Speculative proposal in model form demonstrating integration of long term and short-term components of Living City. Shown in Living City exhibition.
The model which illustrates this project was constructed to demonstrate the three elements of the living city. The lower section, which is regular and organized, represents the basic, long term, infrastructures of the urban zone. Above this are the shorter term amenities which respond to the changing conditions of the city. When demonstrated, the model was dynamic to replicate the activities which constantly change as the life of the citizens interact with the fabric.
The city is a living organism – pulsating – expanding and contracting, dividing and multiplying.
The complex functioning of the city is integrated by its natural computer mechanism. This mechanism is at once digital and biological, producing rational and random actions, reactions and counter-reactions. The computer programme is a conglomeration of logical reasoning, intuitive assumption, personal preference, chance, sentiment, and bloody-mindedness which is assimilated and interpreted. The solutions follow automatically.
The trigger to the computer programme is social man. He creates the City Scene at conscious and subconscious reaction levels by his own complexity. He is identified with the natural computer and is an integral part of its data processing operation – but they are NOT ONE – each has an individual nature which functions independently. At its logical (or illogical?) limit this division of nature causes the DEATH of both. The city is ascendant when they are in unison, in decay when they divide.
The feed-in for city synthesis has three stages:
1. Primary information about population: birth rate, death rate, age, unit size and habits. Also, city site data: location, topography, geological and geographical conditions, the inter-relation with other urban complexes.
The overall network is formed from this information and then absorbs it, processes it, and throws out the subsequent stages.
2. Secondary information: health, housing, marriages, fertility rate, crime rate, journey to work, wages and salaries. Rates of development and obsolescence, density, communications, and land values. At this stage the network is modified and amplified, and the substance of the city created.
3. Trends, conditioning of the city and population caused by the problems and solutions resulting from stages 1 and 2. Movement within the complex; personal action, shopping, entertainment (personal and mass), recreation, market survey, bus timetables, etc.
The last stage is a continuing feed-back in which every facet of city life is relevant to the whole, values are relative to the observer. The absolute ceases to exist after stage 1. The expansion and contraction of centres and suburbs, the dead ends, the exciting and the mundane – all are now an integral part of the city scene, enveloped in a net of inter-relationships ultimately controlled by the Natural Computer.
Dennis Crompton
