ANALOGIES: Analogues of Cities

这个可行性账户的目的是开发，深化，实现和传播类比或“共享抽象”的作用，我们不断和例行地开发和推测复杂系统的功能。在本质上定义不清的系统中，这一点再明显不过了，这些系统表现出一定程度的复杂性，在这种复杂性中，科学上的简约法则很难产生。事实上，复杂性理论在很大程度上已经发展到将更抽象的结构映射到这样的系统上，并通过类比来利用它们的对应关系。城市是最好的例子。事实上，人体与城市之间的类比可以追溯到柏拉图，并且一直是自列奥纳多达芬奇和维特鲁威时代以来，建筑师和规划师语言中普遍存在的各种抽象概念的核心。城市的形式和身体代表类似的系统，它们的形状代表从经济核心（中央商务区与心脏）向其部分（辐射状路线和街道与动脉和静脉）输送能量的系统，这一概念已深深嵌入城市规划的修辞中超过世纪。我们在这个项目中要做的是在城市的运作方式和各种电气，机械，生物和人类系统之间开发一系列关键的类比，如流体流动，势能和电力，以及动力机制，深入探索这些类比迄今为止还不可能。我们现在有了一个名副其实的共享抽象的聚宝盆，现在是开始将这些抽象集合起来并正式化的时候了，这样，首先，它们将为开发用于检查城市功能和结构的许多模型提供最佳方法。因此，深化这些类比是我们的首要任务。我们的第二个目标是将这些类比转化为我们可以以有形形式实现的模型或类比，使用有形这个术语来跨越材料和数字。构建这种类似物的过程是相当新的。在过去，这些都是以一种特殊的方式开发的，但在这个项目中，我们将尽可能地以象征性的方式开发它们，然后将它们转化为物理和数字模拟。第三个任务是将这些模型定位在一个环境中，包括我们自己的跨学科团队以及专业利益相关者在内的用户可以从这些模型中学习，提高他们的理解力，解决问题的能力和设计的力量。根据帕特里克·格迪斯爵士的榜样，我们将把迷你媒体实验室称为“21世纪世纪展望塔”，他是这种参与模式的早期倡导者。这个环境将是便携式和可复制的，我们将寻求与利益相关者在社区使用UCL的参与倡议的灯塔，一旦该项目已经开发了必要的材料。

This Feasibility Account is designed to develop, deepen, realise and disseminate the role of analogies or 'shared abstractions' that we continually and routinely make in developing and speculating upon the way complex systems function. Nowhere is this more evident that in systems that are intrinsically ill-defined, manifesting a degree of complexity where the scientific canons of parsimony are difficult to engender. Indeed complexity theory has been largely developed to map more abstract structures onto such systems and to exploit their correspondence through analogies. Cities are the example par excellence. Indeed analogies between the human body and the city go back to Plato, and have remained central to the sorts of shared abstractions that have pervaded the language of architects and planners since the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Vitruvius. The notion that the form of the city and the body represent similar systems in which their shape represents the system for transporting energy to their parts (radial routes and streets v. arteries and veins) from their economic cores (central business district v. heart) has been deeply embedded in the rhetoric of city planning for more than century. What we will do in this project is develop a series of key analogies between the way cities function and various electrical, mechanical, biological and human systems such as fluid flows, potential energies and electricity, and dynamic mechanisms, exploring these analogies in a depth that has not been possible hitherto. We now have a veritable cornucopia of such shared abstractions and it is opportune to begin to assemble these and formalise them so that, in the first instance, they will inform as to the best ways forward in developing the many models that are used to examine the functions and structure of cities. Deepening these analogies is thus our first quest. Our second is to translate these analogies into models or analogues that we might realise in tangible form, using the term tangible to span the material and the digital. The process of constructing such analogues is quite new. In the past, these have been developed in an ad hoc manner but in this project we will develop them in symbolic terms as far we can and then translate them into physical and digital analogues. The third quest is to locate these in an environment that users who will include our own inter-disciplinary team as well as professional stakeholders can learn from these models, improving their understanding, their problem solving capabilities and the power of their designs. We will call the mini-media lab An Outlook Tower for the 21st Century after the example of Sir Patrick Geddes who was an early exponent of this mode of participation. This environment will be portable and reproducible and we will seek to engage with stakeholders in communities using UCL's Beacon of Engagement initiative, once the project has developed the requisite materials.