Space Syntax Research and Publications
Our expertise lies in developing robust methods of analysis for studying the built environment as a physical entity.
Our work combines the creation of software for spatial network analysis with quantifiable data on observed function and social network analysis so that metric properties of space can be analysed in relation to social and economic measures.
Space syntax methods can predict the effects of spatial interventions on aspects of social, organisational and economic performance in existing built environments and new urban areas.
Selected research projects
Navigate to Digital Mapping and Memory: Recollection and Mediation in Two Memory Maps of Anglo-Jewish History
Digital Mapping and Memory: Recollection and Mediation in Two Memory Maps of Anglo-Jewish History
Open-access article examining digital public history resources mapping everyday Jewish lives in London and Manchester, published in the European Journal of Jewish Studies.
10 February 2025
Navigate to Space Syntax: Selected Papers by Bill Hillier
Space Syntax: Selected Papers by Bill Hillier
Papers on Bill Hillier's transformational space syntax work spanning five decades, setting architecture on a firm scientific basis. Edited collection published by UCL Press.
30 April 2025
Navigate to Locating 'everyday' heritage: a space-syntactic archaeology of place
Locating 'everyday' heritage: a space-syntactic archaeology of place
A book chapter by Dr Sam Griffiths analysing six English suburban developments built on demolished country-house estates, exploring how historical spatial patterns persist in the urban fabric.
31 July 2024
Navigate to TWIN2EXPAND
TWIN2EXPAND
TWIN2EXPAND is a research project that aims to enhance research excellence in Evidence-Based Design and Planning (EBDP) at the University of Cyprus.
1 July 2024
Navigate to Writing the Materialities of the Past
Writing the Materialities of the Past
The book is informed by the space syntax tradition of research, exploring how contingencies of movement and encounter can construct the historical imagination.
9 January 2023
Navigate to Learning from Disabled Spatial Narratives
Learning from Disabled Spatial Narratives
This research extends space syntax methods by collaborating with disabled creatives to map their spatial experiences and identify what enables inclusive participation.
4 November 2025
Selected publications
Theme: Space and Society in Buildings
- Ferm, Jessica., Panayotopoulos-Tsiros, Dimitrios., & Griffiths, Sam (2021). Planning Urban Manufacturing, Industrial Building Typologies, and Built Environments: Lessons From Inner London. Urban Planning, 6(3), 350-367.
- Griffiths, Sam & Laura Vaughan (2020). 'Mapping spatial cultures: contributions of space syntax to research in the urban history of the nineteenth-century city.' Urban History 47.3: 488-511.
- Griffiths, Sam & Alexander Von Lünen (2016). Spatial cultures: Towards a new social morphology of cities past and present. doi:10.4324/9781315610269
- Shen, Y., & Karimi, K. (2018). Urban evolution as a spatio-functional interaction process: the case of central Shanghai. Journal of Urban Design. doi:10.1080/13574809.2017.1337496
- Ruiz-Apilánez, B., Karimi, K., García-Camacha, I., & Martín, R. (2017). 'Shared space streets: design, user perception and performance.' URBAN DESIGN International. doi:10.1057/s41289-016-0036-2
- Karimi, K. (2017). 'Space syntax: consolidation and transformation of an urban research field.' Journal of Urban Design, 23 (1), 1-4. doi:10.1080/13574809.2018.1403177
- Psarra, S. (2019). The Production Sites of Architecture. Routledge.
- Psarra, S. (2018). The Venice Variations. UCL Press. doi:10.14324/111.9781787352391
- Psarra, S. (2009). Architecture and narrative-the formation of space and cultural meaning. Routledge.
- Pachilova, R., & Sailer, K. (2020). 'Providing care quality by design: a new measure to assess hospital ward layouts'. The Journal of Architecture, 25 (2), 186-202. doi:10.1080/13602365.2020.1733802
- Sailer, K. (2018). 'Corridors, classrooms, classification – The impact of school layout on pedagogy and social behaviours.' In H. M. Tse, H. Daniels, A. Stables, S. Cox (Eds.), Designing buildings for the future of schooling: Contemporary visions for education (pp. 87-111). Routledge.
- Sailer, K., & McCulloh, I. (2012). 'Social networks and spatial configuration-How office layouts drive social interaction.' Social Networks, 34 (1), 47-58. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2011.05.005
- Vaughan, L. (2018). Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography. London: UCL Press.
- Vaughan, L., Ed. (2015). Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street. London: UCL Press. doi:10.14324/111.9781910634134
- Vaughan, L., Ed. (2007) 'The spatial syntax of urban segregation’ Progress in Planning 67 (3), 199-294
Theme: Architectural Computation, Machine Intelligence and Virtual Reality - Extended Reality in Architecture
- Hamed S. Alavi, Elizabeth F. Churchill, Mikael Wiberg, Denis Lalanne, Peter Dalsgaard, Ava Fatah gen Schieck, and Yvonne Rogers. (2019). 'Introduction to Human-Building Interaction (HBI): Interfacing HCI with Architecture and Urban Design.' ACM TOCHI Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 26, 2, Article 6 (2019), 10 pages. doi:10.1145/3309714
- Afonso, A., & Fatah gen. Schieck, A. (2019). 'Play in the smart city context: exploring interactional, bodily, social and spatial aspects of situated media interfaces.' Behaviour & Information Technology. doi:10.1080/0144929X.2019.1693630
- Fatah gen Schieck, A. (2009). 'Towards an integrated architectural media space: the urban screen as a socialising platform.' In S. McQuire, M. Martin, & S. Niederer (Eds.), Urban Screens Reader, 243-260. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
- Hanna, S. (2020). 'Data in Design Practice.' In R. Sheil, S. Hanna, M. Ramsgaard Thomsen, M. Tamke (Eds.), Design Transactions: Rethinking Information Modelling for a New Material Age. UCL Press.
- Hanna, S. (2020). 'Random walks in urban graphs: A minimal model of movement.' Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 0, 1-15. doi:10.1177/2399808320946766
- Zhuang, X., & Hanna, S. (2020). 'Space Frame Optimisation with Spectral Clustering.' International Journal of Machine Learning and Computing, 10 (4), 507-512. doi:10.18178/ijmlc.2020.10.4.965
- Charalambous, E., Hanna, S., & Penn, A. (2021). 'Aha! I know where I am: the contribution of visuospatial cues to reorientation in urban environments.' Spatial Cognition and Computation. doi:10.1080/13875868.2020.1865359
- Engin, Z., van Dijk, J., Lan, T., Longley, P. A., Treleaven, P., Batty, M., & Penn, A. (2019). 'Data-driven urban management: Mapping the landscape.' Journal of Urban Management. doi:10.1016/j.jum.2019.12.001
- Penn, A. R., Pinter-Wollman, N., Theraulaz, G., & Fiore, S. M. (2018). 'Interdisciplinary approaches for uncovering the impacts of architecture on collective behaviour.' Philosophical Transactions B: Biological Sciences. doi:10.1098/rstb.2017.0232
- Varoudis T., Penn A., (2020) 'Spectral Clustering and Integration: The inner dynamics of computational geometry and spatial morphology', Formal Methods in Architecture, Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation, Sara Eloy, David Leite Viana, Franklim Morais, Jorge Vieira Vaz (Eds), Springer.
- Varoudis T., Swenson A., Kirkton S. and Waters J., (2018) Exploring nest structures of acorn dwelling ants with X-ray microtomography and surface-based three-dimensional visibility graph analysis. 373. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
- Varoudis T., Penn A., (2015), ‘Visibility, Accessibility and Beyond: Next Generation Visibility Graph Analysis’, In K. Karimi, L. Vaughan, K. Sailer, G. Palaiologou, & T. Bolton (Eds.), The Proceedings of the 10th International Space Syntax Symposium. London, UK.
More research projects
- Contested Cities Revisited
- Delineating Historic Urban Landscapes
- Feed it Forward—Evidence-Based Design for Healthy and Habitable Workspaces
- Flexible Spaces and Changing Office Configurations
- Historic Urban Landscapes
- Mediated Spatial Narrative: AR in Whitechapel
- Paths of Resistant Pathogens
- Planning and Evaluation Methodologies for Mental Healthcare Buildings
- Refugee Cities: the Actual Spaces of Migration
- Screens in the Wild: Exploring the Potential of Networked Urban Screens for Communities and Culture
- Social Invisibility of Mental Health Facilities
- Spatialisation of the Immigration Flows
- Street Mobility and Network Accessibility
- TWIN2EXPAND
- UCL Depthmap: visual and spatial network analysis software
- Urban Dynamics Lab (The UK Regions Digital Research Facility)
- Visualizing inequality in community networks to enhance participatory planning
- Whose Right to the (Smart) City?
- ENFOLDing: Explaining, Modelling and Forecasting Global Dynamics
- Public Led Co-production of Heritage
- VisAge: Augmented Reality for Cultural Heritage
- Spatial Dynamics of the London Furniture Industry
- Way-finding Signals for Somers Town Cycle to School Network
- Knowledge Transfer Partnership: Big Data in the Office
- Augmented Urban Reality
- Three Dimensional Real-Time Computer Based Space Syntax Analysis
- Adaptable Suburbs: a study of the relationship between networks of human activity and the changing form of urban and suburban centres through time (Case study)
- Communication Patterns in Outpatient Clinics
- SocioBuildings
- City History and Multi-Scale Spatial Masterplanning
- The Body as Interface
- Green UCL: Performative Performance - Visualisation of heat loss data in buildings & big projection in real scale on the portico to create awareness of environmental issues.
- Architecture and Narrative: The Formation of Space and Cultural Meaning
- Detroit - The Fall of the Public Realm: The Street Network and its Social and Economic Dimensions from 1796 to the Present
- Mapping the East End 'Labyrinth'
- Rapid Simulation of Complex Form and Material
- Cityware: urban design and pervasive systems
- SCREAM: Media screens as a medium for communication
- Urban Buzz: Building Sustainable Communities
- E-ArchiDoct: Virtual Campus on post-master Studies in Architecture
- Arts & the Brain - Spectacles of the Mind
- Vivacity: Urban sustainability for the twenty-four hour city: development of design-making tools & resources
- Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres: A study of the relationship between morphology, sociability, economics and accessibility
- Space and exclusion: the relationship between physical segregation and economic marginalisation in the urban environment
- Designing for the 21st century: understanding and supporting group creativity in design
- Augmented Round Table for Architecture and Urban Planning
- EQUAL: Configuration and Design in Caring Environments
- The Housing and Support Needs of Younger People with Impaired Vision
- RACMIT: Minimising the impact of refurbishment on customer movement
- Housing Support and Care Needs of Older Visually Impaired People
- Ecomorphic design of environments
- EQUAL: Profiling the Housing Stock for Older People: From Domesticity to Caring
- RADICAL: Research agendas developed in creative arts labs
- Algorithmic definition of axial lines
- Asialink
- EVAS pedestrian modelling software
- Pedestrian modelling with spatially-aware agents
- VIRCON: The Virtual Construction Site
- An immersive VR 'cave' for manipulation, visualisation & auralisation for applications in design, medicine & computer science
- Panoramic photo to 3D model
- Stilton: 3d model from 2d sketch