Mass–Customised Cities

What happens when computational design and fabrication technologies ramp up to the urban scale? Though these innovative production processes are currently now largely limited to small–scale design projects, what will happen when they are applied to the vast scale of the 21st–century world city? Could new technologies enable an important shift away from mass production to increasingly bespoke and custom–designed systems? The introduction of standardisation and mass production processes in the 20th century saw the industrial city take on a repetitious and homogeneous quality through the duplication of component parts. Today non–standard, bespoke systems hold out the promise of realising a distinctive urbanism; characterized by the differentiation of serial production and the variation of simple parts that should lead to a more complex and compelling whole. Given the current pace and rate of urbanisation in Asia, the mass customization of the city is set to have imminent and far–reaching practical consequences for the rest of the developing and developed world.