microplexes - a study in emergent urbanism

I found this on emergenturbanism.net and found it very informative, drilling deep into potentials of interpreting emergent urbaism in the context of biology, social networking systems, and computer optimisation.

Discussing the work of Mathieu Helie:

Through this model Helie attempts to show how policy can reduce its predictive role in projecting growth through costly, speculative infrastructure investment, and reduce its organisational role in dictating precisely how growth occurs. The outcome, or so he claims, is sustainable growth based on dense urban form. It’s not without its complications however, as these kind of models are essentially behavioural models for planners and contain ideological statements about policy. They are also still simplistic.

But by building software models with these kind of growth rules, where policy acts like instructional DNA as opposed to the agent of a total, centralised vision, we can analyse how self-organisation can create urban environments with different connectivity properties to our contemporary cities and compare those differences.