Holagram shifts the focus from the elusive quest to fully understand cities through disciplinary lenses, to embrace the interdimensional nature of lived experiences as the driving forces of meaningful change.
We see our ecologies as the dynamic interplay of networked agents that have passed through the hybridisation of biological-synthetic intelligence and have already become a new whole, contributing to the shaping of space and time in ways that transcend traditional anthropocentric values.
Holagram sees spatial facts as a dynamic holarchy* which can be diagrammatically modelled.*an interwoven network of nested experiences that resist totalising descriptions.
Meaningful urban design practice will produce value for the whole, that is, providing opportunities for biological and synthetic agents to express their agency.
The interpretation of collective intelligences, including biological and synthetic forms of storage or computation, lays the foundation for an urban planning discipline that is as fine and infinite as the number of agents we are willing to understand and provide values for.
We are reinterpreting urban complexity through a continuous process of dialogue with the collective intelligences that inhabit it. This approach transforms urban planning practice from a linear, mechanistic exercise, soon to be replaced by artificial intelligence programs, into a multidimensional exploration of the interwoven experiences that define the urban landscape, establishing new design strategies that retain a meaningful human participation.
Design choices are no longer driven by rigid technological standards but by value-based systems that prioritise the complexities of lived experiences. Planners will no longer hide behind design manuals to validate their expertise. Instead, they will actively shape their own discipline, taking the lead in defining their role within the city’s dynamic holarchy and embracing the inherent ambiguities and complexities of urban life.
Our capacity to shape future urban landscapes that hold real value lies in accepting the ambiguities of lived experiences as central to the creation of human artefacts. In this framework, planning is redefined as an iterative process of dialogue and negotiation with computational agents, enabling us to engage with and shape the city as a complex, living system.
Holagram is also a way of doing research
A city is known through three kinds of material that rarely agree: what its institutions write, what can be walked and measured, and what can be imagined from both. Conventional research picks one as the evidence. Holagram keeps all three and records the disagreement as the finding.
The unit of work is the entry, with four registers written in order. Each register records who wrote it, a person or a model.
1Trace
What is there: a passage, a photograph, a count. Place, date, source.
2Reading
What it might mean. Strong, even paranoid readings are allowed.
3Fiction
The world in which the reading is true. Labelled. Never evidence.
4Test
What would show the reading wrong, run at another level or by another agent.
The style takes its attitude from Simon Sellars’s Applied Ballardianism, a memoir in which reading everyday life as coded turns self-confirming and damaging. Holagram keeps the reading and builds the contradiction into the procedure.