Abstract:
Christopher Alexander once posed the question: what is missing from modern, ‘artificial’ cities such as Levittown, Chandigarh, Los Angeles and various British New Towns that have made their more long-lived counterparts what he calls ‘natural’ cities, the likes of Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto and Manhattan, so much more liveable? (Alexander A City Is Not a Tree 47) The city is “an unstable system, a living system which is in a state of continual decomposition, but also continuously reorganizes and rearranges itself, which expands and shrinks.” (Mulder 73) What is crucial are the ways in which we have allowed this growth and decay through planning strategies and development in architecture. In A city is not a tree Alexander proposes that we have been less successful in our planning of towns and cities because of our inherent nature to break down complex structures into hierarchical parts that form a tree-like structure. The natural city he posits is made up of many layers of networks, or what he describes as a ‘semi lattice’; a structure that far from being a hierarchical tree, instead has multiple interdependencies and overlapping associations and cannot be understood in the ways that we have traditionally handled complexity. Furthermore a modern representation of this complex network is none other than the social networking abundantly present on the internet, it is an apt comparison to the structure of our cities, both being manifestation of our social interactions and the needs that come with it. Each individual is connected to various others, and may belong to several groups of friends or communities that may also overlap. This structure where each individual may be connected to any other through several degrees of interstitial parties, an idea we may know from Duncan Watt’s Six Degrees of Separation (Watts), is the representation of our cities that we actually need to see. The question then is to find ways of representing this complex layered network without overwhelming the viewer, and also allowing him/her to find the important details that they are looking for. The project is built on this basis of visualising the unseen yet all important structures that underlay the physical structures of our cities; and in fact make them work, by focusing on mapping the amenities that we utilise every day in order to meet both our social and physical needs. Alexander himself understood that the vision of the natural city that he desired was not something that could be sufficiently realised with the tools he had at hand at the time, thus he refrained from making plans or diagrams to actualise his research. However with the ubiquity of powerful modern computer technology this project embarks on this task of representation as a framework for building and planning architecture and the city for growth that is more organic, dynamic and robust. What implication does this networking and the Internet of Things (IoT) have on architecture and the built environment? How might this virtual connectivity manifest itself and make a meaningful contribution to place? Through the analysis of social networks and patterns, we speculate much can be learned from exploring the patterns of connection within the built environment. We begin by investigating the patterns of ‘place’ and ask how might we map these connectivities? Then investigate how we might apply a social networking methodology to networked constituents of the built environment. Finally we discuss the implication this has for design and architecture.