Searching for Urban Complexity in Contemporary Digital Practice
Eisenman Architects, City of Cultture of Galicia 1999-2011
The legacy of the machine age of the twentieth century, as manifested in the built environment of the 'modern' urban cityscape, is one of complexity but also a homogenous character. The dominant economic framework of capitalism, alongside the application of a century of both Fordism and Taylorism combined with the modernist planning agendas, has imbued the urban centres of the planet with a distinct 'sameness' that reflects the somewhat linear productive mechanisms utilised in the age of mass-production, mass-consumerism and globalism. (Verebes, 2015a) As architects, the self-imposed separation of the physical production of architecture in opposition to design generation has been regimented up until recent times by the linear assembly-line ideology of modernity and the somewhat representation-bound nature of the two-dimensional 'drawing' (May 2015).
However, following the aftermath of the 'digital turn' (Carpo, 2013) in Architecture in the early 1990s and the continuing uptake of digital design methods and workflows in applied practice primarily due to market forces, there are new opportunities to explore architecture's role as a discipline in the development of 21st-century urbanism. This essay will seek to explore how digital design methods that make use of relational complexity and parametric feedback, such as those prevalent in current generation Building Information Modelling (BIM) software, may be utilised alongside complex network theory soon to enable the 'mass-customisation' of our cities through City Information Modelling (CIM) and help envisage and enact a more 'biological' 21st-century urban complexity in our cities.
The speed at which the world is urbanising in the 21st century is unprecedented in the history of mankind, and of critical concern amongst theorists and citizens alike is the inherent homogeneity of the built environment such rapid urbanisation creates in the long shadow of modernism. Verebes (2015a) expands upon this specifically in relation to developing nations such as China, where hyper-urbanism is approached in a tabula rasa matter with entire cities appearing through traumatic erasure of place as urban areas continue to encroach formerly rural regions in a phenomenon known locally as 'tan da bing' or 'making a big pancake'. Verebes positions this against Archizoom's prescient No-Stop City project of 1968, which describes a city devoid of character, without character and without compromise. Despite the current paradigm shifts of the information age, the planning and development of urban areas still need to be approached from the mechanistic and overly simplified market-driven nature of 20th-century urban development. In contrast to this, Verebes repeats in an interview with Shanghai specialist material fabricator E-grow's Jerry Ku that the increasingly prevalent utilisation of computation and digital fabrication technologies is a profoundly significant influence on the built fabric of future cities despite the current state of ever-increasing homogeneity (Verebes, 2015).
Archizoom, No-Stop City 1968
As Michael Weinstock writes in 'The Evolutionary Dynamics of Sentience in Cities', cities are the most complex artefacts ever produced by humans. This inherent complexity is not purely due to the densification of any particular area but rather due to the constant flow of information and energy throughout their systems locked in cycles of growth and decay, which are not tied to linear processes or easily observed relationships. (Valverde & Solé, 2013) Working across scales, factors related to the spatial and material rely on 'power scaling, self-similarity across a range of scales, and 'far-from-equilibrium' dynamics' '(Weinstock, 2013) to affect the dynamic patterns of urbanity. Weinstock, building on the back of his earlier work in Architectural Emergence (Weinstock, 2010), goes on to link this to the mathematical, biological metabolism of organisms, an idea in itself that has fascinated the Avant-Garde of architecture over the 20th century for example in the work of the Japanese Metabolists (Koolhaas & Obrist, 2011).
The difficulty of trying to analyse and not only replicate the inherent complexity of a system such as a city but also seek to generate new urban form cannot be understated and is perhaps why the field of City Information Modelling (CIM) is still in a fledgeling state despite the core ideas of 'Smart Cities' making its way into the public lexicon as well as the agendas of statutory planners and architects alike in recent years (Townsend, 2013). The infancy of CIM can also be placed at the feet of the digital tools produced to serve the architecture and built environment professions, which could be too 'static' for such a task. As Mark Burry states:
The paradox is that for decades, architectural software has striven to emulate the analogue working practice that architects developed over the past two centuries and, as a group, architects have not been especially motivated to assist lifting themselves out of the analogue design methods rut.
Mark Burry, Scripting Cultures: Architectural design and programming, 2011:17
A possible solution to this 'static' architectural workflow that inhibits the creation of accurate City Information Modelling relies on the utilisation of complex data sets generated both over time and live through urban embedded sensors, alongside algorithmic and machine-based learning methods to better model and forecast not only the growth and decay of cities but also to better understand the variables that affect the system across scales depended on information and energy inputs. In this way, it may be possible to generate new urban forms that address the need for more variation in cities and the problems they generate. (Boyer, 2015)
One of the core issues of the potential success or failure of City Information Modelling in reshaping the future urban fabric of our cities is the notion of the hierarchy of decision. Those such as Weinstock who follow those cities might best replicate the biological processes of nature not through controlled biomimicry but merely by the fact of their own organisational complexity argue for a city devoid of overarching authors where the system itself dictates its own evolution. The notion of a 'stigmergy' model within City Information Modelling that forecasts the evolution of cities relates to the application of network theory, which describes the autonomous nature of agents within the model (either real in the case of analysis or virtual in the case of future modelling or a combination of both) generating urban forms and solutions. (Valverde & Solé, 2013) This is at odds with the dominant architectural mentality of authored works. As Valverde and Solé (2013) state:
Like other man-made artefacts, buildings are the result of purposeful design; However, biological structures are not, as their lack of top-down planning requires alternative construction based on bottom-up rules.
Valverde and Solé. Networks and the City, 2013:114
This does not discount that strong rule-based (or parametric) behaviour may exist in organic agents' creation of biological structures. Instead, it points to constant and incremental organic feedback as the generator for generating complex organic forms. To replicate within artificial simulated models of cities ability for an incremental generation, it may be necessary to completely reconsider how we define cities in our models. The performative shift in architecture to that of conditional factors which determine such generative output rather than more traditional static form aestheticism may hold the key to this new way of considering City Information Modelling when applied to the search for evolving and novel urban forms rather than replicating and expanding on the failures of contemporary urban planning and the machine age. (Leach, 2015) This in itself could be considered in terms of what Delanda (2005) describes as the difference between material properties 'extensive space' and immaterial properties 'intensive space', where the interactions between agents within the model in terms of non-tangible characteristics (pressure, speed, density) are given as much focus as the tangible (form, materiality, scale).
Such models look built up from the 'bottom-up' layering complexity through the transfer, replication and mutation of information within the system rather than hegemonies of top-down rule-based overarching generation of complexity. Leach (2015) compares the way better interpretation and application information systems have already redefined the role of the designer concerning Building Information Modelling (BIM) in terms of the 'logistics of construction' or how the application of datasets through the utilisation of Geographic Information System (GIS) has redefined the role of planners. For Leach (2015), it is not a question of traditional design versus computational design but the application of computational information that will 'revolutionise' design and redefine the architect's role.
This expanded role of the architect in relation to computational information alters the discipline's interaction with their projects. Rather than the traditional methods of production that architecture is accustomed to, the role of 'designer' is replaced with that of 'interpreter', with the architect serving as a conduit for the many sources of information that act upon one another to create urban changes. This sees their traditional early project involvement expand to what could be considered perpetual post-occupation involvement. Physical and virtual manifestations live on beyond a traditional architectural project's 'traditional' lifecycle. (Garber, 2017) Concerning City Information Modelling, architects can plug their datasets and models into larger (preferably public) meta-models of the city commons to help facilitate positive outcomes for the city system and its urban complexity.
At odds with this more 'organic' generation of City Information Modelling, which relies on the democratic, bottom-up generation of urban complexity, is the notion of Schumacher's (2016) 'Parametric Urbanism', which depends upon the rule-based generation of urban morphologies that in Schumacher's (2016) words:
The rule-based generation of urban morphologies based on scripts that differentiate, modulate and correlate the different subsystems like fabric welds, path systems and open spaces deliver a complex, variegated urban order that is as information-rich and navigable as natural landscape formations.
Patrik Schumacher, Parametric Urbanism, 2016:117
Zaha Hadid Architects, C Tower, Rising in The Waterfront High-Rise Center of Shenzhen City, 2021
A core difference in Schumacher's work is the reliance on what he coins 'Hegemonic Parametricism', unlike other methods of generation of complex urban form to solve the problem of homogeneity or 'sameness' in future cities that are strengthened by a democratic intensification and sharing of information across actors in a 'stigmergy' model. To generate complexity, Schumacher's hegemonic centric model aligns itself with prevailing neoliberal market forces to counter what he sees as 'Garbage Spill Urbanisation', which could be applied to City Information Modelling and is radical in its own right but, at its core, is a sense of immutable control mechanisms in the guise of parametric or algorithmic constraint that decide what is acceptable or not acceptable in the context of the city. Whether this more controlled form of urban morphology generation has the longevity of those models that seek to give autonomy to its agents is questionable despite Schumacher's claims of an 'Autopoiesis of Architecture' (Schumacher, 2011). This fundamentally goes against cybernetics 'law of requisite variety', which requires any controlled system to have a greater variety than those under control to remain stable. (Fournier, 2015)
Regardless of the varying viewpoints regarding the application of City Information Modelling as a digital tool for the generation of urban morphologies in the future, there is both great potential and significant risk for the architecture profession and the breadth of urban complexity of cities in the future. (Fournier, 2015) Only recently has the idea of modelling and simulating incredibly complex systems in the form of urban morphologies been well outside the reach of the slow-to-innovate architectural community.
Architecture is now on the precipice of having the digital tools and knowledge of being able to model systems to the complexity requisite of the future city, and critical to these systems of simulation is the ability to introduce a variety that enables the system as a whole to remain poised on what Kaufmann calls 'the edge of chaos' (Kauffman, 1995) which in turn allows for both the systems continual persistence but also the ability to survive potentially catastrophic events. The potential applications of the new field of City Information Modelling and their wide-scale ramifications for architectural practice in the 21st-century urban environs searching for variety over homogeneity have never been more apparent.
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