The traditional developer-lead high-density housing development mode has and will inevitably lead to creating more and more homogeneous, responsive-less housing that cannot satisfy the growth of the urban population in both quantity and diversity. As an alternative approach, this thesis proposes an online distributed design system that based on crowdsourcing to provide a more responsive high-density housing design. Through the pixelation of the space with the standardized modules, architects will able to design units directly in response to the users' varied spatial needs (such as different family sizes, living styles, etc.) and the overall aggregation will emerge based on the predefined assemble rules.

• Goal

Because the fundamental goal for tradition developer-lead high-density condo development is to maximize the profit for the developer, the design of the condos is treated more as commodity rather than living spaces for the actual users. This commoditization will inevitably lead to more homogeneous spatial configuration (to increase the market liquidity and decrease the design cost) which is hard to give way to higher level of customizations for individual users and community-driven development.

• Process

Another problem with the typical approach is the top-down develop/design decision-making model. In this hierarchical model the developers are on top of the decision-making tree while the actual users are on the bottom and only have the choice to choose from limited options. Two problems raised from this approach:

• expensive develop cost.

  Because of the top-down hierarchy, any changes on top of the decision-making tree will affect all the decisions below. This will cause a lot of resources (time, design power) to make adjustment/new decisions. As a result, the develop cost will be very high which add up to the total cost of condos.

• responsive-less to users.

  Because of the high cost of development fee and the bottom position on the decision-making tree, the actual users have little or no contribution to the develop/design process. As a result, the design of the condo cannot address the personal and social requirement of each user and furthermore, cannot be responsive to the local context.

Over the last few decades, the gap between those who produce and use housing has significantly increased. Cities like Vancouver are characterised by a singularity of big developers offering one-size-fits-all housing and an increasing lack of affordability with only 20% of the population being financially able to build a house. Contemporary modes of production have aroused a lot questioning.

-more people move the city, we need more housing -current development model since industrial revolution -current architectural design model since industrial revolution

-typical developer-lead mode -historical theoretical works -corbusier...

-co-housing and social housing -lack of customization

-conclusion

Why is it more beneficial to use self-organized system in Condo development?

• Goal

In self-organized systems, the agents,

• Process

  • Develop/Design cost

  • Responsiveness to individual and larger context

Through reverse the

in order to fully exploit the bottom-up decision-making approach, it is important to understand the -self-organized system -rule-based -game of life -distributed -GPU vs CPU -reCaptcha