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Cyber-Urban Integration
Patrik Schumacher 2023

Published in: Philippe Morel & Henriette Bier (Editors), Disruptive Technologies: The Convergence of New Paradigms in Architecture, Springer, 2023

Abstract:

After 30 years of theoretical speculation and advances in gaming and entertainment the internet is finally on the way to transform into cyberspace. The magazine as guiding analogy for the web is being overtaken by the analogy of the city. Architects take over from graphic designers. The premise for the plausibility of this takeover and expansion of architecture’s competency is that all design, including architecture, is communicative framing. The thesis of this paper is that in this age of soaring web-based telecommunication the space of social communication must be designed simultaneously as physical and virtual realm, as cyber-urban space, seamlessly integrating physically immediate and digitally mediated communicative interactions, constituting a new augmented mixed reality.

Architecture’s Core Competency: The Four Architectural Projects

The life process of society is a communication process that is ordered via a rich typology of communicative situations. It is the designed environment, both physical and digital, that spatially distributes, frames, stabilizes and coordinates these distinct situations within an evolving order that allows us to self-sort as participants of various specific social interactions. Designing is communicative framing. This insight must now be made the explicit premise and agenda for a systematic design research project that bridges architecture and interaction design in 3D virtual worlds that must at the same time connect up with our lived physical space.
The design of virtual communication spaces lies fully within the architect’s core competency. Any design project in this space involves the three parts of the architect’s project the author distinguished in ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’i : the organisational project, the phenomenological project and the semiological project. The semiological project is crucial: While all urban spaces are never only mere physical containers that carry and channel bodies but always already also information-rich navigation and semantically tagged interaction spaces, this information-rich, semantic charge and communicative capacity is, in the case of cyberspace, distilled as the very essence of all design efforts. Here there can no longer arise the confusion of the designer’s task of ordering and framing social interaction with the provision of a physically specified shelter and its technical construction.
To design architectural projects, real or virtual, implies the development of a grammar empowered spatio-visual language, with a much enhanced communicative capacity, to create navigable and legible information-rich environments for densely layered societal interaction types, each with their differentiated purposes and selectively gathered audiences.
The new task of cyber-urban integration brings forward a fourth project, the dramaturgical project, i.e. the architectural equivalence of what in web-design is called interaction design, as a key aspect of user interface design (UI) or user experience design (UX). The dramaturgical project also exists for building design, to the extent that users can interact with buildings, i.e. open doors, opening or closing curtains etc. This dramaturgical project will become much more prominent now, both within the virtual and the physical domains of interaction. Within the physical domain the author has worked on the possibilities of the dramaturgical approach to architecture via AI empowered kinetic architectural elements and systems. This agenda was pursued within the AADRL research project of ‘responsive environments’, and via a more recent update under the heading of ‘spontaneous creative environments’. Currently this agenda is pushed further via the design research project of a cyber-urban incubator. Naturally, the implied continuous adaptive self-re-organisation of the framing environment can be accomplished much more effortlessly within the virtual domain.

A New Life in a New Industrial System

The built environment must progress in step with the progress of society. It is therefore the task of the avant-garde segment of the academic discipline and profession of architecture to theorize and explore how best to guide the development of the built environment in ways that are congenial to the opportunities and challenges of the technological and societal development at the frontier of progress. This requires that architectural theorists connect up with an updated theory of society and its probable trajectories of progress.
The new computationally empowered economy implies a shift from routine work to intensely collaborative work patterns. Nearly all work becomes creative work like R&D, marketing, and finance, together feeding a world of 3D printing, robotic fabrication and software as service. The new reprogrammable robotic production technologies can absorb an unlimited number of innovations. There is no technical or cost limitations in uploading new improved apps to millions of users every day, or to feed 3D printers with new improved instructions. Also, robotic assempby lines no longer lock workers into routine work. All workers are set free to innovate.  This should eventually allow everybody to become a self-directed creative innovator. This increased innovation absorption capacity of current production technologies implies a momentous intensification of communication and collaboration, since innovations require the re-integration of all the specialized aspects of a product or service. This means that most work will not only become creative, but intensely communicative, in science, R&D, design, marketing, media, finance, education etc.  This intensification of creative collaboration and communication implies a new level of urban concentration as well as a new level of cyber-spatial agglomeration.

Co-working and incubator spaces will make up an increasing part of the urban fabric, interlaced with spaces for a more freewheeling networking and socialising. The idea of a Cyber-Urban Incubator is proposing to double up these urban realms with corresponding virtual realms, not as digital twin replicas but as congenial extensions with their own laws of navigation, encounter and interaction but integrated via spatial interfaces and via a unified spatio-visual language as broadly shared orienting system. Physical spaces will afford windows into virtual spaces where the semiology is the same and the logic of gathering and communicating is similar enough to allow for the transfer of competencies from the real to the virtual realm. The easy implementation of data-rich informational overlays in the virtual city extensions might inspire ways to deliver such augmentations also within the physical city experience. In general it is likely that the age of cyber-urban integration will eventually also impact back not only onto the utilisation of urban spaces but on the spatial organisation of the urban itself. While this can be expected in the abstract, the concrete forms this might take are yet to be discovered.

Pro-active Intelligent Environments

The unprecedented level of dynamism in social interaction processes in contemporary creative industry work environments calls for adaptive, responsive and indeed creative built environments. The discourse of so called ‘intelligent buildings’ has to be radicalized and related to the core competency of architectural design, namely the ordering of social interactions. If these patterns of interaction become increasingly variable, this implies the demand for an unprecedented level of real time spatial flexibility. This demand can only be met by perceptive, responsive environments. However, the next step here are truly intelligent, creative environments that operate in a pro-active, self-directed fashion rather than merely responding in routine ways or waiting for instructions. The architectural elements or ‘agents’ that are meant to facilitate increasingly complex and dynamic patterns of human collaborative interaction must become congenial participants in the collective life process. Just as a contemporary tech firm consists of self-directed collaborators that develop their own initiatives rather than employees waiting for instructions, so will a future work environment consist of robotic agents that do not wait for being remote controlled but are self-acting and learning to maximize their usefulness and actual utilisation.
The scene is set, within contemporary advanced work environments, for the architectural instrumentalization of the artistic experiments with interactive art installations, powered by the new easy availability of sensor and actuator technologies. Doors, windows, blinds, partitions, screens, tables, desks, chairs, coffee machines, water coolers, lighting devices etc. will all become self-directed agents, with a life-long machine learning curve, steered by the prerogative of maximising their inbuilt utility functions that guide them to increase their utilization and usefulness in the social communication process. In both the real and the virtual spaces ai-empowered architectural agents and avatars will, more and more, become our valued collaborative companions. To the extent that such entities accumulate experiences and evolve unique skills and knowledge, due to their individual histories, they become irreplaceable and thus precious, not unlike human persons. The life-process of the future will thus become a man-machine ecology, with many productive human personalities and many more productive machine or system personalities.        
This is the concept of spontaneously intelligent environments. In our post-covid-19 world these work environments will have to be seamlessly connected up with the virtual communication spaces for those who will participate remotely rather than via physical co-presence. This project of pro-active intelligent environments is naturally congenial with the project of cyberspace, and indeed the implementation of the idea of continuous adaptive self-transformation can now be spearheaded within virtual spaces due to the relative ease of its realisation compared with physical versions.

Robotic AI empowered self-directed work environment, AADRL, London 2020, Team: Man Mei Lam, Huiyuan Li, Ruixue Wang, Xuan Zhou, Tutors: Patrik Schumacher, Pierandrea Angius

Expanding Agent-based Parametric Semiology

While every architect has an intuitive grasp of the normative ineraction protocols that attach to the various designated areas that the design brief indicates and usually knows enough about the expected and desired user occupancy patterns, such intuitions cannot give a secure guidance on the relative social performance of alternative designs for large, complex environments. Intuition must here be substituted by simulations that can process thousands of agents interacting across an environment of hundreds of spaces. When quantitative comparisons and optimization is aimed at, then intuition fails already in much smaller, simpler settings.
The simulation methodology developed under the research agenda ‘Agent-based Parametric Semiology’  is conceived as a generalisation and corresponding upgrade of the kind of crowd simulations currently offered by traffic and engineering consultants concerned with evacuation or smooth circulation.  These crowd modellers treat users as physical bodies and simulate crowds like a physical fluid. In contrast, architectural design considerations are concerned with socialized actors who orient and interact within a semantically differentiated environment. The simulations that must be developed to get a handle on desired social interaction scenarios will have to be different and rather more elaborate. They contain circulation models as a relative trivial component. There are a number of crucial advancements that distinguish our architectural crowd models from the prior engineering models:
The first and most obvious advance is the expansion of the menu of action types. The second major advancement is that the agent population is socially differentiated rather than homogenous.  For instance within the domain of corporate office life, agent differentiation might track rank, functional role, and team affiliation. An intricate network structure might be read off the client’s intra-net to inform the agent population within the simulation. The third significant difference and upgrade is the dependency of the agents’ behaviours on the functional designations of the spaces they occupy. The environment is zoned via designated and semantically encoded areas. Agents change their interaction propensity accordingly. This ordering increases the probability of highly specific interactions.  Where the number of designations and protocols to be distinguished is very large, it is opportune to use the combinatorial power of grammar to articulate this manifold. This thus implies a fourth enhancement, namely the elaboration of an agent system with language competent agents.
The fifth aspect that distinguishes these architectural-semiological models from the circulatory crowd models is the following: Congenial with contemporary cultural conditions the underlying presumption of these models is that agents are largely self-directed, rather than running on pre-scheduled tracks, and do self-select their interactions and the social events they participate in. These selections are guided by multi-dimensional, dynamic utility functions that can utilise contingent opportunities that the agents encounter within the environment they browse through. These utility functions are implemented in the decision processes that control the agents’ actions on the basis of internal states due to prior actions and the environmental offerings perceived.ii

This research project of ‘agent-based parametric semiology’ iii started within AADRL, then migrated into the next development phase with a PhD group at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The next push was made within Zaha Hadid Architects. Our ZHA research team ‘ZH Social’ is currently moving from the research and experimentation phase to the implementation and testing phase within ZHA corporate headquarters projects.
The research team is building up increasingly large, differentiated and sophisticated agent populations using Unity game development software as base system, augmented with original coding. The development work concerning the agent populations benefits from a technology transfer from the game development industry, both with respect to basics like action animation and simple tasks like pathfinding, obstacle avoidance etc., and with respect to the more complex decision making processes modelled in ‘game AI’. Sophisticated games populate their scenes with increasingly versatile, intelligent, spontaneous life-like agents.

The latest game AI methodology that is becoming more widespread in the game development industry is a methodology employing utility functions, so called ‘Utility AI’. Instead of switching between a set of finite states based on conditioning via triggers, or moving through a whole decision tree until trigger conditions are met, in Utility AI agents constantly assess the actions available to them in their current environment, and assign a utility score to each of those actions on a continuous scale. The utility system then selects the behaviour option that scores highest amongst the currently available options, based on the circumstances. Circumstances are both external and internal states. The latter being dependent on what went on in the game or simulation so far, i.e. the current utility and thus the urgency of a desire. The utility of the related action, recedes or drops after the action was successfully completed and the desire was satisfied. The basic laws of subjective economics like the law of diminishing marginal utility can be thus be implemented here. The normalized utility functions bring the most divers and otherwise incommensurable measures into direct comparison. Each choice of action is relative rather than based on absolute conditionals. These are temporary prioritizing decisions, based on internal states like desires, their urgency, available energy levels, as well as on opportunities afforded by environmental offering in proximity to current location. The various designated zones pre-condition the available action menu.  Utility AI can take any group of action options, destination objects, interaction chances and score these. This makes the methodology very versatile for decision-making.
This technology transfer from the gaming industry delivers thinking tools, formalisation strategies and coding techniques for the elaboration of sophisticated autonomous agents capable of navigation and interaction within semantically charged environments.
The agent-based life-process models bring the interaction processes that are shaped by the designed architectural frames, i.e. the envisaged meaning of these spaces, into the design model. This way we are achieving the empowering operationalisation of both the semiological and the dramaturgical project. This constitutes a significant upgrade to our discipline’s capacity to maintain a grip on social functionality in the face of an increasing complexity and dynamism within the built environment.
This methodology, and indeed the developed tool sets, are readily transferable and adaptable to the new task of designing virtual twins and virtual expansions for the new era of cyberspace and cyber-urban integration.
Indeed the same type of agent models ZH Social had been developing for the comparative testing and upgrading of an architectural project’s social functionality are now being  adapted to simulate and comparatively test the efficacy of designs for virtual interaction spaces, i.e. for the simulation and appraisal of interaction processes that are possible and can be expected in the virtual environments we are designing, as well as in the mixed reality spaces we are envisaging. Our development work with respect to life-process simulation is also contributing to the task of populating virtual environments with autonomous agents or ‘virtual humans’. This desire and need originated in the gaming industry  - the source domain of our technology transfer -  but could also make sense in performance oriented environments, as proactive animators, or as background population illustrating the social situation and social protocols that are meant to be facilitated in the respective space.

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZH Social), Agent-based life-process simulation for Sberbank Technology Centre, Moscow 2020

The Delayed Advent of Cyberspace

All the design disciplines, from urban design and architecture to fashion and graphic design, together do or should form a unified discourse and practice with a unity of purpose: the sensuous framing of communicative social interaction. This also includes all web design, all video-conferencing platforms, as well as all virtual collaboration platforms. Here too our colleagues’ framing design work is always involved.
The internet started as mainly academic network in the 1980s and took off more broadly in the  early 1990s. Soon some of us architects imagined that the internet would develop into a virtual three-dimensional navigation and communication space, i.e. ‘cyberspace’. The word “cyberspace” was coined by science fiction writer William Gibson, in his 1984 novel ‘Neuromancer’. The design studio I was teaching at TU Berlin in 1995 was exploring this idea under the heading ‘Virtual College’: Online learning as collective experience facilitated within a virtual architecture. Informative inspiration was drawn from architect Michael Benedikt’s seminal book, first published in 1991: ‘Cyberspace: First Steps’ iv . Benedict mused about “a new stage, a new and irresistible development in the elaboration of human culture”(p.1) and did speculate conscientiously and resourcefully about “the nature of the artificial or illusory space(s) of computer-sustained virtual worlds.” (p.119). 

However, the internet became a magazine-like medium instead, the preserve of graphic designers rather than architects.  This will change. Cyberspace is now firmly on the agenda.
Due to the long drawn out Covid-19 lock-down experienced across the world in 2020/2021 all communication, work collaboration, and all social events were pushed online, into the realm of digitally mediated interaction. The adoption of video-conferencing tools shot up massively, and so did the investment into this domain. We are currently witnessing an explosion of start-up companies offering virtual event spaces. This new situation accelerated a process that had been going on for a while. But mass adoption brings a wholly new dynamic into this realm.

This re-emergence of the idea of cyberspace, this time with accelerating practical pressure and much more technological power than 25 years ago, was rather sudden. Michael Benedict’s book remains a valid resource of inspiration.
Benedict asks (and gives answers to) the key questions that remain relevant: “How might it (cyberspace) look like, how might we get around in it, and, most importantly, what might we usefully do there?”(p.19). The last of these most general questions should probably be answered like this: We would want to do there everything we are doing in urban and architectural spaces: browse, communicate, work, learn, create, both individually and collaboratively, play, socialise, entertain etc. etc.  The lockdown has impaired all urban and architectural interaction spaces and thus calls for everything to go virtual. This is a radically new situation. In the intervening years virtual environments were a choice, not a necessity, and the choice in favour of VR was made primarily in the realm of entertainment, especially via video games. This market had grown sufficiently large to deliver development resources, ample user market feedback, and a whole competitive industry. The fruits of these investments can now be reaped via technology transfer into societal domains where serious productive work is to be facilitated for adult users who have no time to waste. The forced push due to Covid-19 has led to the discovery that remote, mediated collaboration can be effective. This lesson cannot be unlearned and a new working life-style will emerge. The thesis of this paper is that this new life will be based on cyber-urban integration.

Benedikt asks further: “Which axioms and laws of nature ought to be retained in cyberspace, on the grounds that humans have successfully evolved on a planet where these are fixed and conditioning all phenomena (including human intelligence), and which axioms and laws can be adjusted or jettisoned for the sake of empowerment.” (p. 119).
This is an important question, and there are many possible answers. In any event, cyberspace will have a “geography, a physics, a nature, and a rule of human law.” (p.123)
Benedict shares some useful considerations and proposes some heuristics he discovered in the speculative cyber-space design explorations he conducted with his students. He rightly suggests that when cyberspace takes off “there will likely be myriad places in, and many regions of cyberspace – each with its own character, rules and function.” He also anticipates that there will be a number of different competing kinds of cyberspaces, “each with its own culture, appearance, lore and law.”(p.122)

Benedikt introduces some useful basic distinction, like he distinction ‘navigation versus destination’, and the distinction ‘extrinsic versus intrinsic’ dimensions. These are dimensions of information encoding or visualisation, whereby the extrinsic dimensions are the two or three spatial dimensions that define an object’s location or position in space (with time being a fourth extrinsic dimension) while an unbounded number of morphological properties or features are brought under the notion of intrinsic dimensions that might be used to distinguish and characterize an object or place in cyberspace. The important insight is put forward here that, with respect to the function of information conveyance, extrinsic and intrinsic encodings are in principle functionally equivalent, so that it is the cyberspace-designer’s choice which aspect or information to encode via extrinsic variables, i.e. (absolute or relative) location/position, and which via intrinsic variables, i.e. shape, colour, materiality etc. The presumption here is -  just as in the case of an urban order - that spatial positions are not randomly allocated but mean something and thus convey some (at least probabilistic) information about the actors and activities to be expected at the respective position.

While Benedikt does not reference architectural semiology, probably because he conceives cyberspace more in terms of data-visualisation than in terms of architecture and spaces of interaction, it became clear to me when I read ‘Cyberspace’ in the early 1990s that cyberspace design is essentially an effort in architectural semiology. I soon left my engagement with cyberspace behind (because the web became instead the domain of graphic designers) but my keen interest in the semiological project as a central aspect of the architect’s core competency remained. With this came the theme of ‘information density’ which was also one of Benedikt’s central themes for cyberspace design. The other theme that I brought back into architecture and urban design is the theme of orientation and navigation. Now my renewed engagement with the problem and task of cyberspace design brings me back full circle, well prepared for the challenge.
The distinction of navigation and destination is not a strict one. Most urban and architectural spaces are both navigation and destination spaces. The differentiation of pure navigation spaces like corridors, highways and subways are a modern phenomenon, but even these spaces are never wholly devoid of information and communication potentials but can offer more than the mere transition from A to B. The city can and should be browsed, and this browsing should also be a keen mode of engagement with cyberspace. We cannot assume that users know about all the offerings in advance but they rather must be enabled to browse, scan and discover what is there, not utterly randomly but in a structured browsing or search, where serendipitous discovery is enabled without a loss of overall orientation. Virtual environment researchers R.Darken & B.Peterson make this point too: “Navigation is rarely, if ever, the primary task. It just tends to get in the way of what you really want to do. Our goal is to make the execution of navigation tasks as transparent and trivial as possible, but not to preclude the elements of exploration and discovery. Disoriented people are anxious, uncomfortable, and generally unhappy. If these conditions can be avoided, exploration and discovery can take place.” v
The surplus navigation can bring as an alternative to just jumping to pre-selected destinations has its equivalent in the slackness of lingering time around scheduled events. These informal pre-gatherings and the post-event lingering are very important for networking and informal ‘browsing’ information exchange. These networking processes make productive use of the non-random, select group brought together by the respective scheduled event, e.g. by a lecture, conference or exhibition opening etc.. The utilisation of such an opportunity for explorative encounters and information exchange requires structured spaces of extended co-presence that are not available via conferencing tools like zoom, or in virtual exhibitions, both still based on the magazine page analogy rather than the city/building analogy.

To return to Benedikt’s question which axioms and laws of nature ought to be retained in cyberspace: The same question is posed with respect to the familiar organisation and articulation of the city, its spaces and of the buildings within it. How much of this must be retained in order to effectively exploit the city analogy, thus utilizing our familiarity with cities and thus our collectively shared competency as city dwellers and users of the panoply of building types and types of spaces that order our interactions in real space? The ‘laws of the city’ are much richer than the laws of nature. They are not universal a priori constraints but have co-evolved together with the societies they sustain, and must be understood historically, as embodying a historically transient pragmatic rationality.

While Benedict presciently predicted the currently emerging virtual worlds and meta-verses when he talked about cyberspace as “a new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world’s computers and communication lines” (p.1), my emphasis is on the integration and indeed fusion of real and virtual spaces.
When tasked with the simultaneous design of both the real and virtual spaces for a client the question also becomes: To which degree will the virtual extensions of the architecture retain the look, feel and logic of the real spaces? Probably to a very large extent, especially if we allow the new design features motivated by the modus operandi of the virtual expansion to feed back into the design of the spaces of real co-presence. Even if the dramaturgy is different, the semiological system of signification should be largely the same and cross the divide beween real and virtual spaces.

This feedback or influence of the virtual design into the physical design should include attempts to physically implement the kind of pro-active adaptive mobile architectural agents I presume will be pioneered more pervasively in the virtual domain. The virtual domains will also effortlessly advance additional (real time) graphic information overlays. These too should, as much as possible, be implemented in the design of the physical interaction domains, via google/facebook glasses, via projections, or if no real time variability but only static information is applied, via further permanent morphological or material encoding. The presumption and promoted heuristics here is the massive increase in information density, both in the virtual and in the physical spaces, far beyond what we are used to encounter in architecture and urban design up to now. The hypothesis and hope in this respect is that the advent of cyberspace will lead to a new flourishing of architectural semiology. This is plausible or can be expected to the extent to which cyberspace will, from the perspective of its users, surpass any known city in terms of its variety and density of differentiated, effective interaction offerings. For this density to remain navigable semiological articulation will become necessary. Large proprietary complexes or districts will probably be semoilogically integrated by their dedicated or coordinated designers while larger agglomerations will engender a spontaneous semiosis that then feeds on itself in its further expansion and densification. In any event, architectural semiology, as the (still largely unacknowledged) essence of the cyberspace design task, has a better chance to succeed in cyberspace than in real space, not least due to the fierce global borderless competition in cyberspace, and due to the attendant more rapid historical turnover and remodelling of spaces. The increased communicative capacity that will then increasingly be expected by the users of cyberspace will lead them to expect or demand a similar information richness and communicative capacity from the physical urban and architectural spaces they are willing to patronise. The users’ expectation and the competency in information absorption they acquired in cyberspace will fuel and finally force the semiological upgrading of the physical environment too.

This physical environment will not only acquire a new semiological density and coherence but will be transformed in many further respects as it gets enveloped by and infused with virtualty. Most walls and architectural and urban surfaces will become windows into virtual extensions connecting real to virtual spaces. Room-sized, full or partially enveloping panaoramic screens or projections are very effective mechanisms of collective immersion into virtual spaces. Whole groups of physically co-located participants can thereby be tele-transported into a virtual environment, and thereby interact with several other groups. Another potent form of tele-presencing are holograms. The required equipment could be built into strategic locations like at the lectern in a lecture theatre. Both technologies are being advanced rapidly to ever greater effect and ever more affordable. A further compelling technology for tele-presencing is Microsoft’s VROOM - Virtual Robot Overlay for Online Meetings. Here telepresence robots allow remote users to freely explore a space they are not in, and provide a physical embodiment in that space. Here a robot acts on behalf of a remote participant in a real space as would an avatar in a virtual space. That robot is either equipped with a screen at head height to deliver a video presence of the remote participant, or becomes the site of an AR overlay for co-present participants wearing AR glasses. Holograms might also be spawned. These examples in hardware evolution imply that we must not imagine that cyberspace will be experienced only at home from a laptop, phone or headset, but within new types of technology empowered immersive spaces.

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZH Social), Digital Twin Cyberspace of ZHA Beijing Office, London/Beijing 2021

The Design of Cyber-Urban Incubators

The design of Cyber-Urban Incubators is under way. The idea of a cyber-urban incubator for the simultaneously virtual and real co-location of knowledge economy entrepreneurs serves us as a test bed for the general agenda of cyber-urban integration. The cyber-urban incubator is ultimately meant to be the designed unity of real and virtual spaces for a corporate headquarter or campus,  or for are larger branded knowledge industry incubation cluster. Zaha Hadid Architects have a number of relevant real projects under way and we are currently approaching our respective clients with the proposal to develop a virtual collaboration space together with our design of their physical premises, indeed mirroring our campus design proposals and transposing them into digital twin virtual interaction spaces. This allows us to utilize our 3D models as a convenient base for an online VR implementation ahead of real construction. This allows us to launch, market and test the design much sooner. This would also deliver a useful occasion to gather user and utilisation data, assuming that the virtual occupancy and utilisation patterns allow us to draw inferences about possible design improvements of the projected physical premises. At a later stage we imagine that the virtual spaces will take on their own developmental dynamic, however, without losing all continuities that are implied by the fact that both real and virtual environments are inhabited simultaneously by the same organisation, and moreover are tied together through many mixed reality scenarios where real/present and virtual/remote spaces and participants are operating jointly.

Candidate project for the implementation of a Cyber-urban Incubator: Zaha Hadid Architects, Tencent Technology Campus in Xian, London 2020/2021
End.

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