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.
