Kwinter - Wildness

America - learning lessons on 'wildness'. Should have already learned the lesson from our interaction in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was a classical Western strategy of holding space, pitted against guerilla tactics.

This was a reflection of logic versus intuitive, the fluidity between tactical and strategic modes in relation to fluctuating conditions.
--> Interesting correlation to the human and computer chess match ... Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov in 1997.

The Vietcong's ability to "jungle-ize" space carried over to the urban environment, successfully rendering Saigon uncapturable.

Santa Fe Institute for the Study of Complexity - suggests that indirectness is a more efficient method of design and construction than finished and perfected parts and incrementally over time instead of one fell swoop of assembly.

Indirectness is the secret to achieving a robust, adaptive, flexible, and evolving design. (modeled after "wild systems").

"Subsumption architectures" - A bottom's-up systematic approach to design. There is no central control, and the "design" does not come from the whole and trickle down to the parts, but rather travels in the opposite direction.

Wildness emerges in a system once we lose the ability to predict -- from the outside -- what it will do.

Polygenetic structures - large -- though in quantitative and relative sense more than absolute. Complex -- generated from an indeterminate number of distinct sources, distributed through many or n dimensions, and fundamentally open (i.e., wild) and unfinished.

Evolutionary process -- the formation of organic meshes -- was always built into urban matrices as the result of historical pressures and patterns embedding themselves into a matter, in an open process over time.

Design today must find ways to approximate these ecological forces and structures to tap, approximate, borrow, and transform morphogenetic processes from all aspects of the wild nature, to invent artificial means of creating living artificial environments.