CITY SYNTHESIS

Dennis Crompton – A Guide to Archigram 1961 - 74

The city is a living organism – pulsating – expanding and contracting, diving and multiplying. 
The complex functioning of the city is integrated by its natural computer mechanism. This mechanism is at once digital and biological, producing rational and random actions, reactions and counter-reactions. The computer programme is a conglomeration of logical reasoning, intuitive assumption, personal preference, chance, sentiment and bloody-mindedness which is assimilated and interpreted. The solutions follow automatically.

The trigger to the computer programme is social man. He creates the City Scene at conscious and subconscious reaction levels by his own complexity. He is identified with the natural computer and is an integral part of its data processing operation – but they are NOT ONE -- each has an individual nature which functions independently. At its logical (or illogical?) limit this division of nature causes the DEATH of both. The city is ascendant when they are in unison, in decay when they divide.

The feed-in for city synthesis has three stages:

1. Primary information about population: birth rate, death rate, unit size and habits. Also city site data: location, topography, geological and geographical conditions, the inter-relation with other urban complexes. The overall network is formed from this information and then absorbs it, processes it, and throws out the subsequent stages.
2. Secondary information: health, housing, marriages, fertility rate, crime rate, journey to work, wages and salaries. Rates of development and obsolescence, density, communications, land values. At this stage the network is modified and amplified, and the substance of the city created.
3. Trends, conditioning of the city and population caused by problems and solutions resulting from stages 1 and 2. Movement within the complex; personal action, shopping, entertainment (personal and mass), recreation, market survey, bus timetables, etc.

The last stage is a continuing feed-back in which every facet of city life is relevant to the whole, values are relative to the observer. The absolute ceases to exist after stage 1. The expansion and contraction of centres and suburbs, the dead ends, the exciting and the mundane – all are now an integral part of the city scene, enveloped in a net of inter-relationships ultimately controlled by the Natural Computer.

SITUATION
This thing we call Living City contains many associative ideas and emotions and can mean many things to many people: liking it or not liking it, understanding it or no understanding it, depends on these personal associations. There is no desire to communicate with everybody, only with those whose thoughts and feelings are related to our own. What we feel and think about the city is not new in the sense that it was unthought of before, but only in that the idea of the Living City has not been acted upon before by our generation. In the second half of the 20th century, the old idols are crumbling, the old precepts strangely irrelevant, the old dogmas no longer valid. We are in pursuit of an idea, a new vernacular, something to stand alongside the space capsules, computers and throw-away packages of an atomic/electronic age. Situation concerns the state of change within the city environment caused by the fluctuating come/go of people and things over a time scale. All of us find the Living City in Situation. An awareness of the city is necessary before we can move forward.

Situation is concerned with environment changes and activity within the Living City context, giving characteristics to defined areas. Important in this is the precept of Situation as an ideas-generator in creating the Living City. Cities should generate, reflect and activate life, their environment organized to precipitate life and movement. Situation – the happenings within spaces in the city, the transient throw-away objects, the passing presence of cars and people – is as important, possibly more important, than built demarcation of space. Situation can be caused by a single individual, by groups or a crowd. Situation can be traffic, its speed, direction, classification. Situation may occur with a change of weather, the time of day or night. As the spectator changes, the moving eye sees. Situation is related to individual perception, and the place of the individual in the environment. This time/movement/situation thing is important in determining our whole future attitude to the visualization and realization of city; it can give a clue, a key, in our effort to escape the brittle ingratiating world of the architect/ aesthete, to break away into the real world and take in the scene