My first studio for the M-Arch course at RMIT was experimenting with the traditional concepts of urban planning. The project centred around Darwin as the nations new capital in 2050, with the intentions of scripting the city based off the current utilisations and patterns presented from the local inhabitants. Analysing one aspect of Darwin, we detached ourselves from the data and agitated the results to overcome any bias and obvious directions that presented themselves. The idea was to reach an outcome that we as individuals or groups would never conceive alone.
Generating an urban plan using the mapped data we then analysed a behaviour on a micro level and taking that data, substituted our behaviours into the plan. The results created a mesh of broken data that clashed and fought with itself. To test the results, we examined one node of the data and re-scripted the outputs to represent coded environments. The project wasn’t designed to reach an entirely habitable city, but to ensure that we as “urban planners” weren’t controlling the outcome too much and forcing the inhabitants to live the way we desire.
To maintain this goal we were only focusing on one node of the city and refining it within our own guidelines. For the remainder of the city the intention is to have competing architecture firms and citizens to generate, innovate and utilise the spaces as they so desire. An overriding factor with this project was surrealism, the outcomes shouldn’t work.