Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

Emergent Urbanism at the University of Montreal

I was invited to the complex systems laboratory of the Université de Montréal this week to present emergent urbanism to their twenty-member large research group. Click through to SlideShare in order to see the full text of the presentation under the "notes on" tab. The entire text is in French, however I know a significant share of this website's visitors enjoy French once in a while.

[slideshare id=2378277&doc=presentationudm-091029150425-phpapp02]

If someone wants to sponsor me for a translation in English, email me and I'll upload one very soon. Otherwise my hands are quite full at the moment, it might be a while before I get around to it.

Thanks to Rodolphe Gonzales from the Complex Systems Lab for the invitation. You can read about their work here.

Comments

So I don't speak French but the images tell the story quite well. I particularlly liked the comparisions with the triangle fractal. I think that was a good way to illustrate levels of complexity and variations in levels of complexity within the same project.

Also the examples you gave of old villages vs. new towns was also nice to see. The old villages generally grew in response to distance to churches and markets and the buildings you showed were developed in relationship to structure and form. What I think you are trying to convey in your writings is that some sort of unity between these thoughts and other urban thoughts is missing. And that this unity will create a much greater and more complex urban fractal that could be studied and improved upon etc. What I am getting at is that I am very excited to see a fully developed example of this greater urban fractal somewhere outside of my mind or your writings.

It seems that cities already have this inherent fractalness about them but the information is stretched so far across time and across so many different forces that the formula behind it is rather unreadable.

I think the contemporary thought of Urbanism in this blog refereed was alright but we are facing the little bit different experience of Urbanism after post conflict situation in Nepal. Due to having various types of social interests and values; which may called as “sub-culture”.

I think the contemporary thought of Urbanism in this blog refereed was alright but we are facing the little bit different experience of Urbanism after post situation in Nepal. Due to having various types of social interests and values; which may called as "sub-culture".

Further comment

Please send your comments by email at mthl@mthl.info, or find me on Twitter @mathieuhelie. The commenting system is closed at the moment as no measures can hold back blog spamming bots.

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