Open World City | Rio De janeiro + Space, Time and Play

With +12 million people and beautiful landscape, Rio De Janeiro sets an example of a charming mega-city. However, it also sets an example of a disconnected city with many social and natural boundaries. This observation comes in contrast to the idea which we have found in “Space, Time and Play”  book that  the cities in the video gaming world are border-less and connected, creating an open-world city experience. Combining those two notions together rises the question of how we can create a continuous city growing horizontally and vertically through opening new territories and unlocking growth patterns, in respect to the natural givens, that make the citizen a super hero in his own city.

The challenge was to search for a code that could translate the idea of connected city without borders. Cellular Automata’s rules could change our perception of our city planning’s rules if we took a closer look at how the idea of  a simple cell can proliferate to create such complex connected patterns. One of the emerging ideas  is how can we can understand this complexity as a way to create this open-world city? How this can help the citizen to interact positively as a superhero in his own mega-city?

(Please check the video for a detailed look into the process of coding the growth of a mega city: http://youtu.be/sIvE5t22Y6E )

Applying 2D CA  rules with additional rules for a city like Rio, can give brilliant solutions not only for the city growth pattern but also to its citizen. If we take the mountains/forest  as a starting point, then the city emerges in respect to them; they are no longer regarded as a physical border but rather a different level of the city where urbanization can be harmonious and respectful to the surrounding, not timid nor intrusive. However, the urban fabric continues and doesn’t stop, to create in the next level a new pattern that can create urban clusters of a medium density that allow the citizen to move freely from the built and the unbuilt through series of interconnected and intersected open and closed spaces. The complexity grows as we unlock a new level of the city, a more dense, favelas -like urbanization. The relationship between the unbuilt and built stays the same to ensure the continuity of the fabric, but the scale changes allowing more flexibility to increase the number of inhabitants and create a more crowded experience of the city for the superhero-citizen.

The interpretation of the code into the real world comes in a flexible system of adding, changing and substituting interconnected city elements such as blocks, voids and fabric to create a border-less city with a game-like approach of it’s growth.