Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

urban design

Defining a new traditional urbanism

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Mon, 10/05/2009 - 21:55, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:16

Sometime last year this website attracted the attention of several members of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism, an organization sponsored by the Prince of Wales Foundation in order to support and renew traditions of construction. While this organization does great work to preserve the techniques of traditional building cultures, they have yet to define what the traditional urbanism of their name really implies. The importance of such a definition I believe to be primordial.

Principles published

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Fri, 07/24/2009 - 13:57, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 00:55

The full article conceptualizing the principles of emergent urbanism has been published by the International Journal of Architectural Research volume 3 issue 2. You can download the complete article or read the whole issue.

The Journey to Emergence

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Mon, 03/23/2009 - 07:00, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:02

This is part I of a series of excerpts of an article to be published in the International Journal of Architectural Research entitled The Principles of Emergent Urbanism. Additional parts will be posted on this blog with the editor's permission until the complete article appears exclusively in the journal's upcoming issue.

Design, configuration and natural form

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Thu, 11/06/2008 - 20:37, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:05

When did human creations stop being natural? We look at a tower block, a subdivision or a shopping mall parking lot and see the worst of industrial civilization translated into form. We tolerate them as necessary to achieve the material wealth of our civilization. Those human settlements that are still natural we grant special protections through UNESCO and historical preservation laws. We do not have a law that promotes the creation of new historic settlements because we are not quite sure how they are made.

More evidence that New Urbanism is really dense sprawl

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Fri, 10/31/2008 - 01:12, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:08

From The New Geography magazine.

The challenge of dense sprawl

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 10/22/2008 - 01:11, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 00:59

Creating the emergent dimension, or learning from Wikipedia

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Tue, 09/30/2008 - 22:29, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:04

In Architecture: Choice or Fate, his manifesto for New Urbanism, classicist Leon Krier produced many inspirational images of urban complexity, going as far as a fractal comparison of modern and traditional buildings. The cover of the book, a fictional resort town for Tenerife, presents a fascinating case study of complex symmetry; no building is the same as another, but all share the same geometric properties. That would not be unusual had it not been an architectural manifesto.

The emergent dimension, or why New Urbanism is not urbanism

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Sun, 09/14/2008 - 21:22, last updated Sun, 04/08/2012 - 23:13

There are two methods for producing fractal geometry. The first method, the decomposition, is the most easily understood. In a decomposition we apply an algorithm that breaks up the geometry of some starting point into several parts. We then re-apply this algorithm to the smaller parts created, obtain many more, even smaller parts, and continue this reiteration until we have reached the complexity limit at the smallest scale of object we can possibly make. This is how an architectural design proceeds because it reflects the way that building proceeds.

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