Designing for Urban Resilience: Selected Concepts from Architecture Technology Practice and from System Theories of Emergence

Environmental, social and economic global changes require a capacity to react at the city level, in a way that is effectively in the short term and adaptively in the long term. Cities have always faced complex interconnections and uncertainty scenarios, and the cities that have existed for centuries have demonstrated their resilience in facing them. Nowadays, the increasingly conditions of vulnerability and fragility of the built environment pose new challenges to timely and efficiently respond to the occurred change. On one hand, housing density and inhomogeneity, e.g. cultural and functional, are increased by the migratory phenomenon and by contemporary social demand for temporary dwelling, both of which are characterized by a time-based, unpredictable need. Moreover, the demand affects an existing housing stock which is, as yet, lacking in energy savings and comfort upgrades. On the other hand, economic needs transform cities often without a systemic strategy. It is still an underway process, even if the consequences of which are consistent in any post-industrial city. Therefore, it is required to rethink housing; to innovate in order to find adaptive solutions to properly feedback the complex needs generated by the environmental, social and economical changes. Considering resilience as a process that is not implying preconfigured and a priori solutions, Architecture Technology may contribute to the operational framework in both methodological and performance analysis by codifying requirements (technological, typological, procedural, functional) that can support resilient responses. In this paper, we explore the circuit of architectural design research and technological practice, adopting an interdisciplinary approach, inherited from the Theory of Emergence (Systems Theories), that help in developing a more comprehensive understanding of the housing consumption cycle. Despite their different backgrounds, these diverse disciplines have the potential to contribute to a better understanding of how designed artefacts shape and are shaped by the contexts in which they are used. In what follows, we take a selection of concepts out of the Systems debates in order to identify a core set of attributes that can contribute to assess technological indicators for a more resilient technical housing design.