Morphogenèse de la ville contemporaine

Unstable growth, unlimited urban sprawl, and multiple fragmentations are contemporary urban phenomena requiring new investigations and interpretations of the physical impact of form on today's cities. The city as a living organism with an evolving structure adopts a principle of economy in its form generating process. The city is indeed capable of auto-organization by interaction of its programs. In the frame of this research, this dynamic process named "urban morphogenesis", originating from a logic of nature, is an engineering approach which uses concepts of symmetry – invariance, transformation, and reorganization – from local to global scales. The evolution and complexity of the contemporary city's form could be explained in a new and simple model operating with dynamic notions. A theoretical "multi-scale" model based on ascendant process that uses a set of dynamic notions was set up to accurately describe the city's transformations. The dynamics are mainly applied to the appearance of programs, to the reproduction of habitat groups, to the movement of urban centres due to the presence of new collective programs and to the flexible limit of continuous urban systems. The model can also contribute to explain strategic (de) localizations of important public programs in unsteady areas. To test the new model, the agglomeration areas of Lausanne located in the middle of "Métropole lémanique" were chosen as experiment subjects. Hopefully, this polyvalent "morphogenesis representation" model based on the following simple geometric codes: "—, Δ, ◻, ○" will serve to generate new insights and analyses of metropolitan areas. Evolution of the research will make progress the following debate: "Are both nature's forms and the urban form symmetrical in their morphogenesis? "