From Jacobs' seminal insights to recent works in urban economics, one of the most emphasized - and least closely examined - notions in urban studies is the role of architectural and urban form in the "vitality" of our cities, a set of social and microeconomic qualities. However, can buildings really affect their urban surroundings? Would distinct architectural morphologies have distinct effects over local socioeconomic processes? This paper looks into built forms as a condition for co-presence and social activity in urban space. It advances an approach able to identify precisely the existence and extension of effects of architectural morphology on local socioeconomic processes, with potential large-scale effects, in a way to disentangle them from the effects of urban structures such as the street network. We apply the approach in an empirical study in twenty-four areas in Rio de Janeiro. Finally, the paper establishes the grounds for a probabilistic theory of the social effects of architecture, an approach proposed to help answering more precisely a question that puzzles the spatial imagination: how does architecture matter to urban vitality?
Social effects; Architectural morphology; Typology; Urban vitality