Neurocomputing the City

Neurocomputing the City

Andrew Witt The future city demands the tools of the future. Cities are negotiating invisible and turbulent forces of disruptive new technologies, ecological uncertainty, and constrained resources in realtime. The analytic tools of the past derived from exact rules and clear lines are being tested and found wanting. In their book “Realtime: Making Digital China,” Clément Renaud, Florence Graezer Bideau, and Marc Laperrouza observed that “The construction of highly predictable systems is concomitant with the rise of great uncertainties on a planetary scale.” [1] To confront challenges that are both unpredictable and nuanced, designers need a new arsenal of tools that allow them to reprogram the mind of the city itself.

In their 1973 article “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webbe articulated the notion of the “wicked problem,” a highly multivariable challenge that defied a single optimal solution [2]. Architects, landscape architects, and urban designers live and breath wicked problems across experiential, spatial, and ecological scales. Yet even by those standards, contemporary urban challenges grow inexorably more interconnected and wicked, entailing ecological impacts, social needs, political pressures, spatial particularities, and myriad other externalities. These problems often sprawl across urban and even regional boundaries, implicating the city in wider world networks. Compounding these methodological challenges are the intensifying ways in which disciplines --- architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, but also engineering, business innovation, technology, and others --- are intersecting and mutating in novel ways. These disciplinary mutations constantly expand the

11 knowledge expected of designers, as working across disciplines becomes an indispensable aspect of addressing the multifaceted problems of today’s city.

Speculating on scenarios of the future city requires an omnivorous and ecumenical attitude toward both disciplines and technique. Computational encodings provide an increasingly powerful way to bridge the two. Indeed, computation is becoming a kind of moderating and modulating medium between disciplines, a common and integrating language of knowledge and method. Yet strictly analytic computational techniques such as parametric and performance-driven design are cracking under the strain of the competing and sometimes conflicting demands of contemporary urbanism.

Neural networks offer a path beyond the limitations of procedural tools, and a new way to venture integrative solutions to complex urban conditions. As tools, neural networks are of a qualitatively different order than the computational techniques that have dominated design in the last twenty years.They are nonlinear and relational, ideal for synthesizing and generating highly intricate and interdependent design proposals. Their power lies in their capacity to automatically draw connections and patterns from highly complex or apparently unstructured information. Long the province of arcane corners of computer science, they have recently exploded onto nearly every aspect of human activity.

Neurocomputing the City

Andrew Witt close as possible to human visual cognition. Drawing their cues from the structure of biological vision, they are tuned and sensitized as they are exposed to sequences of images, schemas, diagrams, and other visual organizations. A new kind of statistical image processing, they are trained a posteriori on thousands of images rather than a priori on explicit rules. This means they are exceptionally adept to responding to context: they can interpret subtle contextual clues such as microclimate, differences in vegetation, apparently minor spatial differences, or even patterns of human behavior with specific and calibrated design interventions..

The future city is a fertile context for the application of neurocomputational techniques. Cities increasingly confront systemic issues that span physical, political, and ecological boundaries and exceed individual disciplines. The speed of contemporary urban evolution also demands systems that can analyze and respond instantly to changing conditions, and that can map those conditions surgically and operationally. Neural networks allow the forensic mapping of conditions of the city from raw, unstructured satellite imagery through a process analogous to facial recognition. By applying such techniques to a corpus of monitoring imagery, the resulting database provides granular inventories of urban conditions that are more optically nuanced than typical planning surveys. Combined with generative artificial intelligence tools trained on optimal design scenarios, neurocomputation offers a new and more elastic answer to difficult urban questions.

13 The accelerated feedback cycle between scanning and generating creates a new opportunity to adapt design strategies to the limitless idiosyncrasies of modern cities in perpetual transition. Zoning, once a static practice, can become continuous, fluid, and adaptive. Instead of designing specific proposals for particular sites, neural networks allow us to articulate a body of ideal scenarios that can then be adaptively prototyped across the city with new versatility and nuance.

Certain architects are beginning to embrace the hallucinatory capacities of generative neural techniques for purely formal invention. Yet the rigorous application of neural networks analytically across multiple scales of the city in an integrated and coherent way is even newer territory. Such a practice redefines typical boundaries between disciplines. It fuses architecture, landscape, and urbanism in a symbiotic nexus with imaging, scanning and neurocomputing. To program the mind of the city, designers can now embrace new methods synthesizing data analytics, strategic planning, and spatial design to envision fundamental future transformations of urban space. Neurocomputing opens the door to not only to new cities and new urban life but, more fundamentally, to new conceptions of the very disciplines of design.

Neurocomputing the City

Andrew Witt 1 Clément Renaud, Florence Graezer, Marc

Laperrouza, “Introduction,” in Realtime:

Making Digital China, Clément Renaud,

Florence Graezer, Marc Laperrouza eds. (Lausanne: EPFL Press, 2020), 9. 2 Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber,

“Dilemmas in a general theory of planning,”

Policy Sciences 4 (1973):155-169.

INTRODUCTION