the composable life of small urban spaces

using co-design to build a proof-of-concept for category theoretic urban and policy design

https://github.com/mit-zardini-lab/urban-codesign
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Motivation

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The goal of this project is to show how co-design may be used for urban and policy design. Complex urban and socio-political systems are rich with feedback loops (e.g. community feedback, induced demand) and are highly interconnected, a great match for co-design. William Whyte’s seminal book is an inspiration for this small case study.

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Co-design for small urban spaces

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The design problem in this project builds and evaluates a small 3x3 grid that represent an urban space. Each tile in the grid is either made of grass, trees, pavement, or benches. While a simplified example, we see the co-design framework produce reasonable results from a pool of 400 design layouts: prioritizing accessibility at lower budgets and providing lush greenery at higher budgets.

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Further study

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Co-design and System Dynamics seem to provide similar capabilities and intuitive power. There is likely a way to connect the two paradigms formally using category theory.

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Believing there are better or worse outcomes implies certain partial orders, the interfaces in co-design problems. How can these moral values be equitably surfaced and solicited when designing complex systems?

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Small urban spaces are only small urban pieces of a greater city system. The compositional nature of co-design presents an opportunity to use many different representative design problems to build out a composable, category-theoretic image of the city.

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