Indeterminacy: Self-Organisation and the Urban Landscape

Abstract

The possibility exists to utilise and develop notions of indeterminacy and self-organisation in a fabric that facilitates the urban landscape to emerge as a set of systems operating under dynamic, temporal and fluctuating conditions. This, then, constructs a set of circumstances that enable us to discover how the nature of the urban landscape can be transformed into a formless, dynamic and complex condition, where the indeterminate nature of landscape is offered as a replacement model of order. It suggests a shift from an ordered and rigid fabric, to a set of systems that emerge from an existing context, allowing access to a new form of urban landscape.Designers often operate within a strict set of conditions where time, space and development are considered as separate linear devices and do not necessarily merge and influence one another. Consequently, I suggest a shift from the modernist ambition for development to a new form of practice, where space is transformed into the complexities of time.