To join the KLI Colloquia via Zoom:Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5881861923?omn=85945744831
Meeting ID: 588 186 1923

Topic description / abstract:

Cities have been subjected to innumerable “organic” interpretations. Here, parks have been seen as “lungs”, streets as “arteries” or “vessels”, nieghbourhoods as “cells”, administrative estates as “heads” and business districts as “cores”. In short, the metaphor of the city as organism is as old as we have memory of ourselves.  However, with all the inspiration that philosophers, reformists and designers have taken from this metaphor, from Plato to our days, nobody has ever attempted to move out of the metaphorical dimension to explore the ontological. To consider therefore cities and ecosystems similar at the level of their essential evolutionary nature.

One possible reason why this big leap has never been conceived, is very practical: we have never had the technical ability to describe cities both in-depth and at very large scale, and to do so numerically and comprehensively. We have never been able, in a nutshell, to do to cities what our grand-grands did to butterflies and plants: gather them, measure their form and order them by similarity. This is what researchers at the Urban Deisgn Studies Unit of the University of Stratchlyde have tried to do in the last 15 years. They felt that was needed to learn from what exists, rather than getting inspired by it, and design cities in a truly evolutionary perspective. 

About 5 years ago, this research generated a first prototype of a digital ecosystem – named “Urban MorphoMetrics” – that allows to describe urban form in detail and at very large scale, comprehensively and numerically. Since then, they have developed the method technically, scaled it up significantly, and validated it extensively across a number of aspects of the way cities function and change: social, economical, environmental, historical. 

The presentation will tell this story, and argue that perhaps the time has come to go to the jugular of the problem: can we demonstrate that urban form is itself a complex adaptive system, and as such belongs to the same class as the ecological, culural and social? Can we formulate a first general taxonomy of urban form on the ground of evidence? And finally: can we infer descent from similarity and progress the exploration of phylogeny of urban from taxa? Can we, in short, establish a new science of urban form evolution? 

Biographical note:

Sergio Porta is Professor of Urban Design, Director of Urban Design Studies Unit and course director of the MSc in Urban Design at Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Head of Department from 2011-14, Chair of the International Seminar of Urban Form in 2021 and member of the ISUF council in 2020-21, External Examiner of Urban Design PGT programs at University of Cardiff, Manchester and Westminster in 2018-2022, he is advisor to international organisations, sits on the editorial boards of leading journals in urban science and design and is regularly invited speaker to international conferences. His recent research is onmasterplanning the adaptive city, urban morphology/morpho¬metrics, and radical architectural design. He has published over fifty papers on international peer-reviewed journals and three monographs. He sits in the editorial board of several scientific journals in urban sciences and is section editor of Discover Cities (Springer Nature). In 2023 he was awarded the Mallick Medal 2023 (ICE - Urban Design and Planning) and the Michael Breheny Prize 2023 (Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science) as author of best scientific papers of the year. His h-Index on Scopus (January 2025) is 25.