دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی به سوی شهر باز: طراحی و تحقیق برای سیستم های شهری نوظهور - اشپرینگر 2018

Abstract

The ‘‘open city’’ has recently been theorized as the urban condition which best accommodates difference, incorporates unpredictable changes and fosters adaptation. In this respect, the present paper highlights how the open city behaves as an emergent system whose overall form cannot be predicted in advance nor determined by an a priori intention. Although open urban systems have been increasingly identified as the best fields for flourishing resilience and city diversity, the current practice of planning and urban design focuses mainly on master plans, which tend to behave as closed systems, pretending to predict and overly control the future development of predefined bounded areas. By exploring this contradiction, the present paper attempts to frame a design and research approach that can steer emergent changes in positive directions without trying to formally predetermine their final outcome.

The ‘‘Flock City’’: design and emergence

This paper emphasises how cities become closed systems whenever they lose their ability to adapt to a continuous state of becoming, whenever the relationship between people and the space they inhabit cannot be updated to emergent unpredictable conditions, ever-changing needs and behaviour. In this respect, design practices and urban codes risk fostering closed systems every time they try to over-determine and crystallise the relationship between form and social function. Instead, they might nourish the open city by stimulating the adaptations necessary to constantly update and upgrade our everyday experience of urban space. Since not every kind of adaptation is positive for the emergence of open systems, urban designers and planners have the fundamental role of directing the emergent changes in positive directions without trying to formally predetermine their final outcome. If the city starts to be truly considered as a complex living system, planners and urban designers could be better defined as the ‘‘guardians of the unpredictable’’, like the gardener described by Cle´ment (1991), who needs to become increasingly acquainted with the vegetal species and their behaviour in order to make more efficient use of their natural capacities to maintain and increase biological diversity (which represents a source of wonder and a guarantee for the future). This idea disrupts the established concept of designers and planners as the people who produce architectural plans on a drawing table, and promotes a different attitude which induces designers to observe more and design less.