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Invisible City In-Between

September 2023 | Bartlett Urban Design Silver Medal Winner

Designers:
Dongchen Du | Ruijia Xiong

Tutor: Duration:
Julian Besems 8 Months, 2023

An AI-assisted urban design research project that develops an alternative workflow through unsupervised machine learning. Urban theories, narratives, and spatial data are translated into speculative prototypes through an ongoing negotiation between top-down and bottom-up urban thinking, with Istanbul serving as the project’s testing context.

01 — ComplexCITY: Research Background

In 1961, Jane Jacobs presented a conflict between top-down modernist urban planners and bottom-up urban activists like herself. Likewise, this project conceives the city as a process of conflict between these two perspectives.

02 — MYTHodology: Deconstruction of Invisible City

In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan discuss fifty-five imagined cities from two contrasting perspectives: lived experience and systemic control. Their dialogue reflects the tension between bottom-up and top-down urbanism. Visualised here through the language of Ottoman miniature painting.

03 — MYTHodology: Theoretical Design Agents

Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are reconstructed as two theoretical design agents. Each is informed by a curated corpus of sixty urban texts: one centred on local agency, informality and everyday life, and the other on governance, infrastructure, systemic planning and metropolitan control.

SOM Visualization for Bottom-Up/Macro Polo.

SOM Visualization for Top-Down/Kublai Khan.

04 —MYTHodology: Dialogue as Urban Prototype

The interaction between the two agents is treated as an urban prototype in itself. Rather than producing a single solution, their dialogue exposes competing interpretations of the same urban condition, allowing the city to emerge through disagreement, negotiation, and the coexistence of contradictory positions.

05 — MYTHodology: The Designer as Negotiator

The workflow begins with the designer entering an urban narrative, spatial observation, or personal memory. Each agent responds based on its respective theoretical dataset. The designer can then select, combine, or replace elements from either response, actively negotiating the balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches to urban design.

06 —Three Operative Dimensions

The reformulated narrative is translated into three operative dimensions. Setting Name defines spatial or architectural typology; Actors establish programme, occupation and activity; and Scene Form determines appearance, atmosphere and formal character. Together, they transform abstract language into manipulable design components.

‘Then equilibrium must be created out of opposites. Such inner peace as men gain must represent a tension among contradictions and uncertainties […] A feeling for paradox allows seemingly dissimilar things to exist side by side." Robert Venturi.

07 —Semantic Translation

Urban imagery, architectural databases, video material and online data are converted into textual descriptions through image captioning, action recognition and semantic matching. Text becomes an intermediary between otherwise disconnected datasets, linking urban narratives to typologies, programmes and formal references.

Setting Name — Typology

The spatial or architectural type within which the urban condition takes place.
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Actors — Programme

The people, activities, events and forms of occupation that activate the space.

Scene Form — Appearance

The visual qualities, spatial atmosphere and formal characteristics of the scene.

08 — Misinterpretation as Design Material

Artificial intelligence can identify semantic similarities, but it cannot fully understand the cultural, spatial or social context from which data originates. The resulting mismatches are not treated simply as errors; they are understood as expressions of the conflicts already embedded within cities, where systems, memories and everyday uses rarely align.

09 — Multiple Cities in an Instant

By combining geolocated narratives, theoretical agents, semantic matching and generative imaging, the workflow can produce multiple interpretations of the same location in an instant. These conflicting versions resist a single definitive image of the city and instead reveal urbanism as an open-ended process of continuous negotiation.

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