Seeding Centrality

Abstract

The ongoing urban plans and designs in China may have provided an improper model of making cities. They do not consider the complex nature of city and take little into consideration of the welfare of people. Then, the question comes, what is a proper model of building cities? A city serves as a receptacle of life. There are various lifestyles co-existing in a city. They can be categorized into scales, e.g., global scale (L), local scale (S) and those in between (M). A good city should give places and provide diverse choices for all the lives happening together and interacting with each other. In this sense, the vitality will be achieved. On the other hand, a city is an emerging systems with its own internal growing force. Therefore, the diversity can not be simply imposed by designers’ own wish. It has to be reached by embracing the self-organization process of the city. Therefore, to achieve the real diversity (L, M, S), the study considers Complexity Theories of Cities as one of the theoretical bases. It tries to search for an innovative approach, through which the self-organization process of cities could be properly guided and facilitated.