From the death of typologies to the rise of cellular automata. In praise of Transdisciplinarity

The title of this article to a certain degree could sound polemic and to some extent even iconoclastic. However, as a premise, it is important to underline that it is not meant to compare notions, tools or methods, but it is rather an attempt to present a shift of perspective in the way we look at architecture, cities and territory, an urge to change the paradigm of urban structures and town planning in the light of evolutionary sciences. The research for a new alliance between humans and nature proposed by Prigogine and Stengers calls for a new view of human systems and of the relations they establish with the environment (Pulselli and Tiezzi, 2009) with sustainability as an aim as well as defending the opportunities for a new hermeneutic of the city which will bring along a new language and aesthetic. The key to such a challenge resides within the concept of transdiciplinarity, a synthesis between disciplines that destroys academic barriers and creates new disciplines in which everything is more than the sum of the parts and which has something to do with the complexity theory. Its essence lies in combining pre-existing elements to create new synapses. We will look at how the evolutionary theory, the complexity theory, systemic thinking and the contemporary debate on sustainability and ecology have radically changed the approach to the design of city and territory and, in particular, to the historic dichotomy between Top Down versus Bottom Up model and the emergence of the self-organized city as possible morphogenetic process for sustainable city design. In general terms we could argue that the point is a matter of order versus chaos whereby chaos we mean ‘not a cult topic but a dynamic state, its potential revealed by science, that can indicate the way to a more subtle and flexible order than simplification and repetition.’ (Portoghesi, 2009)