Computational urbanism: confronting the paradox of endurance & obsolescence

Session 7 - Computation: 3 Views: 15H00postprintThe Virtue of the Virtual Conference (VoV), Montreal, Canada, 18-20 May 2011

Educating the smart city:Schooling smart citizens through computational urbanism

Coupled with the ‘smart city’, the idea of the ‘smart school’ is emerging in imaginings of the future of education. Various commercial, governmental and civil society organizations now envisage education as a highly coded, software-mediated and data-driven social institution. Such spaces are to be governed through computational processes written in computer code and tracked through big data. In an original analysis of developments from commercial, governmental and civil society sectors, the article examines two interrelated dimensions of an emerging smart schools imaginary: (1) the constant flows of digital data that smart schools depend on and the mobilization of analytics that enable student data to be used to anticipate and shape their behaviours; and (2) the ways that young people are educated to become ‘computational operatives’ who must ‘learn to code’ in order to become ‘smart citizens’ in the governance of the smart city. These developments constitute an emerging educational space fabricated from intersecting standards, technologies, discourses and social actors, all infused with the aspirations of technical experts to govern the city at a distance through both monitoring young people as ‘data objects’ and schooling them as active ‘computational citizens’ with the responsibility to compute the future of the city

Experiments in associative urbanism

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Associative practices in the management of Complexity

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The interactive urban model: Histories and legacies related to prototyping the twenty-first century

This article surveys the theoretical and historical legacies of mass production and standardization, and the cultural issues associated with globalization, in the most prolific era ever of urbanization. Situated at the intersection of scholarly writing on history, current conditions, and a speculative future, this article focuses on themes related to design research on computation, fabrication, and the city. Given the ongoing transition of industrial paradigm from Modernism's dependency upon Fordist mass production, the context of today's emerging methods of non-standard production is explored, with an emphasis on design repercussions at the urban scale. Theorizations of the cultures surrounding, within, and against technology, this article will confront the difficult issues of the expression of identity in late capitalism, through resistance of regionalism and other neo-traditionalist positions in an increasingly globalized world. These issues lead to a proposition of the notion of an interactive urban model, as the basis of embedding intelligence into city design, and the potential of producing highly customized materialization through contemporary production technologies. The hypotheses of these issues are explicated by three case study design projects, carried out by the author's practice, OCEAN CN Consultancy Network, based in Hong Kong. The three projects demonstrate the author's design research experimentation with design and production technologies at various scales of practice in architecture, urbanism, urban and landscape design, and masterplanning, applying computation toward the objective of achieving, modulated spatial attributes

Hong Kong: Appearing dense but growing smarter

Of the many substantive arguments for existing cities to be densified, and for entirely new cities to be built with sufficient density, the belief in optimised infrastructure and the responsibility to minimise energy use and the consumption of resources reigns seemingly paramount. The assumption that dense urbanity reduces of the environmental impact of cities, has become widely accepted. Interestingly, the nascent discourses of the Smart City also lapse into preaching the mantras of efficiency and sustainability, along with comfort, safety and security. Although these intentions are indeed undismissable, this chapter eschews a definition of sustainability on these terms, but rather, takes the view of high density urbanism as a beneficial model for a multitude of design ambitions. The narrative of Hong Kong's density is told through four short stories , each narrating a paradigm of the city: Parametric; adaptive; customised; and smart. In this chapter, Hong Kong will be read and articulated as having had intelligence to harness, regulate and manage its complexity; to have plasticity to anticipate an adaptive, not prescriptive future; and to generate the DNA to yield a specific and distinctive identity to its urbanism. In the political context in which 'greenwashing' pervades much of the discourse on sustainability, the paradigms of Parametric Urbanism, the Adaptive City and the Customised City, and their associations, are explored through the case of Hong Kong. The notion of urban smartness as attenuated efficiency and augmented cybernetic control are challenged. In this light, the repercussions of information and communication technologies (ICT) have immense potential to augment the intelligence of cities, yet this chapter queries the potential for design, fabrication and production technologies to embed urban intelligence into the physicality of cities. The fundamental questions to be asked is how smart is Hong Kong's brand of density and compactness

UrbanISMS: paradigmatic practices and their multifarious platforms

This PhD investigates the insights and the blind spots of a model of creative practice characterised by complex reciprocities between design propositions, and editorial and curatorial projects. The diverse voices of this composite practice assert themselves as platforms from which to conceive and debate a particular form of Paradigmatic Practice in Urbanism through varied means of representation, media and formats. Embracing complexity, indeterminacy, change, incompleteness and imperfection, a research problematic has been sustained on the limitations of urban masterplanning. Understanding the agency towards the city as an object of study within a problematised world, the disciplinary capacity for projective imagination raises dilemmas of the playful pursuit of innovation amidst the risk of positivism. A series of related ontologies have been proposed for comprehending and conceiving the contemporary city, articulated as Parametric Urbanism, The Adaptive City, and Mass-Customised Cities, alongside parallels to the cacophonous attributes of the urban experience of Hong Kong. A contribution to knowledge is the proposition of a design instrument, the interactive, intelligent urban model, and its theoretical and practical consequences. Engaging the discourses and methods of what is prosaically called the Smart City, the context for this research is the acceleration of industrial and technological change, during an era of an unprecedented pace and extent of urbanisation in Asia

Parametric matter

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