Introduction

Digital Cities
By Neil Leach
Pavlos Fereos, Konstantinos Grigoriadis, Alexander Robles
Palacio and Irene Shamma, Urban Reef, Design Research Lab
(DRL), Architectural Association, London, 2009
Urban Reef addresses the problems of localised ground discontinuity
and programmatic and physical isolation within a larger urban area
by proposing a highly connected 3-D network of housing integrated
with commercial and recreational uses for the Hudson’s Yard area of
New York. Working to a brief for 3,000 housing units, the normative
isolated high-rise building type is replaced by a series of mid-rise
buildings that incline to minimise structural spans and interconnect
in order to maximise the area for housing development.
Lindsay Bresser, Claudia Dorner and Sergio Reyes Rodriguez, 123, Design Research Lab (DRL), Architectural Association, London, 2009
123 challenges the proliferation of haphazard urbanisation and incoherent architecture resulting from the accelerated globalisation of the Gulf region via
research on the algorithmic and geometric principles inherent in traditional Arabic patterns. This algorithmic approach constitutes the basis for a new scripted
morphology generating variation and difference across urban fields, clusters and architectural systems. The proposal aims to create diverse, interactive
metropolitan spaces that challenge the generic and disconnected qualities of the current Dubai model by offering flexibility within a repetitive coherence.

For some time now, digital technologies have had a
substantial impact on architectural design. From the use
of standard drafting packages to the more experimental
use of generative design tools, they have come to play a
major role in architectural production. But how might
these digital technologies help us to design cities? It
would seem that we are now entering a new threshold
condition, as the application of these tools has begun to
shift up a scale to the level of the urban. This issue tracks
these developments, and considers the real potential of
using these tools not only to design better cities for the
future, but also to understand and analyse our existing
cities, and navigate them in new ways.
Patrik Schumacher opens the issue with an
impassioned plea for ‘parametricism’ as a new style for
architecture and urbanism. Challenging Le Corbusier’s
celebration of the orthogonal, he argues instead in favour
of the parametric, citing the form-finding research of Frei
Otto and illustrating his argument with a series of large-scale urban
projects by Zaha Hadid Architects.
The theme of parametricism is continued in Tom Verebes’ article
on the research into urban design undertaken at the Design
Research Laboratory (DRL) at the Architectural Association in
London. Verebes offers an overview of a series of large-scale urban
projects that pursue the design agenda of ‘parametric urbanism’.
The work of Hernan Diaz Alonso and François Roche has often
been compared, and here the two offer their own idiosyncratic and
personal visions of the city of the future, drawing upon a sense of
the science-fictional that characterised much of the early
exploration into the potential of digital design. Hernan Diaz Alonso’s
vision is articulated through a visionary movie about the future of
Los Angeles. Chlorofilia presents a utopian/dystopian vision of a
post-apocalyptic LA that has adjusted to the flooding of the city and
developed a self-sustaining environment, where cells have become
the new bricks and can reform and recombine based on intelligence
feedback loops. Roche’s vision is equally provocative: ‘I’ve heard

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 The world of philosophy, it would seem, can still offer incisive
insights into the increasingly technological landscape of today.
about …’ is a habitable organism – a biostructure – that
develops its own adaptive behaviour based on growth
scripts, open algorithms and impulses of human
occupation. It is built by a construction engine – the Viab
– that secretes the landscape through which it moves.
The question then arises as to how these digital tools
can be used at a larger scale to generate and model cities.
Michael Batty considers the possibility of ‘breeding’ cities
using fractals, cellular automata and so on. But Manuel
DeLanda is more cautious in his approach. For him, it is a
question of not looking at form itself, but at the decision-
making processes that lead to the generation of form.
Only then will we be in a position to simulate convincingly
the growth of actual cities.
The next two articles pursue the theme of generating
urban designs through digital techniques, and draw on
the relevance of Gilles Deleuze’s thinking to this field. In
my own article on ‘Swarm Urbanism’ I go on to explore
the potential of ‘swarm intelligence’ in urban design, and
look at how we can use Deleuze’s concept of the ‘rhizome’
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to better understand the relationships between users and the
physical fabric of the city. Peter Trummer then looks at the potential
of using associative design principles to model cities in a
morphogenetic fashion, articulating his argument through the
Deleuzian term, the ‘machinic phylum’. The world of philosophy, it
would seem, can still offer incisive insights into the increasingly
technological landscape of today.
The theme of generating designs is taken further in the section on
digital towers, which explores the potential of new digital tools to
design architecture at the level of the individual building. The
featured towers have been designed by a range of students and
practising architects. None has been constructed, but together they
offer us an overview of a new approach towards designing large-scale
urban buildings harnessing increasingly popular digital techniques.
Such digital tools, though, may also be used to understand and
analyse the operations of cities. One of the leading pioneers in using
digital tools to model cities and understand the way that they operate
has been Space Syntax Ltd. Alain Chiaradia outlines the principles
behind the logic of Space Syntax, illustrating them with a study of
Tower Hamlets in London.
Praneet Verma, Yevgeniya Pozigun, Rochana Chaugule and Ujjal Roy, SineCity,
Design Research Lab (DRL), Architectural Association, London, 2009
This proposal for the newly developing emirate of Ras Al-Khaimah is formed on the
basis of a critique of Dubai. The project aims at developing a series of prototypes
that would integrate the sprawl and high-rise typologies. In order to describe
possible scenarios of city growth over 20 years, an adaptive density tool based on
changing floor area ratio and programmatic distribution was developed. On the
urban scale the system is organised through mathematically controlled operations
with sine curves, which give rise to a hierarchy of infrastructure and urban blocks
and at the same time modulate the water’s edge in order to maximise it.
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 Britta Knobel, Arnoldo Rabago and Khuzema Hussain, Interconnected
Fragmentation, Design Research Lab (DRL), Architectural Association, London, 2006
London has a history of increasing density within defined boundaries. This has always
been a space-filling system of politics and economy. The lack of adaptive growth
strategies has resulted in a multitude of irregular-shaped voids. Here a new space-filling
system is designed to embrace different sites and programmes and to react according to
its context. This new technique would follow the logic of a fractal and therefore
recursively densify void spaces. As a testing scenario the system was implemented in
one of the densest parts of the City of London where there is a real need for more space.

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 Annie Chan and Yikai Lin, Ant Urbanism, MArch,
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 2009
This project creates a radically new urbanism for an
inner-city area of Taipei currently occupied by an airport.
Pathways are generated using ‘swarm logic’ processing
techniques based on the principle of the pheromone
trails of ants. Rhino scripting and Grasshopper are then
used to generate the building themselves.

Equally, the city itself has also been transformed by digital

technologies. The contributions in this issue from Vicente
Guallart and Benjamin Bratton explore the question of how
we are hooked up within a digital information superhighway.
Guallart introduces ‘Hyperhabitat’, an installation that posits
the need to reprogram(me) the structures with which we
inhabit the world via the introduction of distributed
intelligence in the nodes and structures with which we
construct buildings and cities. Meanwhile, in his ‘iPhone
City’ article, Bratton explores the potential of the connectivity
afforded by global mapping systems, and looks at how they
allow us to navigate the city in new and inventive ways.
Together these articles offer an important overview of a
certain crucial moment in time when digital technologies
began to have a significant impact on the way that we design
and think about our cities. Back in 2002 there had been so
little engagement with these technologies at an urban scale
that Andrew Gillespie was forced to comment: ‘We are left to
conclude that planners have yet to develop the awareness, let
alone the expertise or appropriate policy intervention
mechanisms, that would enable them to influence the spatial
development of a digital society. Somebody might be
“planning” the future digital city – the telecommunications
companies perhaps? – but it certainly doesn’t seem to be
planners!’1 As the first decade of the 21st century draws to a
close, however, there is evidence of a breakthrough. As this
issue demonstrates, a number of key architects, planners and
theorists have begun to engage with the question of the
digital city in a highly insightful way. 4

Note
1. Andrew Gillespie, ‘Digital Lifestyles and the Future City’, in Neil Leach (ed),
Designing for a Digital World, John Wiley & Sons Ltd (London), 2002, p 71.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6-11 © Architectural
Association, Design Research Lab; pp 12-13 © University of Southern
California

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