A New Kind of Beauty Out of the Underlying Scaling of Geographic Space

Abstract

Geographic space demonstrates scaling or hierarchy, implying that there are far more small things than large ones. The scaling pattern of geographic space, if visualized properly (i.e., based on head/tail breaks), can evoke a sense of beauty. This is our central argument. This beauty is a new type of aesthetic at a deeper structural level, and differs in essence from an intuitive sense of harmony, perceived in terms of color, shape, texture, and ratio. This new kind of beauty was initially defined and discovered by Christopher Alexander, and promoted in his master work The Nature of Order. To paraphrase Mandelbrot, this is the beauty for the sake of science rather than for art's sake or for the sake of commerce. Throughout the paper, we attempt to argue and illustrate that the scaling of geographic space possesses this new kind of beauty, which has a positive impact on human well-being. The paper further draws upon the previous work of Nikos Salingaros and Richard Taylor on the beauty in architecture and arts to support our argument. Keywords: Aesthetics, heavy-tailed distributions, head/tail breaks, Zipf's law, and fractals