Morphogenesis in urban design: The path to sustainability is through a fundamental change to the way we build our world

Abstract

Urban design is called upon to contribute to making the world more sustainable, resilient, and just. This aim is shared across urban design's many approaches and schools of thought. However, the response to the pressing contemporary problems of sustainability, resilience, and social justice routinely emphasizes the need to develop innovative tools and extend the reach of advanced technological solutions into increasingly larger domains of our lives and of the environments around us. This paper maintains that the future of urban design, particularly in the current historical transition beyond the Post-War world order, should be explored through a critical reconsideration of the root causes of the current unsustainable reality. We briefly present the disciplinary background of such an operation by recalling the concept of deep sustainability, and its various expressions in the urban design traditions, and highlighting the legacy of “radical” approaches to urban design. A particularly relevant critique of a reductionist, “mechanistic” approach to sustainability was presented by Christopher Alexander twenty years ago, in a memorable talk delivered at the Schumacher Lecture series in Bristol, UK. In his lecture, Alexander proposes the necessary departure from current building and development practices towards an “authentically sustainable” morphogenetic building process. We propose to re-examine Alexander’s talk at the Schumacher Lecture as a fundamental contribution to framing a responsible pedagogy in urban design. We do so by critically summarizing its main conceptual achievements. We then highlight how Alexander’s legacy, not limited to the Schumacher talk, frames the cosmological framework within which the evolutionary nature of the built environment can be recognized and elaborated. We then propose a way to elaborate on the concept of evolution in the domain of urban morphology analysis by introducing recent research in Urban MorphoMetrics and Urban Evo Devo. This forefront research explores the operationalization of Alexander’s Wholeness seeking System A within an environment dominated by a mechanistic System B. We highlight its impact on urban design practice by the generation of evidence-based urban design coding. Thus, we show how the integration of urban morphology and design is a key move towards a new, evolutionary urban design pedagogy.