Warsaw as an Emergent Structure is an initiative to acknowledge that a city is a complex system. It is also a book featuring texts from researchers and theoreticians from various fields, centered around the concept of complexity in urban environment. Ola Wasilkowska, who initiated it, aims at creating a multidisciplinary round table, aiming at developing new means of understanding the city and managing it’s growth.

Ola Wasilkowska commissioned Michal Piasecki to write a prototype of an online platform for planning negotiations. Em_Wwa 1.0 aims to be an amalgam of top-down and bottom-up development. The municipality is able to control global parameters such as the percentage of particular functions on the site and the size of the new developments. Developers can seek places for their initiatives using a cellular automata-like algorithm, which evaluates their propositions accordingly to what has already been generated and to lighting, transportation and accessibility constraints. Citizens can engage in the process by creating their own propositions of developments and commenting those generated by others.

The site used in the EM WWA 1.0 prototype is Plac Defilad – a large square in the heart of Warsaw. The square surrounds a once controversial monument of architecture in favor of ideology – the Palace of Culture. Numerous competitions for a master plan of this square where organized to date, but it remains undeveloped as it gradually morphed from a site into a symbol.

The software was written in Processing.

John Frazer’s “An Evolutionary Architecture” from 1995 is an obligatory read for anyone interested in the amalgam of evolutionary computation and design. In other words anyone interested in the potential of “breeding designs” using evolutionary algorithms (genetic algorithms belong to this category). I was very happy to see it available online for free from the AA website.