Speaker: Neil Leach, USC, School of Architecture
Time: Wednesday, January 27, 6-8 pm
Location: USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
Please join us for a presentation by Professor Neil Leach titled: “Swarm Urbanism.”
In his book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Cities and Software, Steven Johnson presents the city as a manifestation of emergence. The city operates as a dynamic, adaptive system, based on interactions with neighbours, informational feedback loops, pattern recognition and indirect control. “Like any emergent system’, notes Johnson, ‘the city is a pattern in time.” Moreover, like any other population composed of a large number of smaller discrete elements, such as colonies of ants, flocks of birds, networks of neurons or even the global economy, it displays a bottom-up collective intelligence that is more sophisticated than the behavior of its parts. In short, the city operates through a form of “swarm intelligence. . . . Importantly, Johnson extends the principle of emergence to the operations of certain software programmes. If cities and software programmes display a similar emergent logic, how might we make use of digital technologies to model a city?”
For some years now we have been using digital technologies to design buildings, from the use of standard drafting packages to more experimental use of generative design tools and parametric modeling. But how can we use digital technologies to design urbanism? This lecture explores the logic of ‘swarm intelligence’. This is the theory that multi-agent systems of various kinds – from flocks of birds and shoals of fish to neural networks, software programmes and even cities themselves – all begin to display similar forms of behaviour. How then can we use software programmes to generate urban design proposals according to the logic of ‘swarm intelligence’?