John Driscoll

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John Driscoll is an architect and Ph.D student of Systems Science at Portland State University. He has worked with and credits as mentors, Dean Bryant Vollendorf Proffesor Emeritus, UNCC and George Hascup AAP Cornel University. John is primarily interested is in the rationalization of city planning and the emerging field of the science of cities, the goal being to apply theory and methods from complex systems science to the research, analysis and design of urban environments. Cities are simultaneously the physical manifestation of buildings and infrastructure or hardware as well as the software and wetware of socio-economic systems and biological-ecological systems. Fractal cartography, cellular automata simulation, genetic algorithms and statistical physics are some of the theoretical components underlying a scientific framework of cities, utilizing technology and information. The science of cities incorporates a variety of frameworks—what Herbert Simon calls the ‘science of the artificial’—such as artificial life, agent based design, systems dynamics, information theory and data mining. With over half the world’s population living in cities and millions more moving to them every year, an understanding of growth and decay patterns in cities as organism-like systems within a broader context is intimately connected with meta-level processes such as global warming and developing long term sustainable and regenerative approaches to design.