Cities are complex systems — emergent wholes irreducible to their component parts — part living; as dynamic networks of social interactions, part built; as an evolving infrastructure and architecture that defines their morphology. As a greater understanding of the benefits of self-organisation brings us to explore decentralised approaches to urban policy, new models and analytical work based on complexity science can inform our understanding of both what the city is and what it could be.

Urbagram is a set of interlinked concepts, models, speculations, probings, essays and artefacts based on urban spatial systems.

I pursue a thought-praxis (a making-as-thinking) oriented around urbanisation and often refracted through multiple lenses at once: morphogenesis, network theory, complexity science, energetics, emergent urbanism and social software in particular. This is a mode of analytical thinking based on lines of flight, potential inputs and outputs unfolding along the way.

I take a synthetic approach to the analysis of spatial assemblages; working at multiple scales in an effort to explore fundamental spatial phenomena in living systems. I look to many examples of both organised and self-organising complex systems, using network science as a toolkit for comparative analysis across diverse systems.

Mobility, morphology, density, integration and energy are all intricately interconnected and form the basis of my analysis. I build generative software models to explore relationships between these phenomena, looking for insights into how we might grow our cities of tomorrow using bottom-up urban policies.

I have come to explore issues of urban complexity through a fascination with early thinking on cybernetic systems 1, a thread of architectural theory/practice based on adaptivity, software and biology 2 3 4, 20th Century critiques of space and technology 5 6, landmark texts in modern urban studies 12 13 14 15, spatial analyses of urban systems 7 8 9 and an ontological framework that owes a lot to spatial concepts first traced by Gilles Deleuze 10 11 . These touchpoints begin to sketch out a topography of interrelated memes which I should point out will flicker in the background of all my work.

An advisable way of browsing Urbagram is to start with the introductory Essays, which then link through to both concepts and models.

If you’d like to know more about the production of Urbagram, please read the Colophon.

Anil Bawa-Cavia, London, Feb 2010

• 1 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Boston: The MIT Press, 1965)
• 2 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007)
• 3 Peter Cook et al, Archigram (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999)
• 4 Achim Menges, Michael Hensel, Morpho-Ecologies: Towards Heterogeneous Space In Architecture Design (London: AA Publications, 2007)
• 5 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992)
• 6 Manuel Castells, Rise of The Network Society (Volume 1) (NJ: Wiley, 1996)
• 7 Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
• 8 Michael Batty Cities & Complexity (Boston: MIT Press, 2007)
• 9 Nikos A. Salingaros, Principles of Urban Structure (Athens: Techne Press, 2005)
• 10 Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004)
• 11 Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006)
• 12 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961)
• 13 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992)
• 14 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960)
• 15 Ed Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000)

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