Mass-Customised Cities Ad

What happens when computational design and fabrication technologies ramp up to the urban scale? Though these innovative production processes are currently now largely limited to small-scale design projects, what will happen when they are applied to the vast scale of the 21st-century world city? Could new technologies enable an important shift away from mass production to increasingly bespoke and custom-designed systems? The introduction of standardisation and mass production processes in the 20th century saw the industrial city take on a repetitious and homogeneous quality through the duplication of component parts. Today non-standard, bespoke systems hold out the promise of realising a distinctive urbanism; characterized by the differentiation of serial production and the variation of simple parts that should lead to a more complex and compelling whole. Given the current pace and rate of urbanisation in Asia, the mass customization of the city is set to have imminent and far-reaching practical consequences for the rest of the developing and developed world.

Tom Verebes is the Creative Director of OCEAN CN, a Hong Kong-based design consultancy network. He is Associate Professor of Architecture, and former Associate Dean (Teaching & Learning) at the University of Hong Kong. Until January 2009, Tom Verebes was co-Director of the acclaimed post-professional masters' level Design Research Lab, at the Architectural Association in London, where he had taught since 1996. He has directed the AA Shanghai Summer School for nine consecutive years (2007-2015).?The design work of Verebes' practice and teaching has been exhibited internationally at over 50 venues, and he has contributed to over 140 publications. His recent publications include Masterplanning the Adaptive City: Computational Urbanism in the Twenty-first Century (Routledge, 2013), New Computational Paradigms in Architecture (Tsinghua University Press, 2012), and a 368-page monograph and DRLTEN: A Design Research Compendium (AA Publications, 2008). He has lectured on his work across Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.