TOWARD TEMPORAL AND PUNCTUAL URBAN
REDEVELOPMENT IN DYNAMIC, INFORMAL
CONTEXTS
An Adaptive Masterplan Driven by Architectural Interventions
Using Multiagent Modeling
TREVOR RYAN PATT
1
Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore
1
trpatt@gmail.com
Abstract. This paper presents design research speculating on new plan-
ning approaches for informal urban sites that enables coordinated plan-
ning to operate within the realm of spontaneous, bottom-up redevelop-
ment. In opposition to the /tabula rasa/ Modernist development, this
project reacts to the dynamic metabolism of the village and engages with
the rapid turnover of the built environment of the village as a mechanism
through which to implement incremental redevelopment. A radical re-
orientation of the object of masterplanning, this replaces the singular im-
age or document as the guiding authority with a collection of opportunis-
tic adaptations, temporal sequences, and localized procedures. Enabling
this approach is a computational approach that analyzes the morphology
of the public space network to identify opportunities to address issues in
the composition of the village. A multiagent system driven by weighted
random walks through the circulation network conducts local analyses
of the urban fabric while changes are made and proposes potential mod-
ifications to discrete areas. The model simulates the potential for such
a planning tool to be used over a long time span and updated with em-
pirically gathered data, having the benefit of flexibility and resilience
in the face of the changing and unregulated conditions in the context of
informal urbanism.
Keywords. Generative design; responsive masterplanning; informal
urbanism; network analysis; agent-based modeling.
P. Janssen, P. Loh, A. Raonic, M. A. Schnabel (eds.), Protocols, Flows and Glitches, Proceedings of the
22
nd
International Conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia
(CAADRIA) 2017, 221-231. © 2017, The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research
in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.