City Breeder

CityBreeder seeks a new and participatory mode of modelling the processes of the city, one that builds upon an understanding of urban form as highly contingent and continuously re-negotiated. Generative algorithmic design techniques are used to encode specific low-level connective intentions, rules and relationships to produce an emergent condition capable of adaption to its own self-generating body of information: the collective decisions and actions of the model’s multi-agent population. In developing a time-based model that approaches urban creation via the accrual of a very high population of small (simulated) real-time decisions we posit a mobile platform of design that operates in a continuous but minimal way. We believe the city should be allowed to evolve in a largely self-regulating manner, but one monitored and at times micro-adjusted in the pursuit of a diverse and informal sense of dynamic order.