Angelos Floros

Presented: UIA 2011 Tokyo — 24th World Congress of Architecture, Design 2050: Beyond Disasters, through Solidarity, towards Sustainability, Tokyo, 25 September – 1 October 2011

Keywords: Urban Networks, Architectural Design, Desktop Interface, City Infrastructure, Scale

The contemporary city is a network, and its inhabitants know it. They are individual objects, parts of a swarm, users of a dynamic infrastructure. The transport system defines their ability to read the urban structure; junctions and path-lines capture the bandwidth of the city's aura.

Which means the useful question has reversed. It is no longer what city do we want for our citizens, but what citizens do we want for our city — because a city of this degree of complexity requires a well-informed inhabitant who uses external computational power in order to remain part of the system. Herbert Simon's definition holds: a complex system is made of many parts interacting in a non-simple way, where the whole exceeds the sum of the parts — not metaphysically, but in the practical sense that knowing the parts and the laws of their interaction does not let you infer the whole.

At the beginning of the internet it was assumed that companies would disperse their employees into private space. The opposite happened; the metropolitan cities concentrated.

The paper reads the urban network through three components, which it treats as applets of a single system: the desktop interface, the architectural design process, and the city infrastructure. Informational technology, inspired by spatial components, plugs the citizen into an augmented reality that runs in parallel with the physical one — combining infrastructure and interface in the same gesture. Which spatial components are already embedded in informational systems? What is the identity of the contemporary citizen? And how does the tracking of users shape a non-hierarchical interface?

The method proposed is anthropocentric, and it holds the three components together through scale — the scale of linear space used as a dynamic element, in the tradition of Kees Boeke's Cosmic View, where the world is reached in forty jumps.

Scale is what decides the outcome. It is the means by which a citizen remains a part of the system. Without it, the citizen prefers to continue a virtual tour of online social communities, uploading and downloading urban experience instead of having it.