ABSTRACT
As a response to an increase in urban complexity, systemsbased approaches are becoming more instrumental as a means to facilitate thinking about urban areas. What they lacked, however, was a mechanism by which an analytical description of urban complexity could be translated into a usable synthetic description. For this purpose, a prioritised structure model of design thinking is outlined in this chapter. The model aligns design to a set of spatial and form-function preferences in which preference is given to spatiallydetermined variables over other quantitative and qualitative criteria. The application of the model is explored in a design experiment where design is informed by laws that are thought to govern historical urban growth patterns. It is concluded that systems thinking can support design reasoning, and that this is particularly valuable in urban design where dependencies between variables are often too complex to solve intuitively.
