Manifesto for the Borough of Symbioun

The proposal is for a new borough in New York City, Symbioun, built entirely within the boundaries of the Upper New York Bay.

The borough is built to accomodate a growing population that is increasingly moving to urban centers.

It is designed to withstand and adapt to rising water levels and higher rates of major storm frequencies that will occur due to the effects of global warming.

The borough will be thought of as an “event city” of mixed-use development, where people can live, work and play.

The city is organized through the use of a distance-based algorithm - a voronoi grid that can potentially create dynamic spaces of rapid movement and slowed relaxation. Diag. showing tight movement zones vs. open plaza zones.

The borough has three community districts which are bounded by the main shipping lane that traverses the bay and by the Kill Van Kull canal that connects to the Newark Bay.

The shape of the district cells is determined using a two-dimensional voronoi algorithm, generating three cells that define the maximum buildable extents of the three districts.

The number and position of the input points that are used to calculate the voronoi is static in this case. There are three points, one for each of our predetermined sites - Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Bayonne, and they are manually placed so that the voronoi cells do not lie on the important transit lines of the Upper New York Bay.

This is the only part of the process that is not self-generating.

Alessandro Orsini - Syllabus for the Dynamic City

‘Whichever directions you have come from you still have a choice. Moreover, points that start close together get stretched apart as they circulate round the attractor, so they ‘lose contact’, and can follow independent trajectories. This makes the sequence of left and right unpredictable in the long term. This combination of factors stretching points apart and‘re‐injecting’ them back into small regions is typical of all strange attractors. (E.N. Lorenz, Exploring Chaos, Seattle University of Washington press, 1993)

The studio would like to introduce a dynamic vision of the world and so of the urban expansion of our contemporary cities. In particular we are going to study the coastline between New York and New Jersey in relation of the expansion of the city and the water level raise.

This dynamic vision will led us to a non‐linear geometrical interpretation of the physical nature and objects: the fractals.

In fact chaos and fractals are part of the grander subject known as dynamics. This is the subject that deals with change, with systems that evolve in time. Whether the system in question settles down to equilibrium, keeps repeating in cycles, or does something more complicated, it is dynamics that we use to analyze the behavior. You have probably been exposed to dynamical ideas in various places‐in courses in differential equations, classical mechanics, chemical kinetics, population biology, and so on.

Considering the expansion and planning of a city a dynamic process we are going to use a non linear geometry to explore the different possibility of building a safe environment for the a new neigh borough that will be placed in the Upper New York bay area.

Images showing the Lorenz's Attractor and a Fractal Coastline Dimension