Designing Networks Cities: Inclusive, Hyper-Connected, Emergent, and Sustainable Urbanism

designing networks citiespresents a sophisticated, multi-disciplinary, and multi-dimensional approach to urban design. Emerging from years of practice, experimentation, and research by designers (landscape architects, urban planners, urban designers and architects), this approach engages with contemporary thought across a number of disciplines to re-invent the entrenched blunt instruments of the city making process.

A cry for flexible, sharp-instruments in urban design, designing networks cities presents a multi-dimensional way of seeing the essential components of the city (form, space-time, order and aesthetics). It purposefully links traditional architectural design derivation mechanisms to urban design, in the hope that cities will not only be pragmatic, but also become sophisticated iconographically, poetically, and syntactically. It provides the tools to enable decision making within a multiplicity of constraints and opportunities: a philosophy of becoming, not being; a science of dynamic systems, not stasis; and an art of sensations, not subjectivity. And finally, and most importantly, it argues why it is important that cities embrace these multiple dimensions of society on a planet that is facing increasing environmental challenges: an economics focused on equity for all, not for some more than others; a politics supporting a genuine representational democracy, not one representing the overly influential; and a culture [including history] that embraces difference, not one that encourages division.

designing networks cities not only provides the means to identify these issues and a methodology to deal with them within a complex emerging co-existence, but also demonstrates the development of cities that embrace and respond to the complexities of life in what some are calling the Anthropocene.

Steve Whitford was a director of Cocks Carmichael Whitford Architects, a renowned Australian
design focused practice from 1970 to 2000. His projects received numerous awards for their architectural and urban design excellence from both the State Chapter and the National Council of the then Royal Australian Institute of Architects. Concurrently, Steve taught at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and the University of Melbourne (UoM). After completing his Master of Planning and Urban Design in 1996, he ran studios and lectured in urban and architectural design and theory at the UoM. He also held visiting professorships at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Bordeaux, Shenyang Architecture and Civil Engineering University, Tsinghua University, and Nanjing University. In 2010 Steve became a partner at BAU, and was involved in a series of awardwinning urban design and architectural competition entries and projects. He may one day complete his PhD at the University of Melbourne, focusing on the intersections of Deleuze, the complexity sciences, and the sublime, with urbanism.

James Brearley is the founding director of Brearley Architects + Urbanists (BAU) and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University. He studied building and architecture at University of Melbourne (UoM) and at RMIT University, graduating in 1989. He worked in London for Will Alsop prior to commencing private practice in 1992. With an interest in urban scale and the transformative power of public space design James completed a Master of Planning and Urban Design at UoM in 1998. In 2002 BAU won the Jin Qiao Sports Leisure Centre competition and opened a studio in Shanghai. James spent most of the following decade living in China to manage a growing number of large-scale projects. James is the co-author of Networks Cities, 2010, an
investigative design publication of research, theory, and practice of contemporary Chinese urbanism. He has led a broad range of award-winning projects in urban design, landscape architecture and architecture.