Deciphering Urban Morphogenesis: A Morphospace Approach

Cities emerged independently across different world regions and historical periods, raising fundamental questions: How did the first urban settlements develop? What social and spatial conditions enabled their emergence? Are these processes universal or context-dependent? Moreover, what distinguishes cities from other human settlements? This paper investigates the drivers of city creation through a hybrid approach that integrates urban theory with the biological concept of morphospace (the space of all possible configurations) and archaeological evidence. It examines the transition from sedentary hunter-gatherer communities to urban societies, identifying key forces such as defence, social hierarchy formation, population scale, and work specialization, culminating in increasingly complex divisions of labour as a central driver of urbanization. Morphogenesis is conceptualised as a trajectory across morphospace, shaped by structure-seeking selection processes that balance density, permeability, and information as critical dimensions. The study highlights the non-ergodic nature of urban morphogenesis, where configurations are progressively selected based on their fitness to support the diversifying interactions between mutually dependent agents. The morphospace framework effectively distinguishes between theoretical spatial configurations, non-urban and proto-urban settlements, and contemporary cities. This analysis supports the proposition that cities emerge and evolve as solutions balancing density, permeability, and informational organization, enabling them to support increasingly complex societal functions.