Swarm Urbanism and the emergence of patterns in the city

Coming across the notions of 'Emergence' and 'Swarm Intelligence' reading an article in AD issue,I tried to think of the city as an aggregation of elements that self-organise together to generate a mutually resilient organisation, so as an organization of intelligent agents, a dynamic, adaptive system based on interactions with neighbours, informational feedback loops and pattern recognition. Like any emergent system, the city is a pattern in time [1]
Taking this approach further we could appropriate the notion of the 'rhizome' from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as an urban planning strategy. In their work, A Thousand Plateaus, they describe the city as a space of flows, as an amalgam of spaces of vectorial flows that adjust to differing inputs and impulses like some self-regulating system. In the concept of the rhizome they significantly point out the idea of forming a relationship with the other using the example of the wasp and orchid which enter in a mutual reciprocity such that the wasp has adapted to the orchid no less than the orchid has adapted to the wasp. Extending this central concept of Deleuze and Guattari we could understand the city as forming a rhizome with its inhabitants. This opens up an intriguing way of understanding the relationship between humans as ‘agents’ within this system and the fabric of the city as a form of exoskeleton to human operations. We need to distinguish between the city as a site of material composition – as anamalgam of traces of construction – and the city as the site of spatial
practices. The former can be read in terms of an accretion of material deposits, and the latter can be read in terms of choreographies of agents whose freedom of movement is constrained by these material deposits. It is as though the city is ‘formed’ by registering the impulses of human occupation. But so, too, the city constrains the possibilities of human movement through its very
physicality. There is, therefore, in Deleuzian terms, a form of reciprocal presupposition between city and occupants. The city modifies its occupants, no less than the occupants modify the city. Over time the fabric of the city evolves through interaction with its inhabitants. [2] The task of designing the city could be to set a scenario about the potential choreographies that are formed by the participants of public space in a way that the material (and immaterial) fabric evolves in response to impulses of human habitation. The interesting challenge for design is the digital modelling of this intelligent behaviour of the city's agents.

source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z79S63ZYva4

source:http://www.kokkugia.com/filter/research/swarm-urbanism


In actual dance choreography such intelligent systems with autonomous choreographic agents are already being implemented. Following the tradition of William Forsythe (see older post 'Choreographing the city'), Wayne McGregor in collaboration with arts researcher Scott deLahunta developed the Choreographic Language Agent, an intelligent software agent, generating unique solutions to choreographic problems to augment the dance maker's own creative decision-making processes. The six-month collaborative interdisciplinary project aimed at drawing information from the field of cognitive psychology to enhance understanding of the choreographic object.
The most recent iteration of this process has been the development of Becoming, an interactive digital object to support dance making in the studio. Reimagined less as an object or tool and more as a body, Becoming was developed in conjunction with Marc Downie (OpenEnded Group) and Nick Rothwell (Cassiel).Becoming sought to bridge the digital-physical divide between computer program and human dancer, eliciting a kinaesthetic relationship from the dancers as an artificially intelligent "eleventh dancer" that provokes new movement creation in the studio. [3]

source:http://openendedgroup.com/artworks/cla.html



Such a practice combined with the notion of emergence and urban intelligent systems can become more specific and specialized about the patterns of movement that emerge in the city and the space they produce can become the center of urban design.

References

[1]'Swarm Urbanism', Architectural Design Digital Cities, Vol.70 No 4 July/August 2009, Wiley

[2]'Swarm Urbanism', Architectural Design Digital Cities, Vol.70 No 4 July/August 2009, Wiley

[3]http://waynemcgregor.com/research/choreographic-language-agent

Visibility

Visibility

UIA - Celebration of Cities International Competition 2003

National Award. Lisbon, Portugal
a|Um with Marta Caldeira

A|Um Studio’s UIA Celebration of Cities competition entry suggested that one could map a city to
identify places of delay or acceleration of urban activity over time and, through this map, locate
‘acupuncture’ points in the city to open up flows and networks, converting zones that might be
dangerous, arrested or frozen into areas of interaction.('Agent intellects: pattern as a form of thought', Architectural Design, September/October 2006, Wiley-Academy)

Cities should be nothing more or less than the great range of density of human desires, which are able to provoke constant creativity in others.
A healthy city - an ideal agglomeration - is a condition born and developed through both the concrete and suggested inventions of its inhabitants. All the participating agents in a city are immediate beneficiaries of its evolution and answer to time. In the same way, each contribution is unique and indispensable in the process of imagining ongoing change.

(source:http://www.aumstudio.org/)

Cities have several temporal ranges, areas of history that appear and disappear, dissipating in the structures which materialize as temporary or permanent wills. One of the most pertinent capacities in an urban nucleus resides in some of these non-permanent structures: that of the self-modification of meaning, that of the intelligent material.

The accommodation of activities made by the city does not summarize the city in itself: neither does it do justice to its complex body nor to its intelligent answer to time.

A syndrome of disease in a city is evidenced - taking different forms - when the main role of individual agent inside a collectivity is not allowed to its citizens. Examples may be found in all the conditions that emphasize only unilateral or dual understanding of the surrounding environment. The concept of marginality, for instance, is foreign, yet nevertheless accepted in an urban mode of thought which is inclusive and by nature is engaged with the reconceptualization of city edges.

This discussion of limits evokes not only what is exterior to the self but also the integral internal elements of the city body.

It becomes necessary to create new situations, devices, machines or organisms that advance our ability to render visible this individuality within the collective: a key ingredient of a fruitful enrichment in both cultural and human terms.

[PROCESS]
A grid made of different nodal points is placed over the city. New points are discovered in the middle areas between the points of great visibility - of one temporal understanding of the city – and the opposite temporal points; those individuals who reveal a profound distance between the sense of locality, and the insufficient recognition of their individuality by the urban nucleus.

(source:http://www.aumstudio.org/)

The grid proposes a temporal complement to the city. Where the city extends its temporal zone of activity twofold, the grid adds flexibility to that concept, establishing itself as an anchor or an inversion point. The grid points function in syncopation with their understanding of the rhythm of the city, thus establishing themselves as catalysts for different forms of temporality and spatial regeneration.

Nodes that exist in a marginal situation - in less safe areas, in less visible hours- establish their high visibility and their individual temporality, reinforcing relationships of connection with other temporalities, dissipating their initial condition as marginal concepts.

(source:http://www.aumstudio.org/)

The nodes are spaces of night life - present in the urban dream - they are anchoring points for passage of individuals in a limit situation, when the capacity of self-expression is lost inside the urban context. The visibility given by the proposed structures announces a situation of play, of stage, of rehearsal, of temporary exercise of wills and desires, while simultaneously being devoted to the service of showing and caring for that same self-expression of others. The structures go from uncharacterised points to bright spaces of invention: exhibition galleries of diverse themes, experimentation places, meeting points. These nodes will start to bind themselves to their intelligent behavior, that is, the way in which they construct themselves on a local level and then invent new articulations of their situation in this network.

Let day be night and night be day.

[Taken from the official site: http://www.aumstudio.org/]

Collective intelligence platforms as a means of reconfiguring public space

According to Levy 'Collective intelligence' is a social project of varied intelligence, distributed, unceasingly developed and coordinated in real-time(1994). This definition is built upon four axioms: It is distributed: in the sense that nobody knows everything,everyone knows something; knowledge is in a community. It is unceasingly developed: Levy insists on the concept of human qualities; each member of a community is carrying a richness which would ensure a place and a contribution in collective intelligence. It is coordinated in real-time: the reference here is to cyberspace, to the semantic web in particular, a tool supporting collective intelligence and allowing communication between media on a large scale. Finally, it leads to an effective mobilisation of competences as collective intelligence is not a theoretical or philosophical concept , but it enables effective social organisation based on competences, knowledge and wisdom ( Caillard 2007). [1]
Collective intelligence is not purely a cognitive object. Intelligence must be understood here in its etymological sense of joining together (interlegere), as uniting not only ideas but people,

constructing society.[2]

With the rapid growth of telecommunications and information technologies, a number of open source software communities and alternative political organizations have appeared, enabling us to imagine an emergence of new forms of social, economic and political power wherein a common space is constructed by linking an infinetely diverse set of individual interests through shared projects or desires. Examples are political organizations fostered by networking technologies like moveon,org, but also user-generated organisations like the file-sharing communities of myspace and flickr or the online encyclopedia network Wikipedia. In these communities, participants operate from a variety of discrete locations spanning massive geographical distances via intensively reflexive feedback loops of communication and exchange. The participants are at once geographically and culturally apart from one another while also a part of a common space of endeavour. These communities not only rely on communication but also produce communicability, that is to say the generation of new information as a product, and platforms of exchange.[3]

Therefore, we can claim that those platforms of online exchanging knowledge, thoughts and ideas have become the immaterial 'forums' and common spaces of the 21st century capable of reshaping the material and physical attributes of the real urban public spaces.

source:https://neighborland.com/

Platforms like Neighborland, promote human centered uban design and give the power back to the people to take decentralised decisions and organise their community through this online communication space. Neighborland acts as a link for collaboration between organisations, residents, city agencies and universities for the organisation of local projects. People can suggest projects or submit ideas for events and other initiatives that have to do with the local community and get feedback and advice on how to find resources to implement them in  the public space. People can also submit ideas on how to improve existing problematic issues concerning their proximal urban environment. Therefore an online, virtual and immaterial 'public space' becomes the lever triggering a change in the physical surroundings of public space and promotes a new way of taking decisions and a new form of public power on urban space not only controlled by institutional  forces but appearing at the scale of the community of a city. Social networks can contribute to motivate and bring together members of the community so that they can reclaim the commons in new and innovative ways and organise new forms of political actions.
Another good example is Occupy Wall Sreet (http://occupywallst.org/) whose call of protest was initiated by the Canadian anti-consumerist pro-environment group/magazine Adbusters. In their site (https://www.adbusters.org/occupywallstreet/) users make suggestions about events or where they are going to perform and write their opinons freely, redefining the use of public space.

source: https://www.adbusters.org/occupywallstreet/

Another platform complementing the work of urban designers and planners, could be Planning 2.0 which "incorporates online geographic information system (GIS) mapping and web technologies to support collaborative planning and ongoing public participation. This enhances government transparency and accountability by creating a societal infrastructure for human interaction. Planning 2.0 helps us cast our net as far as possible to capture as much public feedback as needed and foster public involvement. This entails retooling our communities with effective means of communication that go way beyond the traditional civic engagement venues to a more open and capable dialog and transparent participation." as Ahmed Abukhater, Global Industry Manager for Community Development at Esri explains in Next American City magazine on how to shift from “planning for people” to “planning with people” using new technologies and platforms. Planning 2.0  has three levels of implementation: 1. Informing impacted and interested stakeholders, including the public, by disseminating information and maps using the GeoWeb as a common platform. 2.Involving members of the public by getting their feedback and quickly registering their preferences regarding planning initiatives, from broad issues such as community visioning to specific project-based proposals and land-use changes. This is enabled by crowdsourcing, through which citizens act as sensors and a source of geographic information and intelligence. 3.Empowering the public to make informed decisions about new and existing developments. By using the web, cloud computing, and open data-sharing policies as a platform to deliver geoservices, people are able to make decisions regarding what should and should not happen in their communities. This provides a collaborative platform that empowers both decision makers and everyday citizens. [4]

source: http://www.urenio.org/2011/01/20/planning-2-0-a-collaborative-platform-for-actionable-intelligence/

References

[1] N.Komninos, Intelligent Cities and Globalisation of Innovation Networks, Routledge, 2008

[2] C.Hight, C.Perry, 'Collective Intelligence in Design', Architectural Design September/October 2006, Wiley-Academy

[3] C.Hight, C.Perry, 'Collective Intelligence in Design', Architectural Design September/October 2006, Wiley-Academy

[4]P.Tsarchopoulos, 'Planning 2.0: Collaborative Platform for Intelligence', http://www.urenio.org/2011/01/20/planning-2-0-a-collaborative-platform-for-actionable-intelligence/