Technopoles & Biotopes

Technopoles are concentrated localisations of technologically innovative production that embrace different processes directly generated by information technologies and structured by the global economy. They pass over physical territorial boundaries, operate within multiple scales and time frames, and establish new relationships with urban places. Borrowed from ecology, biotopes define self-regulating habitats for living things and their reiterative relationship between life [bio] and place [topos]. Urban Biotopes consist of an inclusive field that allows the understanding of territory as a complex adaptive system, exposing dynamic interactions between physical and nonphysical components. Our question, is how to direct a new Upstate New York technopole development towards neighborhood revitalisation through a ring of hybrid interventions. This work promotes the mutation and hybridisation of technopole and biotope models through splicing analogously to generic recombination. Urban actors, engaged in spatial mutation and hybridisation, create spaces for their activities in the layered matrix of the city. New node-places of social contact are between neighborhoods and institutions as well as regional and downtown interests. Ultimately this work seeks to overcome the negative friction between the informational economy and the "sense of place" embedded in the region's inhabitants.

Published on Architectural Design Journal vol 75 no 6

“Sensing the 21st-Century City: Close-Up and Remote”