The Instrumentality of Data Used for Design: Exploring the Sustainable Meanings of Urban Orders in the New Data ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

City is a complex, self-organized system, in which various sub-systems interact with each other whereby urban orders emerge dynamically. Due to lacking of sufficient knowledge about the urban system, urban planners and designers had to work within a simplified concept framework. This oversimplified methodology has been influencing the debate about the urban sustainability. Although the so-called new data environment now provides possibility to acknowledge this kind of complex interrelationship, future-proofed theories and methodologies of urban planning and design are still deficient in related practices. Base on the quantitative understanding of urban orders, this paper aims to explore the issues on understanding the relationship between the urban orders and the meaning of sustainability in the new data environment, to establish a methodological framework of data augmented sustainable planning, and to reassert how to achieve the value rationality in urban planning and design through the exploration on instrumental rationality.

Keywords

Big Data / Urban Order / Sustainability / Instrumental Rationality / Urban Planning and Design

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press