Growing Smart Cities

As the world’s population becomes increasingly urbanised the problems of building sustainable cities also grows. Using Susan Stepney’s response, “Mighty Oaks from Little Acorns Grow”, to a science fiction story by Adam Marek titled “Growing Skyscrapers”, this chapter looks at what a living city of the future might look like, and how that might solve some of the problems of the control and development of cities. There is a long history of the application of systems thinking, cybernetics, and complex systems and the growth and control of cities. However, many problems still remain in the deployment and applications of these frameworks and methodologies, and in the potential consequences of their use. However, perhaps many of these could be solved by the development of a living city

Zany beetroot: architecture, autopoiesis, and the spatial formations of late capital

Peer reviewed: True Using a pedagogic experiment at an architectural school in Tallinn as an empirical and conceptual starting point, this article explores the significance of autopoiesis in contemporary urban design. We suggest that organic processes—in this case the use of vegetable peels as a novel substrate—have been widely deployed in architectural discourse as a form of biomimicry. At a theoretical level these conceptual moves mark part of a wider set of dialogues between the arts and the sciences that rest on a form of degraded or even “phantom” modernism. The article draws on various insights, including the recent work of Fredric Jameson and Sianne Ngai, to explore the changing relationship between aesthetic categories and critical theory in the urban arena. We argue that aesthetic motifs derived from nature, including various forms of organicist architecture, are being effectively recycled under the aegis of late capital. European Research Counci