Generation of downtown planning-ordinances using self organizing maps. Lecture.

Abstract

Facing the stability of typical urban ordinances, which all too frequently become outdated at the moment of their formulation, a new method of work is currently being explored. This innovation is based on feedback from the normative body via the dynamic introduction of preexistences and transformations generated by the same framework as the ordinance. The Ordinance, as a link between the urban project and architecture, should compromise with the purely urban concepts as well as the purely architectural, establishing relationship or network pattern between them. It will be that definition of relational or network pattern that we will call Network-Ordinance. And its adaptation or approximation to the same ordinance, by means of the architectural-urban proposal, will be the normative framework generated from the global, in contrast to the particular and accidental. It will be, therefore, the search for coherencies formalized in pattern that come together and display the most representative ideals and values of the selected area. By means of the objective numeric representation of the values considered useful or representative, as well as those whose interests are unknown, and their application through an artificial neuronal network, with unsupervised and competitive learning of the same type as the SOM (Self-Organizing Map) and, more concretely, Kohonen’s network, the underlying structure of the same data will be discovered and represented in a comprehensible manner. The results obtained are easily interpretable, permitting the recognition of the grouping, in the form of pattern, of the architectural objects represented, allowing the verification of the integration (or not) of a new building or object into those pattern, which conform to the Network-Ordinance and what we have come to call Ecotype. The new objects allowed by this rule will then form part of the same ordinance, becoming integrated in the body of a new neuronal network, and thus acquiring feedback from the ordinance. As a verification, it is proposed that a Network-Ordinance is created for a sector of the historical center of a city in the province of Granada, in order to compare the obtained results with the proposed Ordinance by the city planning.