其递归分解为从最大到最小的不同层次（或规模）的有意义的子整体。我们将新方法与自然街道和轴线方法进行了比较，并通过四个案例研究证明了新方法更好，更强大。基于这项研究，我们将进一步讨论如何将新方法不仅用于理解，而且可能（更重要的是）有效地设计或规划要居住或居住的城市环境。