Franz-Josef Ulm and a colleague were taking a break from a tough problem one afternoon when they spotted an aerial photograph of a city and had an epiphany. Instantly, they made a connection between the patterns of houses and streets and the underlying molecular structure of cement. That serendipitous observation has since led to research that is tying together the seemingly disparate disciplines of physics and urban planning. “Ultimately, I believe there’s potential for this to become a new field of study,” says Ulm, the George Macomber Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and co-director with Senior Research Scientist Roland Pellenq of the International Joint Unit (UMI) between MIT and CNRS, France’s National Center for Scientific Research. “It also could lead to new tools for architects and city planners.” Urban physics, as Ulm calls the new work, views cities as analogous to complex materials. Over the last 50 years, physicists have developed ever-better statistical tools to learn more about materials at the molecular scale. And Ulm himself is a world leader in using them to understand the structure of cement, with the ultimate goal of creating better versions of the material. Ulm and colleagues are now modifying
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