Urban Evolutionary Morphology: The Vestige City

Abstract

The city is changing: no longer is it an aesthetic creation, nor purely an industrial powerhouse. It is becoming a living, breathing super-organism, with a myriad of multiple, competing functions enabling the city to dwell within its particular ecology. As a super-organism, the future city will be defined more by its metabolism, than purely its primary function or spatial form. These biospheric flows of energy and materials will drive the new city and create new synergies for living. This book develops the composition of the evolutionary and the city through architectural and landscape insertions in the Greengate area of Salford, Manchester UK. These designs will engage with the idea of the city as biotic and as a host for biota as well as humans. These new ‘natural’ landscapes will be resilient, through new biodiversity that not only provides a productive landscape, but also links and extends the city’s function and liveability. We have been wrong to force designs on the city: as a superorganism, the new city will be born, not made.