cB    CityBreeder

PROJECT DATA

TYPE	INSTALLATION SOFTWARE
LOCATION	SYDNEY, AU
CLIENT	COMMISSION
DATE	2010
TEAM	IAIN MAXWELL DAVE PIGRAM
AWARDS	WINNER OPEN AGENDA (2010)

CityBreeder

Sydney, Au

Cities are cultural artefacts, the emergent outcomes of open and continuous (design) processes enacted through the collective decisions, desires and anxieties of their populations.  

CityBreeder seeks a new and participatory mode of modelling the processes of the city, one that builds upon an understanding of urban form as highly contingent and continuously re-negotiated. Generative algorithmic design techniques are used to encode specific low-level connective intentions, rules and relationships to produce an emergent condition capable of adaption to its own self-generating body of information: the collective decisions and actions of the model’s multi-agent population. In developing a time-based model that approaches urban creation via the accrual of a very high population of small (simulated) real-time decisions we posit a mobile platform of design that operates in a continuous but minimal way. We believe the city should be allowed to evolve in a largely self-regulating manner, but one monitored and at times micro-adjusted in the pursuit of a diverse and informal sense of dynamic order.