Emergent urban strategies: rules of city reconfiguration

Abstract

A city as a complex phenomenon and an entirety of events, its communication flows (information and data telecommunication networks and their access points), energy, goods and materials distribution and movement of users themselves and their spatial interactions with the environment nowadays no doubt has been creating new conditions and demands on the city's spatial organization, infrastructure, its growth and its thickening. Urban space today is an aggregate of complex dynamic processes which contribute to its configuration and mutually influence each other. Thus, urban environment shows emergent qualities and contains multi-layer scenarios of its own development and reconfiguration in time. This stratification is impossible to be comprehended by a linear model of a single predicted concept (top-down strategy). Architects and urban planners may, however, cover these specifics by a prediction of space development with a multi-layer result that would take into account the requirements of users at the lower level (bottom-up strategy). The aim of the research is therefore a spatial simulation of environment development, which would simulate its complexity, growth and reconfiguration. This spatial simulation would serve as a decision-making tool for architects when applying various scenarios of environment development and thereby it would create a basis for spatial planning decisions in subsequent stages of zoning proceedings. The final result of this research shall be a visualized algorithm in a model of spatial environment reconfiguration that could be serviceable also in the internet environment. This result implemented in a software tool can also serve as a creative platform for designing urban structure based on simple rules of a lower level that would, however, consequently simulate the complex urban entirety