The responsive city design game
pp. 369-390
in: Juval Portugali, Han Meyer, Egbert Stolk, Ekim Tan (eds), Complexity theories of cities have come of age, Berlin, Springer, 2012Abstract
This paper reports on a city-game experiment conducted by Ekim Tan as part of the responsive city workshop (www.theresponsivecity.org). The game was inspired by city-games developed by Portugali (Inter-representation networks and cognitive maps. In: Portugali, J. (ed.) The Construction of Cognitive Maps, pp. 11–43. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 1996) as means to study self-organization processes as they take place in a city and to illustrate the dynamics of synergetic inter-representation networks (SIRN). Unlike previous games, which were essentially abstract, the present one was related to a specific location and task, namely, to the actual urban extension site in Almere Haven—Almere Sportpark de Wierden, and to the 400 new urban units with private entrepreneurial program that composed this extension. The aim of the game was to find out what design rules might emerge in the extension area. What, when and how do different design orders emerge? How do quarters emerge? And so on. Fifteen workshop participants, with diverse ethnic and disciplinary backgrounds, who were involved in the experiment, located some 400 urban unit mock-ups consecutively. In this paper we describe the experiment in some detail and study its implications to urban design in general and to the Almere design project in particular.
