IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

82 Chapter 4
The Regionmaker as one way to help designers of cities and regions cope
with the new demands. 22 ‘‘We keep getting asked to make ‘visions’ for
cities and regions,’’ Winy Maas, a principal of the firm, told me, ‘‘but we
want to base these on real data, not just our imagination.’’ The design challenge,
for Maas, is to represent complex data about regions and cities visually,
in order to provide a space in which the different actors now involved
can explore options together. 23 The Regionmaker, developed by MVRDV
initially for a project called RhineRuhrCity, 24 orchestrates a variety of existing
information sources and flows—demographic data or outputs from
geographical information systems (GIS) (or geomatics, as they are also
called). The Regionmaker supports maps, study charts, and access to databases;
imports and exports images and video feeds from helicopters or satellites;
connects to the Internet; and uses computer-aided design (CAD)
drawings. Maas and his colleagues plan to add to the system information
on the movement of people, goods, and information. A housing subroutine
will develop scenarios for optimal housing designs. A calculator will optimize
natural light in built spaces. A function mixer will propose optimal
mixtures of activities according to economic, social, or cultural criteria.
The long-term aim is for the system to become a decision support environment
in a more proactive and critical sense. ‘‘We could add an Evaluator, or
an Evolver that can suggest criticism of the input we make,’’ speculates
Maas. 25
Deciding who gets to use these new tools is itself a design action. The
principle of open planning is that nonspecialized actors and stakeholders
are involved in the creation process, not simply as yes-no responders to
precooked proposals. MVRDV’s system has the potential to enable municipalities,
citizen groups, and planners to ‘‘compose’’ an optimized mixed
neighborhood—but they have to be invited to do so and shown how. All
of this takes commitment and time.
Multicentered places, as a response by smaller localities to the magnetic
power of big centers, are cropping up in many regions of the world. In
India, for example, P. V. Indiresan, a noted innovator of new concepts
for rural development, has taken MVRDV’s network thinking several steps
further. He is developing plans for ‘‘virtual cities’’ among clusters of India’s
seven hundred thousand rural villages. 26 Special rural development zones
(SRDZs) will be connected in a loop by a sixty- to eighty-kilometer-long circular
road and state-of-the art communications via wireless local-loop com-