Abstract:
Contemporary urban environments are presently at the forefront of a potentially revolutionary paradigm shift; the reversion backward to walkable urban centres. The turn of the 20th Century marked the beginning of our reliance on the automobile as the primary mode of transportation. Fuelled by the exponentially deteriorating living conditions in major urban centres during the industrial revolution, and the resultant escalation of urban to rural drift culminates in the sprawling metropolis that has come to epitomise many modern cities. As a result, the car is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. Our cities and urban environments have been designed around the automobile, often at the expense of pedestrians or other forms of active transportation. Research concerning the rise of many modern health concerns, shows a correlation between inactivity and diseases like obesity, diabetes, colorectal cancers, hypertension and heart disease, while increased activity appears to have a positive effect on children suffering from attention deficit disorders as well as sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease. Therefore by implementing and prioritising walkable environments within urban and suburban environments, the potential for preventative treatment of many of these physical and cognitive health concerns exists, as opposed to the reactionary treatment methods which come with a high cost to national economies. Converting driveable cities into walkable environments requires the analysis and understanding of a wide range of complex, causal, multi-layered systems. Architectural and urban space has always been conceived hierarchically. The contemporary conception of space however is far more nuanced. Urban space is essentially a collection of relationships or interactions between inhabitants and their environment and these relationships operate across a range of systems, similar to the ecological interactions between organisms and their habitats. Many of these territorial entity to entity and entity to environment interactions are also complex and multi-layered, and as a result fall outside what mathematician Jacques Hadamard would define as ‘well-posed problems’. Hadamard’s definition of a well posed problem is fairly simple: 1. A solution exists. 2. The solution is unique. 3. The behaviour of the solution changes continuously within the initial conditions. Hadamard, like many mathematicians agree that traditional problem solving methods such as first principle modelling and statistical modelling praxis are inadequate when dealing with issues of complexity, uncertainty and a fluctuating context. As a result of the ever increasing complexity within our urban environments, caused by the transition from ‘driveable cities’ towards a more liveable environment, and the inadequacies of traditional problem solving methods as a tool to facilitate this shift, the following research will explore the potential of Computational Intelligence systems to analyse and optimise the systems and factors associated with walkable environments within an urban context, focusing primarily on the role these systems could potential have within the design process and what this approach to design means for the future of architecture.