Masterplanning the Adaptive City

capacity to learn and to embed knowledge in decision-making processes. One 
of the more compelling innovations in computer science is the U.S. military’s
development of artificial intelligence for war machinery, which “creates new ways
for machines to ‘learn’ from experience, to plan problem-solving at different levels
of complexity.”
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The cybernetician Gordon Pask argues that conventional architecture is
limited to descriptive taxonomy, or prescriptive documentation, but “does little to
predict or explain.”
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Pask believed that “urban development can be modelled as 
a self-organizing system and in these terms it is possible to predict the extent to
which the growth of a city will be chaotic or ordered by differentiation.”
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Collective
behaviors of organisms create coherent, self-organized formal arrays of dynamic
interaction among the individual organisms. Flocks of birds, schools of fish,
colonies of ants, and so on all seem to be controlled through a distributed form of
intelligence, acting without a central leader.
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Juval Portugali claims cities are “to a large extent unpredictable and
therefore unplannable,” yet adds a caveat, stating that “the perception of cities as
chaotic and unpredictable entities is becoming more and more a basic sensation
of life” in this century.
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He sketches out how self-organization is a “conceptual
and mathematical theory about complexity” which can teach us how to “control
the complexity of our chaotic self-organized cities, how to predict their behaviours,
plan their future and thus tame them.”
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Self-organizing systems “raise questions of control” and of the position of
the designer.
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Self-organization is a compelling understanding of the city, for the
ways in which dynamic systems arise from rule-based component parts, and
simplicity gives rise to a coherent but complex whole. In establishing new
paradigms and practices with respect to the self-organization which occurs within
all cities, De Landa argues that “what matters is not the planned results of
decision making, but the unintended collective consequences of human
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THE DEATH OF MASTERPLANNING

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decisions,” arguing that the “best illustration of a social institution that emerges
spontaneously from the interaction of many human decision makers is that of a
pre-capitalist market, a collective entity arising from the decentralized interaction
of many buyers and sellers.”
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It is necessary to clarify that an interpretation of emergent behavior as a lack
of design intention “is a misunderstanding of fundamental principles of ecology.”
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It is possible to draw parallels between the self-organizational principles of
development and evolution in biological forms of life and the emergence of
cities—both are produced by “material processes that are ultimately reducible,
however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics.”
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Although the
word “emergence” is used in everyday language as a synonym for “appearance,”
in the sciences it refers to “the production of forms and their behaviour, by systems
that have an irreducible complexity.”
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As used in this sense, “emergence” refers to
“the properties of a system that cannot be deduced from its components,
properties ‘emerge’ that are more than the sum of their parts.”
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Emergence
explains how order is created, but not specifically why a particular form of
organization is created. 
The principles of evolution in biological systems outline the ways in which
order relates to a set of functional criteria, and through successive generations 
the order is adjusted toward increasingly optimal configurations. According to
Marshall, “When we say that evolution has happened, we mean that there was a
transformation, via successive intermediates, or descent with modification.”
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Marshall’s thesis indicates that evolution is a “generic effect” of a series of 
non-biological processes of adaptation and transformation, allowing readings of
the city to be dissociated from a notion of it as a living organism. In this light, he
argues for the idea of design as an evolutionary process, for an approach to design
which assumes evolution is linked to “adaptive emergence,” as the process of
change reflecting incremental local decisions and actions. The term “evolution” is
thus used loosely to denote dynamic transformative processes. Questions arise 
as to whether it can be used to refer to non-biological processes of variation and
selection through descent. If “evolution” can be described as any process which
aims for long-term transformations resulting from selection and adaptation, to
what extent can it be applied to a discussion about urbanism? 
The development of complex systems from simple origins is often presented
as “a series of major transitions or transformations that are triggered when a
critical threshold is passed.”
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Self-organization also refers to “the emergence 
and development of forms over time—in some cases it is simply used as the
description of the sudden appearance of order.”
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Steve Johnson sketches out
three phases of inquiry into self-organization: in the first phase, researchers
struggled to comprehend the forces which lead to self-organization; in the second,
self-organization became a cross-disciplinary focus of study, gaining momentum
in research centers such as the Santa Fe Institute; in a third and contemporary
phase, Johnson claims “we stopped analysing emergence and started creating it.
We began building self-organizing systems into our software applications, our
video games, our art, our music.”
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At the scale of architecture, or a single building, “there is a new sensitivity to
the ‘life’ of buildings, and an understanding that performance and behaviour can
be inputs to the process of design rather than functions applied later to a form.”
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TOM VEREBES

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