L I T T E R A T U R | "Swarm tectonics; A manifesto for an Emergent Architecture"

"It is the very effectiveness of ants, creatures with relatively limited cognitive skills but with a highly advanced capacity for social coordination, that illustrates the extraordinary potential of "swarm logic" as a means to address social problems. Collectively these ideas come under the heading of "emergence, a term popularized to describe a development in scientific explanations of the universe, but one that expands to all aspects of social life. It  represents a shift in understanding from "low-level" rules to higher-level sophistication, a kind of bottom-up patterns of behavior, but not ones that freeze into one single expression, rather ones that are premised on dynamic adaptation. Constantly mutating, emergent systems are intelligent ones, based on interaction, informational feedback loops, pattern recognition and indirect control. They challenge the traditional concept of systems as predetermined mechanisms of control, and focus instead on their self-regulating adaptive capacity."¨

Neil Leach, "Swarm Tectonics; A Manifesto for an Emergent Architecture", Latent Utopias 2002