Relational Urbanism

THEORY

Relational urbanism looks for modes of operation which may cast light on the link between material processes, spatial design and decision making mechanisms within urban design and planning. Questions of control, subject of design and architectural urbanism become central in the different research and professional projects undertaken so far.

The research work explores concepts defined in the disciplines of cybernetics, urban and political ecology, systems theory and engineering, trying to bring logics and modes of operation into the way we think, design and manage our cities. In this sense, ideas such as feedback, learning, and autocatalysis amongst others are built into mechanisms that help us build a critical understanding of the links between socioeconomic factors, political decision-making processes and the spatial definition of the city

RELATIONAL URBAN MODELS

In this kind of work, the projects emerge after setting up a relational model, where the links between different variables are turned into parameters which can be readily controlled within a user friendly interface.

Each project requires a new set of variables / relations , making the relational urbanism approach a lens through which contemplate or conceptualize urbanism and the design of cities.

The capacity of coordinating different inputs (traffic, infrastructure, economical, detailed typology) within an easy user interface allows the model to become the base where time-based discussions about different processes (economic, perceptual and others) that happen across the territory and metropolitan areas.

OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

Optimization techniques focus on cases where the external conditions makes the optimization of certain parameters prevail along the design process. In those cases, architecture and engineering fuse together in an innovative process of creation.

Architecture itself takes form beyond its functional and structural solution and harmonizing with other ecologies of the city; architecture spread further its own limits to be at the same time politics, infrastructural and environmental.

RECONSIDERING THE TYPE

This section pretends to go beyond the conventional typologies that nowadays prevail in the market; trying to propose new types according to the contemporary demands from the society and the environment.

The question on typology is the question of the nature of architecture itself and it is each generation responsibility to establish a theory about the essence of architecture and all its attendant problems. Nowadays, the major questions regarding architecture lie beyond the physical limits of the type itself.

Architecture, understood as part of a more complex milieu, find its contemporary challenges in its indissoluble borders with other urban ecologies. It is in this line where architecture becomes innovative at the same time repeatable and unique by its local conditions.

STUDIES ON COLLECTIVE FORM

Working with relational urban models prompts small-scale design directly linked into architectural scale into the thick of the discussions around the large scale urban design and strategic thinking within cities.

Studies on Collective Form focus on linking type and architecture with proposals of collective form and systemic approaches of urban composition.

It stresses on the significance of parameters such as density, massing, program or scale; and how these parameters can take form in the urban fabric. Familiarizing with such concepts enables to design certain strategies for the city linking architectural design to a wider ecology of relations.

Relational Urbanism