"The Immediate City" Everything at your fingertips . Its the first time I have seen these images the photomontages work really well. The project is from the shenzhen hong kong (SZHK) biennale 09.
"it was developed as an alternative solution to presenting and sharing architectural content about, for, within, from and against the city." designboom.com
The amount of time needed to make a detailed model for a project sometimes feels like a waste of time. Especially when its only used once or when the lecture throws out the window (true story).
The amount of work taken to build this Shanghai model for the 'Shanghai Urban planning centre must be incredible. Thats not even counting hours used to set the City up and cleaning/maintainance.
Paul Coates took 'The Game of life' concept further when applying it to the design rather than natural evolution of the built environment. He has enabled the user to change the input to suit their own requirements. His design ‘Cellular Automata’ uses 4 states of pixel, the unbuilt state, a road, house and a garden. It follows 5 rules similar to 'The game of life'. For example :
“‘If a cell is empty and there is at least one road cell and less than two garden cells among four bordering cells, then make the cell a road, with 50% probability, otherwise a house’”. P188 Marshall, Stephen, Cities Design & evolution
The rules are complex enabling results that are something that can be recognised as urban.The user can input specific reference points described as “a scatter of ‘seed’ locations” P189, Marshall, Stephen, Cities Design & evolution, density of the site and road ratio to the rest of the area.
This concept could be developed further allowing the public or non-urban designers to produce complex plans created through inputting specific criteria to the area. Also with the changing of specific criteria such as local planning policy variations of designs or outcome probabilities it could be further developed as required.
John Conway's game of life was created in the 1970's. From 4 simple rules life seems to develop through a 2d grid.
1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by loneliness. 2. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding. 3. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives, unchanged, to the next generation. 4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours comes to life.
If you want to play the Game of Life yourself check out
This concept when developed with Urban Planning can take the development of the City in a completely different direction. This idea has been developed to create Voxopolis by The masters of Advanced Studies in CAAD at ETH in Zurich.
The amount of time needed to make a detailed model for a project sometimes feels like a waste of time. Especially when its only used once or when the lecture throws out the window (true story). 
Paul Coates took 'The Game of life' concept further when applying it to the design rather than natural evolution of the built environment. He has enabled the user to change the input to suit their own requirements. His design ‘Cellular Automata’ uses 4 states of pixel, the unbuilt state, a road, house and a garden. It follows 5 rules similar to 'The game of life'. For example :
