The form of beady ring is an invariant found among all ‘urban hamlets’ of the Vaucluse region of Provence, France. Each was organised around an irregular ring street with an array of wide and narrow spaces, which seemed like beads on string. Early space syntax research observed that it had arisen not by conscious design but by some accumulative process of small-scale decisions taken over time.
Beady ring
Sources
Hillier, B. & Hanson, J. (1984), The Social Logic of Space, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. pp.10, 59-61