Monday, February 2, 2009

Questions for Discussion 3

Working from the following articles: The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention by James Corner and The Myth of the Ant Queen by Steven Johnson.

"In this active sense, the function of mapping is less to mirror reality that to engender the re-shaping of the worlds in which people live." (Corner 213)

"Mapping is perhaps the most formative and creative act of any design process, first disclosing and then staging the conditions for the emergence of new realities" (Corner 216)

"Rather than engineer a solution to the trail-following, the two UCLA professors had evolved a solution; they had created a random pool of possible programs, then built a feedback mechanism that allowed a more successful program to emerge...The tools of emergent software had been harnessed to model and understand the evolution of emergent intelligence in real world organisms." ( Johnson 62-63)

Questions:

If a consensus of the city shifts from a framework of 'disorganized complexity' to an 'organized complexity,' does even the act of foresight or planning may become an irrelevant exercise?

Is it possible to view the city as analogous to a bottom-up system?

If the city is viewed as a 'real-world organism' and mapping is thought of as a conceptual 'tool of emergent software';

1) how can mapping aid in understanding the evolution of emergent intelligence in the city?

2) is it possible to design a feedback loop (mechanism) to evaluate collected mapping information?

3.) it it possible that this feedback mechanism could allow more successful programs (in urbanization) to emerge?

4) what would any and/or all of this look like?

1 comment:

  1. If a consensus of the city shifts from a framework of 'disorganized complexity' to an 'organized complexity,' does even the act of foresight or planning may become an irrelevant exercise?

    Whether irrelevant or not, foresight and planning are means to record an act and its influence or lack thereof upon the city, its inhabitants and their activities. The planning becomes a documented action by which we can test the force of our own human nature within a space. Do we continue on our inate paths or do we adjust/evolve in accordance to the new conditions?

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