Urban-ISMS: Narration and Instrumentality in Paradigmatic Practice
In this lecture, hosted by University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, Tom Verebes presents a model of design practice with complex reciprocities between design propositions by OCEAN CN, and a series of editorial and curatorial projects. Understood to create and respond to platforms and audiences, this form of practice is a basis from which to conceive and debate paradigmatic formulations of urbanism. It is within and between the flows and exchanges between the making of design projects and editorial and curatorial practices, that a research problematic has been sustained on the limitations of urban masterplanning. The dilemmas of innovation and/versus positivism (Utopianism or Not in Urbanism) arise, posited with an alternative set of narratives and instruments, both mutually substantiating components of a practice searching for consolidations of paradigmatic moments. This lecture will present the relation of conceptual paradigms as ontologies for urbanism, to their associated experimental design approaches and methodologies. As such, this body of work oscillates restlessly between imagination and computation, between projection and calculation. Parametric Urbanism, The Adaptive City, and Mass-Customised Cities, are understood to be inter-dependent, rather than independent ontologies with discreet methods. The proposition emerging is of an interactive, intelligent urban model, and its repercussions for the emerging discourses and methods of the Smart City.