AUTHOR: Nik Karalis, CEO, Woods Bagot
It is clear that for the future social and environmental viability for the inhabitants of cities, we will need to better understand the latent capacity for cities to grow within their existing infrastructure and footprint. It is also very clear that in the past, the efforts of planners and designers to reproduce the qualities of existing successful older urban fabric, have largely failed. We believe that this is due to these designers grossly simplifying the spatial and social dynamics of the urban fabric of new cities.
And in turn it is also clear that this is due to the absence of an adequate analysis framework to accurately account for and model this complexity. We all recognize “success” in a good city when we see it, but we haven’t been able to provide a suitably objective framework for its replication in any of its syntactic, morphological, economic or behavioral systems and design for the critical relationships between these.
There is now a way of commencing to answer this challenge by bringing the vast data resources now available together within the digital architecture of computational modelling.
We will present the status of our ongoing research program documenting the case studies of the behavior of the Tech Sector market phenomenon (as a sample “community”) in New York and London.
This work illustrates the potential for modelling any other definable “community”, mapping the intrinsic parametric relationship between space, behavior and socio-economic dynamics.
A fascinating future lies before us. The practice of urban design is going to be transformed fundamentally. This is what we mean by resilience, social and environmental viability defined by Urban Systems.