Integrated planning and the design of urban agglomeration: Bernhard Hafner's Comparative Simulation of Alternative Urban Prototypes

Cybernetic simulation programs that renewed the development process of urban agglomerations began to emerge as part of a paradigm shift that took place in the 1960s. During this period, changes in urban planning evolved in the context of cybernetically-informed research methods, in which architects and systems scientists focused on the environmental control of social and cultural planning processes. As such, the urban fabric became an object of planning and regulation. These events in turn generated the need for ‘big data’ processing in architecture. Consequently, the reconfiguration of urban architectural fabric emerged as a topic of scientific operation.

In this context, in 1967, the Architecture Machine Group developed ‘Urban 5’, a planning program for urban participation based on man-machine dialogue. In the late 1960s, systems scientist Jay Wright Forrester also developed ‘Urban Dynamics’, a computer simulation exploring the interdependence of urban population, housing, and industry in the urban fabric. It was in this same 1967 environment that the Austrian architect Bernhard Hafner began to work autonomously, and without any personal relation to the other two projects, on a program for the ‘Comparative Simulation of Alternative Urban Prototypes’, based on the assumption that the design of urban forms had to be accompanied by the simulation of fields of urban dispersion.