Urban Versioning System v1.0
petersuber's bookmarks 2019-11-21
Summary:
"We propose putting together a license for the open source design and construction of cities. The Urban Versioning System quasi-license is not yet such a license. At the moment the document is more a dogma or set of constraints. It’s an oath, a quasi-license, something to chew on. You can build using these constraints....
Both arbitrary and non-arbitrary constraints can be useful but the truism about rules being made to be broken is an obvious component of this discussion. Regulations, zoning laws, strictures and even the quasi-license outlined here would do well to refer to the structural organisation of nomic games, in which rules of the game include mechanisms for the players to change those rules. Peter Suber, original creator of the gaming system Nomic, describes in “The Paradox of Self-Amendment”xx how “self-amendment may be accepted as valid despite the contradiction inherent in it, which may be conceded to exist… This is possible because acceptance is not bound by any formal logic. If the people and officials in the appropriately complex sense accept self-amendment, despite its contradiction, then their acceptance validates it”. Elsewhere, Suber says that one of the starting rules of his game is “deliberately boring so that players will quickly amend it to please themselves”.xxi An architecture that is boring, or that becomes bored, is desperate for inhabitation and deployment.
Constructions made under the UVS quasi-license are in an important sense always unfinished, always leaving work to be done or thoughts about change to be had. Such constructions occur in physical space, but it is likely that they are also happening in informational spaces and so setting up the means for their interrogability in such terms is a crucial dimension of building. If it’s any good, somebody will always find a way to break into a closed system (either in defiance or as necessity) so incipient creators might as well provide it in a pre-broken condition...."
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