Urban rejuvenation : a contemporary urban topology for the information age

A changing perception based on the appreciation for information in our era allows a broader idea and different understanding of life as a system driven by the flow of information. Simultaneously, our understanding of 'the' urban was broadened. It enabled us to perceive urban structures as living organisms beyond their physical manifestation and separated from human control. Like species, our cities are great products of evolutionary forces and contain invaluable information worth preserving.When writing about urban spaces, urban is understood as a system which is constituted not so much by built forms and infrastructures, but as a heterogeneous field that is constituted by intervention and lines of forces and action. These lines form the coordinates of an urban topology that is not based on the human body and its movements in space alone, but also on relational acts and events within the urban system. These relational acts can be economic, political, technological or tectonic processes, as well as acts of communication. The urban is therefore quite different from the physically defined spaces of events and movements.The focal point of this paper is to explore the relationship between the spaces of movement, the spaces of events and the relational systemic 'spaces'. It will be attempted to identify fundamental processes behind urban design. Rules are derived from connective principles in complexity theory, systems theory, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence.Department of ArchitectureThesis (M. Arch.