Patterns of the Expanding City: An Algorithmic Interpretation of Otto Wagner’s Work

Central Europe witnessed an urban boom at the beginning of the 20th century. By that time, the leading state of the area was Austria-Hungary, with Vienna as its capital. Before the First World War, even larger expansion of the cities was predictable. Otto Wagner, a leading architect of the empire and an expert in urban planning and architectural theory, published his vision about the future of the evolution of cities in 1911. In this book, he formulates clear rules about how a city should sustainably expand in a controlled manner. In this article, these rules of the inherited patterns are systematised and turned into recursive algorithms to simulate the urban growth controlled by them and the resulting patterns. The algorithms are tested on 1911 Vienna and, as comparison, on 2021 Miskolc, a medium-sized city in Hungary with different geographic surroundings. In the article, the resulting patterns are presented in 2D and 3D.