Goals ยท Updated 20December 2005, by Jason
This section describes the goals of these programs and how we evaluated the success of each step.
Simply put, this investigation is meant to model the seemingly chaotic tendencies of general urban growth using the simplest description, or rule set possible.
Our models are made to scale. These models are not to the physical scale of familiar downtowns across the American landscape. Instead, these models respect the carrying capacities of familiar late 20th Century housing topologies. Residences like townhouses and apartment towers model how many people they could reasonably house. Neighborhoods of these residences are then expected to support a critical amount of commercial and civic activity to sustain growth. In this way they "breed" amenities like restaurants and schools.
To gauge the success of our rule sets we searched the resulting models for patterns familiar to urban growth. Blocks, neighborhoods, satellitte cities, and downtowns all pointed the project toward increasingly familiar behaviors. At each step, a question like "Is this accurate?" was downplayed to "How does the rule affect the pattern?" In this way, the project aims to catalogue the familiar patterns found in urban growth with the rule sets that create them. The project has a roughly predictive quality for future pattern creation or at least creates a critical framework of explicit intervention for future design speculations in an academic setting.