  Cities are living organisms. They are out of equilibrium, open systems that
never stop developing and sometimes die. The local geography can be compared to
a shell constraining its development. In brief, a city's current layout is a
step in a running morphogenesis process. Thus cities display a huge diversity
of shapes and none of traditional models from random graphs, complex networks
theory or stochastic geometry takes into account geometrical, functional and
dynamical aspects of a city in the same framework. We present here a global
mathematical model dedicated to cities that permits describing, manipulating
and explaining cities' overall shape and layout of their street systems. This
street-based framework conciliates the topological and geometrical sides of the
problem. From the static analysis of several French towns (topology of first
and second order, anisotropy, streets scaling) we make the hypothesis that the
development of a city follows a logic of division / extension of space. We
propose a dynamical model that mimics this logic and which from simple general
rules and a few parameters succeeds in generating a large diversity of cities
and in reproducing the general features the static analysis has pointed out.
