Stealth Group (Ana Dzokic, Marc Neelen, Ivan Kucina & Milica Topalovic) The Genetics of the Wild City http://www.classic.archined.nl/wildcity

participants

Occurring, growing without supervision or restraint, not domesticated, cultivated or tamed, the Wild City is what may be called the urban paradigm of contemporary Belgrade. During a decade of instability, emergent processes replaced the city's primary systems in domains of trade, housing production and public services. Where many saw only visual chaos, the city's ability to persist in its functioning provoked us to view it rather as a dynamic entity, a complex adaptive system. As an enclave excluded from global connections, it proved the ultimate laboratory in which 'emergent' behavior could be studied - to witness this new, mutated layer overtaking cities, land, structures and waters.

Through the Wild City research, ways of observing complex phenomena and taxonomies to register their behavior are developed. It focuses on processes, the unfolding of events in time rather than particular physical instances. The research indicates how nearly all of the processes - ranging from street trade to city transport, conflict and negotiation between individual actors and institutions - give rise to unusual relations and urban typologies. Overall comparisons of behaviors brought an exciting discovery: a pattern of similarity in their sequences that can be called 'urban genes'.Parts of 'The Wild City - Genetics of Uncontrolled Urban Processes' have been presented at the Mutations Exhibition (USE) in Bordeaux, as well as in Brussels, Japan, at the Berlin Beta 2001 Conference, at V2_Wiretap Program (Rotterdam) and as a proposal to the City Planning Department of Belgrade. Wild City forms the content of the DataCloud 2.0 browser, currently developed by V2_Lab and ArchiNed.

Biography

The Stealth Group are: Ana Dzokic, Marc Neelen, Milica Topalovic and Ivan Kucina. They have initiated and assembled several joint projects, beginning with the Projekt X Workshop which explored the *edge-condition* of Belgrade during its most difficult times. The flux between Belgrade and Rotterdam, the simultaneity of research at the Berlage Institute (Rotterdam) and the debut of the Stealth Group, have been one of the main forces of this collaboration, allowing for an evolved understanding of *hometown*.Stealth Group continues its research of wild, uncontrolled processes in the city structure, introducing them into the architectural field in order to build tools for dealing with spatial forms of constant social change.