System City / Architectural Design (PDF)

A radical shift is taking place in the way that society is thinking
about cities, a change from the machine metaphors of the 20th
century to mathematical models of the processes of biological and
natural systems. From this new perspective, cities are regarded not
simply as spatially extended material artefacts, but as complex
systems that are analogous to living organisms, exhibiting many of
the same characteristics. There is an emerging view that the design
of the thousands of new cities needed for an expanding world
population are to be founded on intelligent and inhabited
infrastructural systems or 'flow architectures' of
urban metabolisms. The physical arrays of the flow architecture of
the city are intimately connected to the networks of subsidiary
systems that collect and distribute energy, materials and
information. They animate the city, and should therefore be
intimately coupled to the spatial and cultural patterns of life in
the city, to the public spaces through which people flow, and
should unite rather than divide urban morphological and ecological
systems.

Featured architects: AMID(cero9), Buro Happold, Foster +
Partners, Groundlab and SOM.

Contributors include: Joan Busquets, Kate Davies and Liam Young,
Mehran Gharleghi, Evan Greenberg and George Jeronimidis, Marina
Lathouri, Wolf Mangelsdorf, Daniel Segraves, Jack Self, Ricard
Solé and Sergi Valverde, and Iain Stewart.