Virtual City Experimentation: A Critical Role for Design Visioning

Here we introduce the idea of virtual city experimentation: a design approach to catalyse action in the context of rapidly emerging disruptive challenges to the fabric and life of cities. In the meaning we give to the term, the concept of virtual experimentation owes little to the contemporary association of ‘virtual’ with ‘digital’, or ‘on-line’. Independent of any technology used in the process, virtual here speaks about evoking the critical human ability to conceptualise alternative realities, to imagine and to explore in the mind other sets of relationships (social, physical, technological) than those currently evident in the lived-in world.

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