ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the idea of virtual city experimentation: a design approach to catalyse action in the context of rapidly emerging disruptive challenges to the fabric and life of cities. Any realistic assessment of the multiple challenges of climate change suggests that human society is facing a period of revolutionary transformation, as significant as any in history. The chapter emerges from design-based research and education programmes; virtual city experimentation builds on one essential feature of all design activity the visioning of new potentialities and concepts. The critical challenge for cities in this period of climate transformation is that they are complex adaptive systems with significant embedded dependencies built-in over the years of their construction. Historical relationships between the city and nature are also under pressure; cities have impacts well beyond their borders, shaping local, regional and continental production systems and transforming landscapes, natural ecosystems and even weather.
