A Smart Paradigm for Participatory Urban Design
Patrik Schumacher & Shajay Booshan
Published in:
The Routledge Companion to Smart Design Thinking in Architecture & Urbanism
edited by Mitra Kanaani for Routledge Companion series, Routledge, London & New York 2025
Abstract:
This paper describes, illustrates, and discusses the idea of a gamified online platform for the participatory planning and design of synergy clusters. It is constructed in analogy to the white papers that outline Crypto and Web 3.0 projects, i.e. it outlines a research and development programme rather than presenting results. The synergy clusters facilitated by the platform might be physical urban developments or metaverse developments. The key tasks are sufficiently analogous to merit being investigated and addressed together.
The underlying scenario here is that the described platform facilitates intended development projects that are presumed to be unencumbered by prior planning legislation. The paper outlines a schema or ‘genotype’ for delivering tailored game development solutions to developers like start-up city entrepreneurs, municipal master-developers, real-estate developers, or metaverse platform developers. The conception of pertinent planning rules – embodied in spatial modules and their rules of combination – is a key part of the tailored game development, and so is the design of pertinent market mechanisms that create value for all participants.
Introduction
The paper might be interpreted as proto white paper for a start-up company delivering a platform plus game development services, or for an open-source project, evolving a game development platform which would allow cities, municipalities, developers or would-be communities to create their own participatory urban development game. The platform is especially congenial to start-up city entrepreneurs who intend to operate a City-as-a-Service business model.
The development success criteria for the authors’ conception of the participatory game schema focus on maximizing total economic value, i.e. the total social utility generated in the process, rather than the founders’ expected profit. However, the identification of a new utility enhancing methodology and tool schema is inherently opening up entrepreneurial profit opportunities that should be able to capture a part of the overall end-user value surplus that might be generated by such a tool.
The underlying idea of the envisioned Participatory Urban Development Platform (PUDP) was first explored at the Architectural Associations’ Design Research Lab (AADRL) in 2001 via a project entitled ‘Negotiate My Boundary’, with the ambition to develop a mechanism that gives a residential block the chance to become a residential community. “Negotiate my boundary … incorporates the communicative power of the internet to build up a virtual community in anticipation and preparation of the real residential community. This is a crucial step that significantly lowers the threshold of personal communication and allows the self-selection and communal self-organisation to take off in the safe and non-committal virtual domain” (Schumacher 2002).[i] The idea was picked up again by Shajay Booshan within the AADRL and developed into an ongoing, multi-year design research project (Booshan & Nahmad Vazquez, 2020).[ii] More recently the idea was picked up as R&D agenda within ZHA.
A key accomplishment and advantage of such a gamified participatory planning tool is that it can facilitate community building ahead of construction and thus reduces the risk of product-market fit by generating information about preferences of potential future stakeholders. A key aspect of the posited importance of community building – residential communities, creative industry clusters, or retail clusters – is the premise that the key to real estate value is the creation of co-location synergies. This is the real meaning of the mantra ‘location location location’. The market here is always also a match-making market. The networking on the basis of information-rich self-exposure, typical of social media platforms, is to be brought to bear as a key feature of the community building game. Networking here implies co-location, including the opportunity of space and asset sharing between players, firmed up by token-based market transactions rather than remaining non-committal exchanges of ideas. Tokens can be used to pay down deposits that function to reserve parcels or voxels and can be traded like options or redeemed by finalising the purchase. Tokenisation – including non-fungible tokens – allows also for fractionalisation of real estate assets, thus further liquefying the markets. The possibility of selling fractions of real estate assets is a financing tool that allows passive investors to participate in anticipated downstream appreciation and revenue streams while a single point of control over the build-out, use or sale of the asset remains in place.
A second key ambition of the platform and gaming schema is the suggestion and facilitation of explicit collective action initiatives, as well as the facilitation of self-evolving governance structures and procedures, potentially ushering in a liquid stakeholder democracy, in conjunction with market processes. The platform would lower the inevitable transaction/governance costs and do the heavy lifting of the initial formation and provisional structuration of the would-be ‘polity of the invested’.
The end-game or goal or of the design participation game is global value maximisation by allowing all future stakeholders – future owners, investors, tenants and end-users – to engage with and, in the aggregate, steer the development by trading both with the platform and with each other during the design stage. The facilitation of bi-lateral and multi-lateral space sharing agreements delivers individual and overall space utilisation efficiencies, as well as opportunities for positive spillover effects between the activities that intersect in these specifically shared spaces. Generic shared spaces, in contrast, cannot be relied upon to bring more positive than negative externalities. The same applies to the usual, often nearly random relative locations that result in the absence of the kind of information and engagement facilitated by the gaming platform proposed in this paper: they produce more friction than synergy.
In summary the new paradigm promises prosperity gains by introducing new markets, by expanding trading opportunities, by increasing liquidity via tokenisation, and finally via the facilitation of tailored, self-adapting urban planning and governance procedures for a liveable, prosperous, and sustainable urban environment.
Network Society: Urban Design Implications for Physical and Virtual Cities
Within contemporary post-fordist network society, the productivity of everybody depends on being plugged into professional and cultural networks that exist only in cities. What each of us is doing needs to be continuously recalibrated with what everybody else is doing, directly or indirectly. While this continuous adaptive re-calibration of economic activity is facilitated by the system of prices in the case of the ongoing output of products and services, in the R&D arena – where prices are not yet active – this requires inter-awareness via the intervisibility of research and development work and via communicative interaction. All further productivity gains depend on this, and it requires a new level of communicative density that is only available in cities. This is an important component of what economists measure as ‘agglomeration economies’.
Urban economist Edward Glaeser investigated what he called innovation clusters and emphasized the proliferation of productive ideas that cities throughout history had incubated and he observed that “even in our age of information technology, ideas are often geographically localized”(Glaeser 2011, location 812).[iii] As striking evidence Glaeser refers to a study that found patents exhibit a strong tendency to cite other patents that originated in geographically close proximity.
Since the neat division into work and leisure has disappeared and we feel the vital urge to remain connected to the network 24/7, it is as important for us to live in the city as it is inevitable for us to work in it. Everything piles into the centre, the more the better. This spells a new desire for an unprecedented degree of urban intensification.
The satisfaction of this demand requires new degrees of freedom for urban entrepreneurs (and their architects) who need this freedom to experiment, discover and create the best ways to weave the new urban texture and to garner the potential synergies through new intricate programmatic juxtapositions. Only an unhampered market process can be such a discovery process and has the information processing capacity and agility to weave a viable complex urban order for this new dynamic societal context. That’s why positive, physical modernist urban planning had to vanish. Planning was hence-force confined to operate negatively, by means of restricting private actors.
Productivity advantages of concentration, as hinted at above, are referred to as agglomeration economies. There are two kinds: direct economic benefits via firm-to-firm cooperation and indirect benefits of urban facility sharing. Agglomeration economies thus include transport efficiencies, wider and more diverse amenity sharing, the benefit of large labour pools enlarging the skill-base for companies, larger service markets with more variety of specialized services (long tails), increased innovation potential due to knowledge and technology spill-overs within and between industries, and most importantly cooperation between complementary firms/activities allowing for specialized knowledge industry hubs.
The demand for networking, knowledge exchange and ramifying cooperation is so great that urban concentration, business travel and internet-based telecommunication increased simultaneously. Since 2020, accelerated by the global pandemic, remote working and tele-conferencing expanded exponentially. This experience also catapulted the old idea of ‘cyberspace’ or the ‘metaverse’ into a breathtaking take-off. We believe that the development of the metaverse will spawn creative industry clusters within virtual worlds, as a complementary (perhaps partially substitutive) development to physical urban concentration, without, however, reversing the trend of physical concentration in knowledge economy hubs. In any event, the metaverse is as much a task domain of architecture as is the city[iv] (Schumacher, 2022). The formation of effective co-location synergies will also be an important aspect of metaverse urbanism. Therefore the envisioned Participatory Urban Development Platform (PUDP) discussed in this paper is also applicable in the metaverse. The radical degrees of freedom metaverses offer as politically unencumbered true start-up cities make this new domain an ideal test-case for the PUDP. Our recently launched metaverse and virtual start-up city Metrotopia (www.metrotopia.io) aspiring to become the go-to virtual industry hub for the whole design ecosystem – affords such a test case as soon as we move into our urban expansion mode. ZHA also designed the Liberland Metaverse addressing at the web3.0 ecosystem as target audience for a creative industry hub. A catalogue of modules was developed to facilitate the fit-out of the initial multi-tenant incubator building, anticipating the development of an in-world builder empowering user-generated content.
Fig.1:ZHA, Liberland Metaverse: Urban plan, event within incubator building, catalogue of socially functional interior fit-out modules, 2020
The unique aspect of the Liberland Metaverse project is that its purpose is to anticipate and facilitate the physical settlement of Liberland, as well as perhaps spawning franchises elsewhere, anticipating Balaji Srinivasan’s idea of a ‘network state’.
With respect to both physical and virtual urban agglomerations, the intricate social and functional ordering of activities is a matter for giving space to market-based self-sorting processes, premised on a new level of informational empowerment of all market participants. Participatory urban development platforms of the kind projected here offer a new mechanism for such vital self-organisation processes.
Community Creation
In advanced metropolitan societies, social networks are largely divorced from immediate locale. “Community” is increasingly becoming an unreal euphemism. Communities barely exist any longer. To the extent they still exist they linger on as an anachronism, mostly in relatively unproductive social milieux. Nobody knows their neighbours anymore. Residential co-location takes place blindly, without any prior acquaintance with, or even information about, neighbours. In our highly differentiated contemporary society self-sorting based on generic social categories or income levels is too blunt to overcome the problem of anonymity. The design of multi-tenant houses is usually focussed on how to maximize privacy within a condition of aggregation that is seen as cost-imposed necessity rather than as welcome benefit or opportunity. Neighbours experience each other primarily as nuisance, compromising privacy. Neighbourhoods as integrated communities must remain illusory unless new social mechanisms of neighbourhood formation are devised.
Is this anonymity and disappearance of community an inevitable condition of modern life or can this trend be countered? We believe that this trend can be countered with new computationally empowered social technologies. The aim here is to facilitate the creation of an urban community, comprising several subcommunities, like closely knit collaborative networks of densely co-located firms together with integrated residential communities.
Our proposed platform allows future residents to learn about each other and select each other as future neighbours and encourages potential buyers to reveal their identity and intentions to each other, both in words and via actions within a 3D gamified city building simulation. Potential buyers or tenants are making choices about locations, programme type, as well as selecting urban and architectural modules from a rich but coherently developed kit of parts. There are thus two mechanisms of personalisation at play: the self-tailoring of the apartment and the self-sorting of residents into affinity clusters. Both forms of personalisation are value enhancing.
Start-up Cities as Paradigm Application Case
One important precondition for the application of the envisioned Participatory Urban Development Platform (PUDP) and for the full unfolding of its potential is the availability of sufficient degrees of freedom to allow the urban development process to be shaped by the participatory discovery process. This implies the absence of preconceived and politically predetermined urban development outcomes as usually prescribed in municipal land-use/zoning plans. This condition of freedom from political impositions prevails in the metaverse. With respect to physical cities this condition is very rarely, if ever, realized. That’s why libertarian start-up city projects present a viable scenario and context for the elaboration of an urban game platform.
Naturally, radical innovations in terms of political as well as urban rule sets are easier to pull off with a fresh start, without infringing on any pre-existing population. This is Paul Romer’s idea of new cities with new rules to opt-in (Romer 2011, p.8)[v], rather than trying to implement reforms with existing populations. The new problem then emerges how to get a critical mass of people to join a nascent city, how to initiate a bootstrapping dynamic. The difficulty of a start-up city is that the political space that makes the desired innovation possible is usually rather remote from existing population centres. This means that the special innovations and freedoms must be substantial enough to motivate the move to a new city far away from current metropolitan hubs.
While Romer is no libertarian, he inspired some libertarians who, after years of sustained but largely unsuccessful political agitation, have come to the conclusion that a political shift within the advanced societies is too heavy lifting and ultimately rather unrealistic. A more realistic strategy might be, so the hypothesis of this group, to make a fresh start somewhere else, with a newly and voluntarily gathered, more entrepreneurial and less risk averse polity. In these special political zones, the unfulfilled economic promises of our technological era can take off and show the way. This is the idea of start-up cities or free private cities (Gebel 2023)[vi].
Most recent start-up city projects are motivated by the opportunity that is opening up due to the economic paralysis witnessed in all advanced societies since 2008. This phenomenon of a decline in economic growth predates the 2008 crisis and can be attributed to the anti-competitive accumulation and entrenchment of special interest groups in mature, stable economies. The gradual growth of such interest groups or ‘distributional coalitions’ (Olson 1982) has been identified as a primary reason for the general long-term secular stagnation that has been witnessed in the mature Western democracies, as hypothesized and argued for with evidence by economist/political scientist Mancur Olson[vii] (Olson 1982). The 2008 crisis did not break up these paralysing coalitions. To the contrary, since 2008 this process of political entrenchment of powerful distributional coalitions has only intensified.
Start-up cities become economically plausible to the degree to which existing cities are politically inflexible and resist innovations without which growth must stall. Innovations require the expansion of entrepreneurial degrees of freedom and are incompatible with the preponderance of politically entrenched incumbent interests. To the extent that there are sufficiently large pent up innovation potentials, new, unencumbered places that can unlock these potentials become economically viable, or at least economically plausible. To be sure, start-up cities are high-risk entrepreneurial ventures. But high-risk-high-return scenarios always attract at least some protagonists. In the case of start-up cities libertarian ideological zeal also comes into the mix, so that a veritable start-up city movement is emerging. ZHA is currently working with three such start-up city projects: Liberland (liberland.org), Praxis (cityofpraxis.com) and Honduras Propspera (honduraspropera.com).
The hypothesis is that people from all over the world, entrepreneurial people that feel stifled in our current overregulated, risk-averse societies, will come to join in these new city adventures. However, they cannot simply gather en masse as undifferentiated crowd. Cities are economic and cultural engines by way of bringing people together, but not by mixing everybody equally with everybody else. Cities bring people together in a structured way, generating co-location synergies via the process of market-based spatial self-sorting. Communicative interaction is always specific, highly selective with respect to purpose and partners, and always spatially framed and articulated. This spatial framing supports the definition of the situation, which is a precondition of all meaningful, productive communication.
Cities, via the distribution and articulation of both private and public spaces, should function as a differentiated spatial matrix for social self-sorting according to social similarity/affinity, occupation/collaboration, interests, cultural pattern, family status etc. The resultant spatio-social order is the more functional, the more degrees of freedom are available to the process of self-organisation. This spatio-social order can then be proficiently navigated and a plentiful supply of relevant partners for desired forms of communication are easy to find, undisturbed by irrelevant crowds. This spontaneously emerging functional order is the built environments prosperity enhancing contribution to society. This ordering process has been severely curtailed by the political overregulation of the urban development process. There is no real market process here. The result is an imposed, dysfunctional pseudo-order substituting for a real, functional, vital order. Clearing away the overbearing political control is a necessary step. But we can go a step further by enhancing the market-based process of urban self-organisation by means of inventing and developing new tools, mechanisms and processes.
Multiplayer Configurator for Honduras Prospera
At the onset of the global pandemic in early 2020, ZHA instantiated the Participatory Urban Development Platform (PUDP) described above for Honduras Prospera. The protagonists of Prospera were looking to catalyse the creation of an ‘’ideational community”, initially online, with a shared communal vision and synergy potentials as described previously. The intention is to bring this online community on-land, within the Prospera jurisdiction in Roatan, Honduras. The multiplayer configurator platform that ZHA customised and licensed to Prospera, can be considered a minimally sufficient product to test the hypothesis of using of a gamified platform to discover customer preferences, including co-location synergies. “Configurators are comprised of components (the building blocks), processes (the rules, and taxonomies), a knowledge base (datasets for economic evaluation) and people (the users)” (Louth et al, 2023). For detailed description of technical and implementation specifics, consult the related paper entitled ‘Configurator: A Platform for Multifamily Residential Design and Customisation’[viii] by the ZHA CODE research team (Louth et al, 2023).
The PUDP is a game-engine based interactive platform that was developed using Unreal Engine, a platform typically used to develop photo realistic video games. The PUDP or ‘the architectural game’ is being delivered via a standard web browser, whereby potential apartment buyers are able to login, build up their profile, and select the location of their house or apartment in a 3D grid or voxel array defined within the boundaries of the development site. Subsequently, they can build up their house or apartment by choosing from a menu of room modules and customise the interior layout of the chosen rooms via interior fit-out modules. Furthermore, they can augment their apartment by exterior add-ons such as balconies, roof-types etc. Most importantly, the choices each player makes are visible to other players, and players are able to invite ‘friends’ to ‘play’ the game and build something together, or at least in a coordinated way.
One of the important consequences of basing the PUDP on a real-time, photo-realistic video game engine is that it improves the confidence of non-expert buyers in both the viability of the proposed novel architecture and that eventually what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG). The WYSIWYG aspects extends to terrain, vegetation and climate of the site, all of which aids in improving the buyer confidence in typically a large financial transaction. Both the designers and potential end users constantly experience the spaces within immersive communicative interactions. They can meet and discuss the project within the immersive multi-player virtual simulation of the evolving design.
Equally importantly, the photo-realism foregrounds the need for a phenomenological basis of architectural and urban form. This means that the designed and then the built architectural configurations maintain legibility in the face of versatility and complexity, thereby facilitating easy orientation and intuitive navigation.
In the first real application of the configurator on a beautiful Roatan site overlooking the waterfront thirteen prospective buyers registered their preferences and made their selections. In this case our architectural design team subsequently had to reconcile many conflicting choices and adjust physically infeasible or difficult to engineer options. The reconciled option was subsequently engineered for construction, and the result is currently being tendered.
The price of the apartments was, in this case, not just based on their respective sizes, add-ons and fit-outs. The pricing of the space voxels was also dependent on their location in the 3D grid due to a number of considered factors: views of the ocean, exposure to summer sun, walking distance to amenities etc. The participants in the game were further informed about the preferences and selections of the other participants. The gaming process allowed for the discovery of preferred locations within the 3D grid, e.g. bulk heads, top level positions etc., as well as adjacency preferences with respect to other participants’ as potential neighbours.
Fig.2: Configurator for Honduras Prospera, Roatan, ZHA, 2020. A minimally sufficient instance of the Participatory Urban Development Platform deployed to aggregate occupiers of residential units and customise their layouts, prior to physical realisation.
In practical terms, with respect to both functional and physical criteria, the proposed apartments are constituted from a ‘kit of building parts’ such as walls, roofs, balconies etc. Furthermore, these kits of parts are assembled into pre-set space modules that can replace the voxel selections made by users in real time, via an intuitive drag & drop interface. Lastly, a shape-grammar encodes various allowed and architecturally relevant combinations of the spatial modules. The grammar ensures that allowed selections always make physical and functional sense. Each of the elements of the ‘kit of parts’ geometrically encodes the constraints of its physical realisation. Each selected element includes information of its production time, material and energy consumed in its production, construction costs etc. The actual fabrication of the modules happens locally, after selections have been confirmed and committed to, in a near-site micro-factory.
Fig.3: ZHA, Beyabu Configurator & Residential Development in Roatan, Honduras, 2020. The game of substituting voxels with pre-set composite modules, and a likely outcome of the participatory design game within the Configurator, visualised within the game-engine.
Fig.4: Kit-of-parts for Beyabu Configurator & Residential Development in Roatan, Honduras; implemented in timber via local robotic micro-factory.
City-as-a-Service
Agglomeration benefits of cities are by virtue of the high frequency interaction of human producers of goods, services, culture, and knowledge in a compact footprint. Coupling this wealth creation mechanism, with the increased need of accommodation for an increasing population looking for an urban life implies both densification of existing cities or the creation of new cities (UN report 2020, UCLA study 2022). The requirement to successfully cater for this rapid development pressure calls for low-risk sandboxes for urban experimentation. The PUDP provides a good ‘simulation’ environment to test both novel urban configurations that could aid the synergetic agglomeration as well as the architectural kit of parts that could enable its rapid physical realisation. The PUDP provides a robust platform that might become an integral tool for a City-As-A-Service (CAAS) business model.
One critical aspect of this whole approach is a new engagement with modularity. Modules are critical for both the participation of non-designers (developers and end-users) in the urban and architectural design process. We are building up a large catalogue of modules, both general as well as function-type specific. The system of models is ordered hierarchical and thus offers both integrated ready-made large space modules as well as the opportunity to build up space modules from smaller components, thereby gaining huge combinatorial variety. Further, all modules are set up as parametric modules, i.e. they are capable of dimensional tailoring as well as geometrical adaptation. The design of all modules is being shaped by structural and environmental engineering logics as well as by materiality and fabrication constraints. This implies that tectonism[ix] (Schumacher, 2023) is the architectural language of choice.
We are currently extending the Configurator deployment for Prospera to an urban district scale. Thus, instead of multiple individual apartment buyers as players, we are elaborating our platform to cater for stakeholder representatives such as a municipal master developer representing the collective interests of the planned community, and several other developers focussed on residential, commercial and office space real estate respectively. Correspondingly, the spatial pre-sets now include much larger chunks, up to complete buildings, as well as different function types, i.e. not only residential but also office and commercial assets.
Simulating likely Outcomes
PUDPs are cyber-physical platforms in that they couple the virtual spatial environments with their physical counterparts. In this sense, PUDPs are the inverse of the so-called Digital Twin technologies where the virtual spaces are typically a digital recreation of spaces that already exist physically. The coupling of virtual and physical spatial environments enables the use of the virtual worlds as gamified low-risk sandbox environment for rapid experimentation and iteration within plausible physical and economic conditions. The PUDP represents potential owners or end-users as players, encodes player preferences, augmented with decision support information, to arrive at choices and trades. The game platform can be deployed virtually for many interested parties to engage with the evolving project and each other. The thus enabled stakeholder co-creation represents a ‘crowd-sourcing’ of value-relevant end-user knowledges. This addresses one of the key issues of the built environment development process: the high risk of malinvestment, the wasting of valuable time and resources on buildings/locations that the envisioned users might not value.
The PUDP can also be helpful without, or in advance of, engaging actual players in the development game. The game invites automated testing in a game theoretic sense. The potential outcomes of the urban game can be simulated computationally by defining a set of representative agents/players with their respective preferences and economic strategies, and then see how the games would play out. Each player can be assumed to be a rational actor and proceed to simulate a sequence of most rational choices by each player at each turn. A related paper entitled ‘Interactive Geometric Simulation of 4D Cities proceeds to simulate the growth of a city based on such assumptions, specifically a game-theoretically rational land use allocation[x] (Weber at al, 2009).
By way of such agent-based simulations the PUDP becomes a potent tool of economic modelling and urban development exploration: different game rules can be tested as well as different player preferences and strategies. The results can then be compared with respect to a number of success metrics, as well as being intuitively appraised by expert urbanists and architects. The discovery and elaboration of optimal player strategies (in view of player preferences) can then be fed back as empowering computational support tools for the players when it comes to actual game play.
There are several related game platforms, which, although they have different purposes, inform our ongoing work on the PUDP: city and world builder games such as Sim City, Cities:Skylines and Minecraft, for educational and experimental use in urban design. There are also professional and validated planning tools that are instructive (Black arcs, UrbanSim).
The Unreal Engine based VU.City platform in London being an accepted format for official digital planning applications and approvals, bodes well for PUDP to participate in a tangible pathway to physical realisation.
Conclusion
The Participatory Urban Development Platform couples the social, exploratory and network-effect benefits of online worlds with the effective utilization of immersive digital twin technologies: On the one hand, such platforms provide a low risk, online environment geared towards the active, participatory incorporation of the wisdom and the often only implicit, situated knowledge of professionals and end-users. On the other hand, due to the modular approach allowing for optimisation, they provide for expedient and resource efficient physical realization and operation.
In summary, the principal innovations of the Participatory Urban Development Platform are:
- End-user or representative ‘players’ that capture the socio-economic preferences/motivations of the stakeholders of a prospective urban development, city district or start-up city.
- High-performance, architectural system of modules (kit of parts) that can provide feedback on the economic and ecological costs of physical realisation.
- All modules are parametric (adaptive) and optimised in terms of engineering and fabrication logics, and articulated in accordance with the paradigm/style of tectonism.
- Open-ended urban playing field as search space for socially optimal land-use allocations.
- Gamified multi-author design, communication and exchange process that maximizes the utilisation of the dispersed stakeholder knowledge for enhanced product-market fit via consumer co-production.
- Immersive and engaging real-time photorealistic rendering of the evolving urban configurations implied in the participants selections.
- Garnering of latent co-location synergies and facilitating space sharing efficiencies, for both physical and virtual (metaverse) industry clusters as well as urban communities.
- The platform is also an urban economics research tool affording the simulation of urban configurations that aggregate and integrate variously defined stakeholder interests/strategies.
The claim put forward here is that these innovations, presuming political green light, deliver the set of necessary and sufficient mechanisms to maximize all stakeholder/end-user interests, i.e. maximising the total social value of the invested resources, including land resources.
Furthermore, the Participatory Urban Development Platform provides a computational framework and vehicle to research and reason operationally about critical aspects of the political economy of city building with a new level of precision. PUDP is therefore not only a CASS business tool but also a tool of research and academic discourse.
End.
[i] Schumacher, Patrik, Autopoeisis of a Residential Community, in: Negotiate My Boundary – Mass-customisation and Responsive Environments Ed. by Brett Steele and +RAMTV, AA publications, London 2002
[ii] Shajay Booshan & Alicia Nahmad Vazquez, Homes, Communities and Games – Constructing Social Agency in Our Urban Futures, AD Special Issue: Urban Futures: Designing the Digitalised City, Wiley & Sons, May/June 2020
[iii] Glaeser, Edward. Triumph of the City: How Urban Spaces Make Us Human . Pan Macmillan, London 2011
[iv] Schumacher, Patrik, The Metaverse as Opportunity for Architecture and Society: Design Drivers and Core Competencies, in: Architectural Intelligence, Tongji University, Springer, 2022
[v] Romer, Paul, Technologies, Rules, and Progress: The Case for Charter Cities, Center for Global Development, 2010, https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/1423916_file_TechnologyRulesProgress_FINAL.pdf
[vi] Gebel, Titus, Free Private Cities: Making Governments Compete For You, 3rd edition, Aquila Urbis, Waldorf, Germany 2023
[vii] Olson, Mancur, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, Yale University Press, New Haven 1982
[viii] Louth, H.D., Fragachan, C., Bhooshan, V. and Bhooshan, S., 2023. Configurator: A Platform for Multifamily Residential Design and Customisation. In Architecture and Design for Industry 4.0: Theory and Practice (pp. 769-805). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
[ix] Schumacher, Patrik, Tectonism – Architecture for the Twenty-First Century, Images Publishing, Melbourne 2023
[x] Weber et.al. Interactive Geometric Simulation of 4D Cities, EUROGRAPHICS 2009, Volume 28 (2009), Number 2