Abstract

When Lewis Mum ford described Jane Jacobs' work as home remedies to fight urban cancer (Miller, 1986) he incarnated not only the learned professor's scholarly opinion, but also the mood of an entire generation of urban planners used to pursuit urban knowledge in the study of the previously built city regardless its proper or improper condition in contemporary situations. This archeological-like approach to urbanism has evolved, via Space Syntax, to turn into a highly sophisticated yet successful methodological corpus for the study of the city and the way we inhabit it. We refer to the urban thinking lineage that seeks urban knowledge in the city or previously built urban space as Lynch's lineage. Having said that, we claim there is another urban thinking lineage that, despite being equally differentiable, has remained in a methodological underdevelopment condition. This lineage does not start its pursuit of urban knowledge in the study of an urban space perception or built city but in the study of that spatial manifestation clearly different represented by human beings and the way they interact among each other Thus, this lineage's purpose of study is the interaction of human beings in urban space. We refer to this urban thinking lineage as Jacobs' lineage. This paper introduces methodological rudiments innovative to their development and consolidation. Its central argument is consistent with essential Hillier's criticism to the atavistic historical tendency of urbanism to prescribe dogmatically It is, simultaneously, consistent with Carlo Patti's criticism to Hillier's work regarding the faith leap in Space Sytax's predictions based on the axial map.