The STEALTH group:

Ana Dzokic
Milica Topalovic
Marc Neelen
Ivan Kucina

WILD: occurring, growing without supervision or restraint;

the urban paradigm of ontemporary Belgrade
 THE WILD CITY
Genet ics of uncont rolled urban proces ses
The Wild City research project
inspects the city in crisis – a
complex, trembling ground on
which rules for production of
urban substance and logic for
preserving of urban vitality are
constantly reinvented. It spans
over two conceptual territories:
metaphorical, which describes
an urban paradigm of wildness,
and strategic, which proposes
dynamic design procedures for
contemporary environment,
shaped by dominant market
forces and decline of
institutions.

not domesticated, cultivated or tamed; the wild city is

People in principle are cowards.
It’s not easy to rush out into the street all of a sudden and say: “Bye-
bye busted firm; give me my compensation money, if there is any
at all, and I’ll go out and do some business.” That takes courage.

I found my spot. On literally half of a square meter, on a

small camping table, I set out packages of cigarettes. I was
making four- to five-hundred German marks a month. By
our standards that’s a pretty solid salary.

Later on, the Boulevard of Revolution started to

develop as a shopping area. Of course it always
was a shopping area, but then a second row of
kiosks and stands started popping-up, parallel to
the official state-owned or private ones that
were already there.

In the beginning of the 1990s, on that same

street, I saw my buddies – guys my age selling
all kinds of products from the hoods of the
cars parked there. Smuggle-commerce, of
course. They’d get the goods from Hungary,
Bulgaria — wherever they could travel — and
sold them right there on the Boulevard.
These guys stood on the street literally
across from the universities they had
graduated from a couple of years
before.Later, they shifted over to the
flea market.

We built our [first] shop space from

whatever scraps we could get our
hands on. We rented it cheaply; it was
a small pre-fab house. We painted the
interior, fixed it up a bit, so that it
would look decent. You put in a few of
those halogen lights, for [40, 50 or 60
DEM,] and presto! It resembles a shop,
but in fact it is just a [maquette] [model]
of a shop.

The fact that system here allows you work for a

year or two without any registration, any
permission, without any kind of inspection — that’s
another story.

I think that the mentality of people from this climate

makes us inclined and well-suited to anarchy and
absence of a legal system. Our talent for improvisation
can [come out] since we’re all more or less masters of
finding [our way out] [our own way] — We’re all James
Bonds.

But things will have to be solved technically, soon the

pedestrians won’t be able to pass through the streets,
because of stands, cardboard boxes, shades and other
wonders. It all looks very … thrilling. Bars, hangers,
goods everywhere, music, people.

ALTERNATIVE: actions conducted by large numbers of indiv

malfunctions of establishments and mainstreams
 It’s not only in this part of the world that people sell fake perfumes and fake cigs. It
works anywhere; those “detectives” are all over. But I guess it’s more intensive
here, simply because it gained so much momentum and undoubtedly a
very large part of the population exists on it. In the same way, there are
people who made careers in the “practices” of the ad-hoc,
improvisation, “on-black,” “on-grey”.— whatever you want to call
it.

Afterwards you will put the money into another practice

that is profitable, but legal. Then it becomes another
story, those are already mega-facilities, for example
entertainment ones.

(Where were you supplied with cigarettes? You

remember the trucks in the city center?)
How could I tell about that? That is what you
know. Don’t think it’s some kind of paranoia, I
simply think it’s not necessary. We are not
exposing any glamor here, I think the story is
just between us, to remember and to be
warned.

Foreigners should come here. They could

learn all kinds of things — football, basketball
. . . survival.

Everything is in changes; without change

there is no life. It used to be like that, now it’s
like this, tomorrow it will be different.
Obviously, this is a living mechanism; it didn’t
come about overnight. About those people,
it wasn’t easy to go out into the street
while someone else was there all along,
and for him it was normal and things
even started to work in his favor. He
already got stronger in this competition,
he has courage, heart, knows how to
fight, those are today’s qualities
necessary for normal living.

I think that this jumble is a strong

alternative*. If you can organize yourself a
bit better, if you are persistent, determined,
you can make a career. If you are not, you can
live from hand to mouth. It can choke you, like
the guy next to you who has 3 brands of cigarettes
more. One cardboard box will eat another one, which is
perfectly normal.

My name is Petar Miucin, but in the city I am known as Pera

Lozac (Pera “the Firestarter”). That’s how you can ask for
me if you need something when you come to Belgrade.

viduals, simultaneously, as a compensation for

38

GREY REALM
Without the necessary functions of
institutional systems in society and in the
city, personal initiative appeared as the
only possibility for fulfilling demands and
became the fuel for the move from the
previous, centralised economy to
disperse, a-legal, chaotic stage.

During the last decade, the described

condition - the Grey Realm has become an
envelope for the human condition in
Belgrade.

The most radical reconfiguration of the

city came about with the street trade
entering public space and reshaping it.

Over the past decade, in evolution* from a

simple to a more complex spatial disorder,
street trade underwent six phases from
mobility to creation of new urban forms.

EVOLUTION: continuous progress from the homogenous to th

simple to the diverse and manifold
Genetics in urban
of uncontrolled quality and function
processes
 mobility _ 1
In early stages of the processes, street
traders have blossomed along the lines of flux
while phenomena rapidly intensified towards
the city centre. The fast fluctuating, horizontal
movement of this huge network simply routed
around any institutional authority, keeping
mobile in order to escape legal prosecution.

lightness _ 2
The non-stop, 24-hour rhythm brought to the
city came from the exceptional flexibility of
tradesman functioning on a small scale.
Channels for supply are numerous, the usual
tax and bureaucracy are avoided, which
enables new trade to react instantly and offer
desired goods.

occupation _ 3
‘Grey’ circulation of currencies became the
only controller of the spatial growth. Profitable
trading spots became ever more compressed
while new public centres are being formed. All
available public and void space of the city
turned into a testing ground for new commerce
and shapes gradually through dense
juxtaposition of formally unrelated units.

legislation _ 4
The resulting transformation into new spatial
and organisational typologies is largely due to
dynamic relations between individuals and
institutions. Officials sought participation in
processes by providing temporal support
elements, such as stands, kiosks, dedicated
trading locations with infrastructure.

solidification _ 5
Subverting institutional intentions, the
legislation gave further momentum to solid,
physical definition of condensed, vivid space
of street commerce through which its course
became irreversible.

new forms _ 6
The heterogeneous constellation of changing
territories, ownerships, diverse types of trade
and spontaneous architectures re-maps the
city by producing multiple points of uncertain
potentials.

he heterogeneous in structure, and from the single and

 atomised,

FLOOD OF _characters
pixelated,
small entities

CHANGES

Amidst the disintegration of former

Yugoslavia, war, media obsession and the
politicisation of everyday life, the crucial
point for a complete turn over of the city was
the UN embargo of 1992. During a decade of
instability, the governmental grip on the
society weakened dramatically by economic,
demographic and social crisis.
temporary
Instead, emergent processes have replaced
the city’s primary systems in the domains of
trade, housing production and public
services. In the beginning of the present
decade, they were accounting for 50% of sale
of everyday goods, 60% of petrol sale, 65 % of
city transport and 70% of any construction
activity.

The concentration of activities in public

space was supported, in a liberal manner, by
the city municipalities. Their attempt to insure _figures
an independent source of income from the
as presented in
bankrupt state resulted in a compromise daily newspaper Blic,
above the law, and a fast commercialisation of jan-feb 2000
potent public ground. In this process, hardly
any spatial regulations were implemented.

The main concentrations of urban sprawl* are Wild history 95 419

situated along the lines of flux, the city’s of Belgrade wild buildings
attraction points and outlets of traffic in numbers: ‘registered’,
infrastructure.
1975: 17 903 unofficial
1995: 33 594 estimations
2001: 95 419 200 000

1 out of 10 citizens
of Belgrade’s central
zone has built ‘wild’
SECTION THROUGH THE CITY
in the past 10 years
tramline no.7, 15 km

URBAN SPRAWL: uncontrolled growth of compact urban ce

existing buildings
 aesthetic adaptation strategies:
heterogeneity camouflage
‘in depth’ temporarity
densification lightness, mobility
inventive use of
materials and forms

no recognisable
geometry parasitical

created by anarchistic:
all social classes creates and
follows no
rules
posseses
emergent
behavior
concentrations,
and forces, not
shapes

mobile

light inward
solid

750 wild
wild center vs construction
wild periphery: sites opening
73 045 vs 22 374 per week Legalisation Demolition
in the city City will profit City will pay
5 billion DM 3 billion DM

entres, with extensions into public, void space and onto

URBAN
READY-MADES
catalogue of new urban forms

In this continuing process of change the city

acts as a machine for production of new urban
forms and as generator of its own substance.
Innovations are present across all scales and
on different levels: spatial/physical,
architectural typology, ownership,
organisational structure, program.

Catalogue of emerged forms proposes them

as ‘ready-made prototypes’. Purpose of
registration of each prototype* is to point out
newness that it produces, to describe it’s
prototypical features and to show the
possibility of it’s applying.

On the conceptual level the Wild City is an

incubator* of new urban forms in which an
urban planner becomes a hunter in the jungle,
the one who searches for new species and
cultivates them.

urb a n s c a l e _ 0 1

0 1 _ 0 1 _ worm Minimal plan 0 1 _ 0 2 _ infection Growth in waves

One of the new ‘wild’ housing areas in the perimeter
Belgrade consists of approx. 1000 houses. It is built on
city land, in the process of denationalisation. In fear
that their constructions could be demolished, individual
builders have obtained an existing plan for the area,
and reproduced the same street pattern themselves.
The Flea market - one of the targeted locations for
informal commerce was a piece of no-mans land in
New Belgrade, on a major traffic junction. In just 5
years it became the largest trading centre in the
country that continues to grow through perpetual
waves of legislation and informal invasion.

PROTOTYPE: an original urban form or instance, serving as a

 0 1 _ 0 1 _ worm Minimal plan

Level of inventiveness / Prototypical features:

- minimal plan consists just of infrastructure
- permanently unfinished state
- free standing houses on plots without property
boundaries create sensitive gradation from public to
private space
- insensitivity to social status

Cultivation:
- assign area for development of individually
commissioned or do-it-yourself housing
- do not exceed diameter of walking distance
- lay down ‘minimal plan’
- regulate / impose absence of fences
- make available network of architectural advisors
- for purposes of enriching the catalogue, monitor if and
how the prototype will mutate

0 1 _ 0 3 _ worm Impermanent ground 01_04_virus Inward expansion

Along 5 km of riverbanks, uncontrolled or In the process of ‘in-depth’ densification of the city,
deliberately overlooked developments in the built extensions vary across all city fabrics:
leisure sector have their peaks. The boats are not internationalist, XIX century compact blocks, loose,
only linearly ordered, but form a floating fabric fragmented structures.
over the water. The ‘watery condition’ produced
the ultimate negation of the city, its weight and its
presence.

a basis or standard for the design practice

 architectural typology_ 02

02_01 Parasite housing 02_02 Mushroom roofs

Often illegal, housing extensions have densified Boosting square meters over the permission
all types of existing city fabrics. They result in limit? Making ‘ghost floors’? Mushrooms are a
refreshing combinations of typologies, such as formal synonym for architectural masking.
rural houses on top of skyscrapers.

organizational structures_ 03

03_01 Symbiosis 03_02 Consolidation

Without gasoline and spare parts, the city The network of mobile petrol traders quickly
transport had to transform into a symbiotic model consolidated, resulting in new private petrol
consisting of the old public company joined by stations, constructed at sites tested-out by mobile
numerous ‘one man – one vehicle’ enterprises. predecessors.

conversions public / private_ 04

04_01 / 02 Expanding public privacy >>>

On a sidewalk of the most frequented Belgrade many changes in program – the addition of a
Boulevard, a plastic kiosk was placed with a wooden-frame cafe space, a concrete basement
temporary permit. Over 2 years, this structure and a roof shade into which a living space is
passed through 3 solidification phases and as hidden.

use of mobile objects_ 05

05_01 Boxes 05_02 Cars_trunck

INCUBATOR: an idea of a city of permanent urban innovation; on

development of new urban species
 02_03 Autarchic dreams
‘Wild houses’ range from modest ones, to
‘dreamland’ villas.They are built on the public land,
in a wide belt of city perimeters.
02_04 Programmatic hypertrophy
Challenging the borders of housing typology, the
owner of a private city transport company made
his bus-garage villa in a part of a wild
neighbourhood.

03_03 Homogeneity 03_04 Inversion of institutions

In mid-90’s, the first Chinese traders came to
Public swimming pool turned into private tennis
Belgrade. Quickly, their population grew to 50 000.
court.
Soon they overtook a redundant shopping centre
and turned it into the Chinese centre.

04_03 Private publicness

Linear repetition of the described masked
typology, along the pavement of frequented
streets produces commercial strips.
The whole city’s ground zero became a commercial
asset.The spaces being converted range from
common rooms in housing blocks of the
internationalist New Belgrade, to flats and homes
in the old city.

05_03 Cars_front 05_04 Cars_extended

ne which permits and encourages the formation and

PARADOX: a proposition contrary to the prevailing practice
appearance or terms seems absurd, yet may be true
 Extended Lada, used as a funeral car. At the
moment, there are four of them in Belgrade.

e; a sentiment seemingly contradictory; that which in

 METAMORPHOSIS
time/space mapping of transformation process

For a period of one year, the

majority of department stores in
the city were left without supplies,
having only few products to sell.
This example of a department store
illustrates the process of inversion
- where institution changed from a
trade into a management
organisation that rents its space
and shares it with smaller private
traders.
department store
beogradjanka

1. 3.

2.
inertia shrinking attractor loosening
the department in mid 1993, as in the autumn boundary
store still at its a result of the of the same the state-
original state embargo, the year, the public owned store
in the department space around starts partially
beginning of store remains the store renting its
1993 out of goods begins to be space to small
occupied by private shops
street
salesman

BENEFICIAL VIRUS: alien presence, instigated by a degrading

corrupting and vital force
 The 3D sequential mapping is developed as a
way to visualise physical and organisational
evolution. These models contain information
about the establishment of new relations
among actors, change of boundaries and
physical containment - over time. Organic
shapes present self-organised initiators of
change entering primary system. They become
more regular in the upper sections of the
model (later phases in time) which correspond
with a period of physical change. The colours
present different levels of institutional
recognition.

5.

4.
subdivision partial double skin
once open in recovery attachments to
plan, the space benefiting form the building
becomes the new made by private
separated economic investors
influx, the appear, some-
department times using a
store regains a doubled façade
part of its as a camouflage
trading space

g institutional body, which becomes an inevitable,

 a: subdivide territory
without clear
boundaries
b: fill in subdivided
territory

a: further shrinking
a: open boundary
a: loosen b: push boundary, make
for selected tactic
boundary various tactics
b: intensify by
b: push boundary, growing in
step in numbers

a: shrink a: shrink
b: surround attractor, b: -
be ‘soft’
a: expand by double skin a: -
b: camouflage into double b: grow network nodes
skin by merging

department store: public transport:

invert branch

a: tolerate
b: extend structure by
adding units

a: give structure: line up!

b: selection to fill in
a: offer empty
the structure
structure
b: find empty
structure a: tolerate
a: rise value
b: disperse from
b: intensify by growing in
central point
numbers, form homogeneity

a: abandon the system

b: surround attractor,
be ‘soft’
a: tolerate
b: spread from units into
in-between space

shopping centre: cd market:

homogenize fertilize

GENETIC CODES
Through Urban genetics* mechanics of a pulsating organisations are achieved,
transformation processes are extracted. In through conflict and negotiation between
nearly all of the studied processes, institutions and individuals. They resemble
ranging from street trade to city transport, profound symbiotic natural forms and

URBAN GENETICS: discovering the inherent scripts of unforese

that their outcomes are more sophisticated than the designed o
 a: give structure and
program to territory use a: give structure: line up!
b: selection to fill in b: selection to fill in the
structure structure

a: define strict
territory a: -
b: concentrate b: concentrate in zones that
a: offer new
within defined are more attractive, be ‘soft’
structure in
territory, be ‘soft’ a: tolerate surrounding public space
development b: solidify in
b: concentrate and solidify zones that are
in the surrounding more attractive

a: - a: shrink
b: find void attached to lines b: disperse along
of flux, occupy by dispersion lines of flux
a: form solid double skin a: tolerate
b: fill in the double skin b: connect by filling
in-between space,
be ‘soft’

flea market: street trade:

stratify coagulate

a: tolerate
b: form network

a: tolerate
b: step in, occupy a: -
in-between space, b: disperse along
be ‘soft’ lines of flux a: tolerate
a: share units
b: differentiate
b: plug into the units
nodes by
concentration

a: - a: shrink
b: surround attractor, b: -
be ‘soft’

a: keep remaining territory a: permit

b: form territory over group b: solidify strong nodes
of units by adding another
program

green market: petrol selling:

infiltrate disperse

systems, in which the small elements the minimum of stability. Tip: take a look at
(individuals-orange) are in charge of the public transport code and prototype
producing newness and flexibility, while 03_01.
the big core (institution-grey) maintains

een processes of urban transformations under a hypothesis

ones
GAME OF LIFE
Following the exciting discovery that there is
a pattern of similar behaviours among ‘urban
genes’- stages of the observed processes -
these sequences have been collected and
developed as an urban design support tool -
the Game of Life*. It started with a
fascination and a question: can there be a
sophisticated outcome of the evolutive
process if it continues further and further?

While its rules are fairly simple, the

complexity that arises from it is able to
maintain the character of a self-organising
system.

Originally, ‘Life’ is a cellular-automata game, created

in 1970 by J.H.Conway, in the field of artificial life.

In the example of a green market, which acts

as multy-agent system, a simulation test was 1 2 3
made.

Heterogeneous and vivid spatial formation

appears as the main value of the tool. It
comes through ranges that are achieved in
every spatial parameter – range of different
scales, range of material qualities from solid
to temporary, range from still to mobile,
range in different forms of ownership, range in- empty
in use throughout day and night, stretching surround between structure
the program in a range.

LIFE: synonym for evolutive design, rather than the magazine, t

state of existence
 hunch
hm
r ryt w t or
y
ou ne ul a
2 4h g
re dy
bo

ed
ar nt
sh me
w e
ne nag
ma

di
v
tra ers
de if y
te i ng
g iva
r i n - pr
blu bl i c
pu

green market - steps of simulation

4 5 6 7
Maksima Gorkog St.

Kalenic market, Belgrade

in-
plug-in extend between merge

the breakfast cereal, the 1950s-era game board or the human

WITHOUT Today, while normality (read ‘globalisation’) is
coming to Belgrade, the phenomena observed
are on the verge of being erased. On the
PREJUDICE established path of, commonly called,
‘transition in Eastern Europe’, planning
institutions are providing ground for an easy
clutch of a city’s assets into the global world.
In this condition, the aesthetics of the ‘wild
space’ found among the street traders and the
‘do-it-yourself’ interventions will slowly
vanish.

The political aspect of the Wild City project

However, the message of the wildness reaches
much further than its appearance. For a period
of 10 years, the Wild City has created an

CRISIS: a crucial or decisive moment or situation, a sudden c

rather than deterioration
 unconventional social condition in
contemporary Europe. A fairly primitive, but
rapid formation of a liberal market at its
extreme, shows an example not determined by
icons of global capitalism, but a romantically
anarchist universe of ordinary people going for
their everyday needs and dreams.
On the city scale, this condition has pointed
out to: multitude, variety, dispersion, physical
growth through decentralisation,
fragmentation, heterarchy, network
organisations.
This reality of Belgrade allows us to imagine
and speculate about public policy in which
change in the course of events, often towards improvement
economies of scale are substantially less
important than economies of variety and
flexibility. The new and desired institutional
structure is then created not to reverse, but to
support emerging processes with a clear,
social agenda.
The Wild City evolved and sustained itself
through economic, social and political
ruptures. It is an architectural creed: it offers
no certainty and stabile solutions, it has no
tolerance for professional prejudice. Instead, it
allows us to enter the field of changes of a
social and urban environment with ways to
observe them and to navigate them.
YOU’LL HAVE
TO BE IN THE
WORLD
John Thackara
Design has to change if it is to be effective, or even
meaningful, in today's context. It has to lighten up,
big-time. A few years ago we were promised that the
Internet would usher in a weightless new economy of
mind over matter. But life has become heavier than
ever, physically and psychologically. We live in a
world of human, natural, and industrial systems
whose complex interactions are difficult to
comprehend. These systems are, by their natures,
invisible, and we lack the clear mental models that
we might otherwise use to make sense of the bigger
picture.
We've wallowed too long in the idea that the world is
'out of control' - be it cities, the economy, or
technology. But we're people, not ants. We have a
culture, and language, that enable us to understand
and share knowledge about abstract phenomena.
Against this background, projects like The Wild City
bring us good news. Although this project is about
the genetics of uncontrolled urban processes, its
trajectory aims towards techniques of intervention
and control. While The Wild City is taking this
approach in architecture, in the worlds of Large
Technical Systems and software design whole flocks
of like-minded birds are already developing similar
concepts, however tricky it will be to operate among
complex and dynamically changing systems.
This transformation of the design process has two
axes. The first axis concerns the understanding and
perception of the processes that shape today's
shifting urban conditions. The second axis is about
intervention, in a 'sense-and-respond' manner--a
design process in which we are 'blind' to the precise
outcome of the processes we put in motion, but clear
about the kind of future we want to see emerge.
Design for legibility
In order to do things differently, we first might learn
to see things differently, to re-connect with the
systems and processes on which we depend, and to
understand them in order to look after them. The
emerging model of design and architecture
incorporates what we know about the behavior of
biological organisms, the geometry and information
processing systems of the brain, and the morphology
of information networks.
Many affective representations of complex
phenomena have been developed in recent times:
physicists have illustrated quarks; biologists have
mapped the genome; doctors have described
immune systems in the body, and among
communities; network designers have mapped
communication flows in buildings; managers have
charted the locations of expertise in their
organizations. But these representations have been
created and used mainly by and among specialists
as objects of research, not as the basis for feedback
and ‘sense-and-respond’ processes. City life will
always exist on the edge of chaos, but
representations of energy flows are an achievable
priority.
The strength of The Wild City is that its researchers
have 'grown' a catalogue of processes and change
mechanisms from the ground up, based on street-
level research over a number of years. The
interactions between non-regulated processes
(street traders moving into spaces vacated by
defunct official businesses) and existing city fabrics
(the green market, or a department store) are
fascinating. And in my view, the main point of the
project has been to deliver tools for perceiving
'actors' and 'forces' that previously did not figure (so
to speak) in urban design notations.
If I have a reservation (or a wish for a next step) it is
that all process representations could be made
visceral, in order to develop not just an
understanding but a feeling of how complex urban
flows and processes work.
Sense-and-respond
The purpose of systems literacy is to enable action,
rather than watching from outside, and to develop a
shared vision of what might be done together, and
how. Our dilemma is that evolution operates without
prior knowledge of what is to come, that is, without
design. The point is to re-discover intentionality and
learn--once we can read them--how to shape
emergent processes.
A first step here is learning how to think backwards
from a desired outcome. To identify the things that
need fixing, and to foster creativity in the search for
new questions, we can become expert at 'back-
casting', developing future scenarios and tracking
consequences retroactively, from then to now. On
that backwards road, we can develop the capacity to
spot opportunities at the junctures between physical
and virtual networks, and to imagine relationships
and connections where none existed before, in much
the same way as processes are visualized in The
Wild City.
How best might we use design scenarios of
desirable futures as the basis for real-world
interventions to 'steer' complex urban
transformations? How shall we connect an
understanding of urban genetics with real-time
actions to nudge 'self' organizing systems in a
desired direction? Understanding emergent
behavior, how shall we develop strategies to 'steer'
it?
Beyond the artificial
I will respond to these questions first with a
negative. The answer does not lie in the development
of autonomous or so-called intelligent design tools,
such as genetic algorithms and cellular automata.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI)) community has
shown that it is feasible to design self-generating
codes that have the capacity to plot the lines of
complex shapes, such as a boat hull. The proposition
was that 'intelligent', generative design tools might
help architects and designers design the processes
or codes, the 'rules of the game' or 'shape
grammars' by which forms are generated, rather
than the end product itself in detail. One researcher, in the world. Natural, human and industrial systems
John Fraser (then at the Architectural Association in are all around us – they are not below, outside, or
London) said that this means designing the overall above us. This new subject-object relationship in
system;"you design the rules, rather than the actual design entails a shift from a concern with objects
individual stylistic detail of the product". and appearances, towards a focus on enhanced
perceptions of complex processes - and their
With his synthetic world Tierra, the software continuous optimisation. Think of ‘world’ as a verb,
researcher Tom Ray looked at autonomous digital not a noun. Think of rowing the boat, not just drawing
evolution in a different way. In Tierra, Ray observed it.
the incredibly dynamic evolution of self-replicating
program strings, basically virus-like structures, that A second transition is from designing for people to
he had 'seeded' in this synthetic environment. The designing with us. The reason is that anyone using a
complexity produced by such viruses far exceeded system - responding to it, interacting with it, feeding
the think-then-do capacities of human designers. back into it - changes it. People are described as
The software designer of the future, Tom Ray users, or consumers – but we need to think of them
speculated, would be like a hunter in this jungle, as actors. Complex Technical Systems – be they
searching for program strings possessing desirable physical, or virtual, or both - are shaped,
characteristics for a particular application or context continuously, by all the people who use them.
back in the real world.
Our business models in design also have to change.
But neither shape-generating algorithms, nor self- The idea of a self-contained design project – of
replicating software viruses, are appropriate for the signing off, when a design is finished - make no
continuous intervention in continuously evolving sense in a world whose systems don’t stop changing.
urban systems. There are at least three reasons for Design’s project-based business model is like a
this. First, urban processes are not shapes. Second, water company that delivers a bucket of water to
self-replicating software does not allow for sense- your door and pronounces its
and-respond feedback. Third, intelligent design tools mission accomplished.
are just that: tools. They can and do exist Design is a service utility,
independently of the physical and social context not a manufacturing process.
without which a sense-and-respond design process I imagine a design economy
is impossible. In biology, the influence on a process based on service contracts
of geographic or regional environment is described such as those already used
as choronomic. Choronomy adds value; a lack of in management consultancy.
context destroys it.
As designers, our role
Extremely Agile therefore evolves from
The irony is that while real-world place-and-thing shaping, to steering -
designers have been flirting with AI and evolutionary from being the ‘authors’
design processes, the most advanced software of a finished work, into
designers, who call themselves Extreme facilitators who help
Programmers, are headed in the opposite direction, people act more
back towards human-steered design. Extreme intelligently, in a
Programmers prefer to do it, rather than watch it. more design-
They have come to value individuals, and minded way,
interactions among them, over abstract processes in the
and tools. They find it more important to engage systems
directly with working software than to labor at the they live
design of self-organizing systems. These principles in. It’s a
are the basis of a new movement in software called kind of
The Agile Alliance. deontic
street
The Agile movement, and Extreme Programmers, are theatre in
not anti-methodology. They want to restore a which the
balance. "We embrace modeling, but not in order to regisseur-
file some diagram in a dusty corporate repository. designer
We embrace documentation, but not hundreds of contributes
pages of never-maintained and rarely-used tomes. questions,
We plan, but recognize the limits of planning in a proposals
turbulent environment". and design
concepts,
Flowing to a conclusion but not
We've filled the world with complex systems and finished
technologies - on top of the natural ones that were scripts.
already here, and social/cultural systems ones that
evolved over thousands of years. For a while we were
told these systems were 'out of control' - too
complex to understand, let alone to shape, or re-
direct. But 'out of control' is an ideology, not a fact.
There is something we can do. It's called design, the
"first signal of human intention".

Our intentions – for social quality, for sustainability,

for play - will remain wishful until we complete the
transition from designing on the world to designing

Green market, evolution model, page ‘game of life’