Emergent Urbanism

26/08/2010

Philip K Dick - A Day in the Afterlife from travis6cs on Vimeo.

Philip K Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, nine of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923.

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Agenda

The term ‘emergence’ has become ubiquitous within architectural and urban design due to the increasing integration of design and computation. We now understand urbanism as a complex system, existing in many composite parts which operate simultaneously to achieve ‘successful’ formal and behavioural interrelationships; subsequently we demand new methods for conceiving and controlling urban space.

We are concerned with brand-driven urban developments, privatised corporate initiatives, total surveillance technologies and viral ‘policy driven’ urban strategies that pose profound and disturbing trajectories for our contemporary urban environment. We seek ‘bottom-up’ design systems, performance-based spatial ecologies and ‘emergent’ urban morphologies as a means of re-generating failing urban environments.

We explore computational design methodologies including parametric modeling, generative design and interactive design systems through studio workshops, questioning how such technologies and novel methodologies can successfully impact the design and operation of urban systems - environmentally, economically and socially. We examine complex dynamic systems and latent networks that underpin urban structures; focusing on the spatial and performative implications of ‘encoded’ design systems and calling into question the use of collaborative, democratic and open source control as a means of shaping urban experience.

The design studio is an experimental research laboratory for the analysis, modelling and prototyping of emergent, performative structures.