Local Code : 3659 Proposals About Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities (Paperback)

"Praised in the New York Times for its "intelligent enquiry and actionable theorizing," Local Code: Real Estates is a collection of software tools, design proposals, and theoretical arguments about the future of urban infrastructure and architecture. Local Code combines drawings of over five thousand digitally designed and networked microinterventions for vacant lots in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York in the United States, as well as Venice, Italy, with theoretical essays and information graphics. The book's data-driven layout presents a complex, elegant interface to myriad possible future urban landscapes. Local Code presents a digitally driven, networked approach to urban resilience and environmental justice, and argues that we have just begun to discover the full possibilities of computing and design"-- With three billion more humans projected to be living in cities by 2050, all design is increasingly urban design. And with as much data now produced every day as was produced in all of human history to the year 2007, all architecture is increasingly information architecture. Praised in the New York Times for its "intelligent enquiry and actionable theorizing," Local Code is a collection of data-driven tools and design prototypes for understanding and transforming the physical, social, and ecological resilience of cities.

The book's data-driven layout arranges drawings of 3,659 digitally-tailored interventions for vacant public land in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Venice, Italy. Between these illustrated case studies, critical essays present surprising and essential links between such designs and the seminal work of urbanist Jane Jacobs, artist Gordon Matta-Clark, and digital mapping pioneer Howard Fisher, along with the developing science of urban nature and complexity. In text and image, Local Code presents a digitally prolific, open-ended approach to urban resilience and social and environmental justice; At once analytic and visionary, it pioneers a new field of enquiry and action at the meeting of big data and the expanding city.