Creating new cities: cellular automata and social condensers.

Lombardi, Davide; Dounas, Theodoros; Zhang, Chenke; Wu, Hao; Yang, Chaohui

Abstract

This paper presents a further step of a study that is exploring the potential of applying computational strategies to design and evaluate solutions for urban development and planning in the context of contemporary China. This exploration used a city design competition brief in China to check the feasibility of shaping future cities by the use of an automated system based on high-density urban types. The necessity of relying on digital tools is due to the need to encapsulate and translate into one single process the wide range of different parameters taken into account during the design development, in our case environmental data, big data, blockchain technology and Chinese regulatory frameworks as envisioned by the Chinese 13th five year plan. We thus build an algorithm that creates new cities driven by the aforementioned parameters. The last step of the process is based on the application of a social condenser that aims to create an overlapping merging among the defined functions. In parallel the algorithm uses a Cellular Automata strategy to develop an urban fabric. The outcome of the paper is an algorithm who gathers all the data as mentioned above and outputs a masterplan making use of the Cellular Automata paradigm.

Citation

LOMBARDI, D., DOUNAS, T. ZHANG, C., WU, H. and YANG, C. 2018. Creating new cities: cellular automata and social condensers. In Fukuda, T., Huang, W., Janssen, P., Crolla, K. and Alhadidi, S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 23rd International conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA 2018): learning, prototyping and adapting, 17-19 May 2018, Beijing, China. Hong Kong: CumInCAD.

• Conference Name: 23rd International conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA 2018)
• Conference Location: Beijing, China
• Start Date: May 17, 2018
• End Date: May 19, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Oct 30, 2017
• Online Publication Date: May 17, 2018
• Publication Date: May 19, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jun 29, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 29, 2018
• Publisher: CumInCAD
• Keywords: Cellular automata; Lattice path; Urban density; Generative urbanism
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/2977