Growing Cities

The goal for this project was to build a framework in which city growth could be simulated in an emergent process. Instead of predetermining the sizes and locations of open spaces or the densities and heights of buildings in certain neighborhoods or the prescribed segregation of different building use-types (zoning) across the city, BlackBox Studio was interested in creating a system of lower level rules that would resolve these types of issues in a more organic manner.

Just as a forest naturally finds an equilibrium that accommodates many different species of plant and animal life in a highly interdependent ecosystem, BlackBox was interested in simulating a comparable ecosystem for a city. Instead of plants that process and exchange resources with other plants, we have buildings that support various economic, social, civic, logistic, and industrial activities, which all need certain amounts of each other and must accommodate and process resources (energy, money, people) in a sustainable manner.

In this beta development of the framework, the process of growing the city is iterative—one new building is added to the city with each iteration. At each iteration a probabilistic algorithm is used to determine the use-type of the new building and the parcel on which it will sit. The principal metric within the system is the “happiness” of the building: the more happy the building, the faster it grows taller; the less happy the building, the faster it grows shorter. A building is happier, for example, when it likes the use-types of the buildings around it, and when its neighbor buildings are also happy. A building is happier if it is afforded good views. A building is happier when it is not too old or if it is next to a park. The development of these types of happiness rules is something that would ultimately happen in collaboration with urban designers, city planners, real estate professionals, demographic experts, anthropologists, etc.

Because the buildings are constantly checking the factors that affect their happiness levels and adjusting their heights based on the continuous changes going on in the context around them, the whole system is constantly in a state of flux. It may stabilize over time, but not until after whole sections of the city have gone though growth, decay, and redevelopment cycles.


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