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Research Outline

- “System as a Living Organism” -

Xinyi Liu

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 It's easy to associate a city with a physical substance, such as infrastructure, utilities, materials, etc. But what if one interprets it as a living being with life? Starting from a counterintuitive perspective, it’s possible to categorize a city into any new group.

The key idea of my research is to examine and suppose the future sustainable city as a living organism rather than a rational outcome of modern construction. I believe climate change surpasses the bearing limits of a city's current configurations and structural design features because people design urban areas as lifeless subjectively. Questions about what life is and what distinguishes living and non-living beings will be discussed in depth. Essential principles that sustain the successful operation of an organic entity have tremendous potential to be applied to the design of future urban systems. It’s critical to redefine the relationship between human beings and nature within a homogeneously dependent structure rather than a hierarchy.

I hypothesize that if we consider a city as a creature like human beings or at least part of us, things will be different. This means that the urban system should be redesigned as a holistic entity with all subsystems acting in harmony like an orchestra instead of fixing flaws of independent parts to address sustainable issues. Our perspective should shift from urban to organic matters to find a better and even perfect operation model as an example of such an entity. A matter of attitude, not intelligence, will lead us to a new verge of ecological evolution. Although the definition of life is still debatable in nowadays' scientific research, it’s possible to conduct experiments based on many inspiring features in nature. Such elements can be, for example, adaptability,flexibil­ity, resilience, and symbiosis, which sustain life at both macro and micro levels. The referential sources for improving the future urban systems could derive from both the biosphere and the ecosphere. For instance, the reactive mechanism in the behavior of various kinds of proteins can be further studied. Likewise, these concepts in protein behaviors can be compared to the urban contexts, especially regarding waste recycling, junk collec­tions, material ecology, and digitalized urban data management. These principles can also be borrowed to improve the future urban environment by creating better traffic networks, neighborhoods, and services. Other examples can be bacteria, algae, leaf cells, etc. The focus is not on designing a structure that looks like algae or layers of leaf structures. Rather, the goal is to improve the future living environment for human beings and the whole planet.

As the era of artificial intelligence is around the corner, our attention to research should not be self-sufficient in the technosphere but embed the considerations of the influencing factors in socio-political, economic, and ecological aspects. The final solution to design a greener city is yet to be discovered, and It’s not a short-term process. However, I hope that my proposal will make a difference, for the wisdom of nature is infinite.

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