The Downtown Business Club - Concept

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2015

Maybe you were high or drunk last night. You still have more than eighty dollars to make it till the rent is due in three weeks. Your body aches. You spent one of your dollars for mushroom barley soup and buttered challah bread at Kiev for your 6:00 a.m. lunch. You worked on your band/comic book/monologue/design/play/ film/painting/poems/graffiti/flyer all afternoon. Your boy/girlfriend is somewhere else. Night has come and your senses are sharp. You know what's out there. Soon you're dressed, out and heading east. Straighter friends said you were crazy to live east of Second Avenue: "Do you want to get shot?" CBGB's is over and you're not that comfortable at Club 57. You don't wear all black anymore. You can wear what's fun: something masculine/feminine.

The game in its broadest sense is an amusing way to spend time in every field. But the thing that breaks the amusement is the certain, general rules of the game against rapidly changing world in the scale of urban. That is why the pressure on the individuals can be felt. They are independent from each others in a metropolis, due to reach the minimum values of life to meet their basic needs from the time that they prefer to live in fixed rules of ordinary games which are vicious.

International Journal of Architectural Computing, 2007

This research includes a new teaching proposal for architecture and geography, based on Systems Theory and Dynamics Systems, aimed at improving the understanding of the complex structure and dynamics of the city. SimCity, a game of strategy that allows us to design and to plan the city, is used as the software, with the aim of conducting didactic experiments, and integrating the complex relations that configure the city. The methodology incorporated theoretical and experimental stages, and concluded with a simulation exercise. The exercise had a very good reception, as a method for learning and research, creating a great aptitude for generating good research questions, by making many variables visible simultaneously. The research has developed, and participants have, subsequently, been exposed to the second version of the course, where new concepts are being integrated (emergence and cellular automata) to deepen the theoretical base, and to allow further analysis and experimentation...

Journal of the American Planning Association, 1997

Artificial processes for locating urban activities based on simple rules pertaining to local circumstances give rise to complex global patterns that mirror the spatial organization ofcities. These systems are called Cellular Automata (CA). They provide a useful means o f articulating the way highly decentralized decision-making can be employed in simulating and designing robust urban forms. CA can be easily programmed in a variety o f software, and as such provide a suggestive way o f exploring actual as well as optimal patterns and plans. This primer provides a pedagogic guide to these ideas and to potential computer applications.

Bryant Park is New York City's only 100% privately funded and managed 'public' park, making it an oft looked-to model of public-private partnerships. This paper examines the everyday workings of the park using ethnographic and archival data, and criminological and urban theory. These details help us understand how Bryant produces a theme-park-like social order in its built environment, landscaping, management, and programming of the park. I suggest that social control functions through five governing principles: visibility, classification, predictability, vulnerability, and empowerment. Everything is neatly classified, from people to activities to trash. Vulnerable design elements like flowers are chosen to suggest the park is cared for. Park-goers are meant to feel not controlled, but in-control; safe, comfortable, and empowered. This elaborate manipulation of semiotics and space serves to produce surplus value for multiple corporate interests involved in and around the park. I argue that the park operates as a site of production of revenue for these corporate interests. I explain how the park is created and marketed as a product itself, which park-goers have an unwitting share in producing. Thus New York’s elite-business community benefits from this nominally public park. Bryant Park es el único parque “público” de la ciudad de Nueva York de financiación y gestión 100% privada, lo que lo convierte a menudo en un ejemplo de partenariados público-privados. Este artículo analiza el funcionamiento cotidiano del parque, utilizando datos etnográficos y de archivo, así como teoría criminológica y urbana. Estos detalles nos ayudan a comprender cómo Bryant produce un orden social dentro del parque en el entorno creado, paisajismo, gestión y programación del parque. Se sugiere que el control social funciona a través de cinco principios de gobierno: visibilidad, clasificación, predicción, vulnerabilidad y empoderamiento. Todo está cuidadosamente clasificado, tanto las personas como las actividades o los cubos de basura. Se eligen elementos de diseño vulnerables, como flores, para sugerir que se cuida el parque. Se pretende que los visitantes del parque no se sientan controlados, pero bajo control; seguros, cómodos y con poder. Esta elaborada manipulación de semiótica y espacio sirve para producir un valor añadido para numerosos intereses corporativos que están involucrados en el parque. Se defiende que el parque funciona como un lugar de producción de ingresos para esos intereses empresariales. Se explica de qué forma se crea y comercializa el parque como un producto en sí mismo, en el que los visitantes del parque participan de forma involuntaria. De esta forma, la comunidad de negocios de élite de Nueva York se beneficia de este parque “público”, únicamente en su nombre.

Tourism researchers together with their counterparts in urban planning and economics have grappled with the complexities of urban destination management and have been on a search for an integrative methodological framework ever since. This paper explores the prospects of cellular automata (CA) models and their use as modeling environments for urban tourism research. The discussion begins by way of an introduction to past applications in the natural and computer sciences. Certain speculations are made with regards to their utility and relevance to the modeling of urban tourism. The economic paradigm features largely together with discussions on the influence of complexity economics and its roots in complex adaptive systems.

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2016

In this paper, the algorithmic city is introduced as a framework for understanding urban space in terms of its underlying code and systems. It is connected to urban codemaking, a playful approach to public art that asks players to engage with codes of urban space. To connect these two concepts in a framework for pervasive game design, players are framed as sensors and actuators within the algorithmic city to make it more playable.

This paper is an attempt to explore and to propose a model of interactions between social, environmental and economic variables in land-use and urban development dynamics, using cellular automata. Such models can simulate spatial evolutions with different development perspectives and can produce future development scenarios useful for decision-making processes. For the purposes of this study, a cellular automaton applied in the City of Heraklion (Crete) has been developed. The implementation of the model hereby illustrated is a pilot experience and still in a groundwork phase. However, we believe that this paper, addressing few methodological, theoretical and practical issues, offers an unpretentious, but useful contribution for cellular automata based modelling, and more importantly, suggests why such models are particularly useful for urban simulations.

The Place of Palms: An Urban Park at Aphrodisias. Results of The Mica and Ahmet Ertegün South Agora Pool Project (Aphrodisias XIV). Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2024

Excavations at Aphrodisias in the 1980s revealed an extraordinary monumental water-basin (170 x 30m) in the centre of a colonnaded square, formerly called the ‘South Agora’. A hypothesis that the complex was not an agora at all but ‘the place of palms’ mentioned by a sixth-century benefactor in an inscription on its Propylon was demonstrated during a five-year excavation project — The Mica and Ahmet Ertegün South Agora Pool Project. This volume publishes the rich results of this excavation and the long life of the complex, from its construction in the first century, through rebuilding after a major earthquake in the late fifth century, to various destruction events (a Persian sack, an earthquake, and Arab raids) in the seventh century; and then the Seljuk and Ottoman settlement that developed over the silted-up pool. The pool in its Roman heydey was surrounded by palm trees and Ionic stoas, in the manner of the urban parks or porticus familiar in early imperial Rome. The Aphrodisian example gives us an entirely new sense of what these porticus complexes were like.

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