In April 2013 I was very glad to take a part in the Smartgeometry 2013 Constructing for uncertainty.
Within 4 days work in 'Volatile territories' cluster we were focused on the development of speculative urban design instrument, capable to simulate the dynamics of evolution of urban tissue. Using "Recursive Design" software which allows setting up the multiplicity of complex interconnections within agents of the system and Processing algorithm which were simulating the emerging potentials of the territory, we made an attempt to model future urban morphology of London’s Brick lane.
"Recursive Design" software initially has been developed as design instrument in the scale of the building, upscaling its capacity in order to cope with urban strategy, required rethinking of the instrument, taking into consideration such factors as phasing, scale, strength and evolution of interrelations of actors of the territory.
We were focused on definition of the bottom up drivers of the territory by means of introducing subjective data to the model of urban growth and streaming location based information from the Foursquare API. Venues in Brick lane that had a high amount of demand are given a higher attraction factor then venues with lower demand. The build up of commercial program agents along Brick Lane thus fluctuates in response to real-time urban data. Connection of top down design intentions with Forthsqure Social Network allows us to build feedback engine linking dynamics of popularity of the territory with the decisions on urban strategy.
Another challenge of the project was to define the instruments of indirect control of bottom up processes forming the materiality of urban tissue. By means of testing of urban strategies of "new industrialisation" of the territory for contextual relationships, we developed gallery of networking models which manifests clustering, hierarchical, or horizontal character of interrelations . This was then used to develop new programs and spatial typology based on the projected gentrification of Brick lane, modeled in Recursive Design as a particle system. New fabric constitutes the programmatic basis of the subsequent simulations.
In our simulation we identified desirable public spaces, defined them as a attractive locations in the Volatile Territories program, and set the resulting pathways carved out by select agents as public circulation. In this way the agent-based system subtracted the program areas to define public void space based on agent intensity and path.
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