Linking design to finance : enabling a co-operative developer platform through automated design and valuation

Abstract

Significant shifts in technology and finance are altering the practice and position of urban design and development. These shifts - the torrent of micro-spatialized data, the amplification of designer instrumentality through computation, and the financialization of built capital into abstract securities - are forming a new relational infrastructure propelling the production of the built environment. Currently, coupling these shifts together remains the specialty of well-capitalized and sophisticated institutions, but the march of technological progress forecasts the widespread democratization of urban development skills and knowledge. This thesis explores the potential outcomes from mass accessibility to urban data, design computation, and digitized financing. I present two patent propositions outlining design methods that culminate in a project deploying network effects through collectively-financed, mass-distributed developments. The project is situated in three neighborhoods of New York City, on three-dozen sites for one-thousand inhabitants, and the methodology consists of three design computation processes. The first is a method for the automated re-massing of urban typologies using procedural scripting and a geometry constraint engine, in order to achieve open-space and density targets. The second is the automated valuation of a real estate development project using projected cash flows and construction cost estimations. Lastly, an optimization method matches suites of sites, project-massings, and financing arrangements; demonstrating the ability for the inhabitants' spatial needs to be met within financial constraints. Assuming that these technologies will be in widespread use evokes a vision for clusters of households to collectively originate, fund, and construct networks of mutually co-dependent developments. With the ability to operationalize a co-ownership model of distributed live-work spaces, self-organizing groups will have a dramatically expanded capability to influence the design and use of urban fabric - in practice, a Lefebvrian 'right to the city'.