Description
A fever indeed seems to have been adrift in the few years prior to and following the 1960’s. The state of urban environments needed urgent interventions, especially as cities appeared to be mushrooming out of control with problems that were complex and increasingly appeared intractable using traditional thinking and design approach-es. Instead what one needed, so the one particular argument went, were more syste-matic approaches that took into account multiple, interacting variables and could help devise a way out of these problems into new desirable order of urban environments. These sentiments run through a number of key texts that appeared around the time in architecture and urban design. For example, Chermayeff and Alexander in Communi-ty and Privacy (1965) laid out a systematic approach to decomposition of urban envi-ronments into a set of requirements that could then be recomposed into other patterns responsive to different needs. Yona Friedman followed a similar trajectory in Towards a Scientific Architecture (1975), whereas Nicholas Negroponte developed some of these arguments further in The Architecture Machine (1972) and Soft Archi-tecture Machines (1975). And somewhere in between the 1960’s and 1970’s an enig-matic group named Archigram (1999) furiously drew and published graphic visions of urban futures in a range of projects with intriguing titles such as the Walking City, Plug-In City, Instant City, Control and Choice living, Metamorphosis, Computer City.
The ideas and language that frame these and other writings of the time drew upon concepts from the emerging domains of operations research, systems thinking, cyber-netics, control and feedback systems and information systems, all of which had proved invaluable during the war years. These newly founded disciplines illustrated how to cope with complexity; surely they could be just as applicable to combat urban issues. It is against this background that we encounter the first tentative steps towards urban modeling using digital information systems.
Increasingly in the discourse that unfolded in these early projects, we witness ex-plicit and implicit intersections between urban thinking and information and commu-nication technologies. The language of urban design gets infused with notions of networks and flows, dependencies between variables, mathematization of decision making processes, and much more. And we encounter also in these early studies ma-nifestation of subtle differences in how computing and communications technologies were marshaled differently to respond to urban issues. Negroponte, for example, conceptualized The Architecture Machine as a tool to assist in generation of design possibilities, not just to record and process information but also as an active partici-pant in the man-machine dialogue about exploration of spatial compositions or design futures. The Computer City of Dennis Crompton, on the other hand, did not employ computing to generate fixed alternatives but embedded these technologies as the very constitutive and integral elements of continuously evolving and shifting urban infra-structure and environments. These are not opposing positions but only two early con-ceptualizations about how to shape urban environments using digital technologies. The former employed computer representations and modeling to facilitate exploration of alternative urban futures, the other imagined representations and what was represented as but one and the same.
The early body of work from the 1960-70s provided foundations and impetus for developments in a number of cognate disciplines in urban modeling in the subsequent years with advances in computer aided modeling systems, geographic information systems, digital photogrammetry, and networking infrastructure that linked dispersed repositories of data. To better understand and frame the role and scope of future vir-tual urban modeling systems, it may be instructive to briefly review the spectrum of lineages that inform thinking in urban modeling literature.