ABSTRACT
Parametricism makes urbanism and urban order compatible with radically liberal market processes. Large-scale city planning receded during the 1970s, and since then urbanism as a discourse, discipline, and profession has all but disappeared. The disappearance of urbanism coincides with the crisis of modernism, which can be interpreted as the way in which the crisis of the Fordist planned economy manifested itself within architecture. The bankruptcy of modernist planning gave way everywhere to the same visual chaos of laissez-faire urban expansion under the auspices of stylistic pluralism and the antimethod of collage. However, in the last ten years innovative urbanism reemerged under the banner of “parametric urbanism,” developing the conceptual, formal, and computational resources for forging a complex, variegated urban order on the basis of parametric logics that allow it to adapt to dynamic market forces. The global convergence and maturation of parametricist design research implies that this style of urbanism is ready to go mainstream and impact the global built environment by reestablishing strong urban orders and identities on the basis of its adaptive and evolutionary heuristics.
