Why do some cities feel grown rather than drawn?
Further reading
It isn’t a miracle.
It’s the consequence of a specific design process.
Incrementality – an urban-fabric workflow built on fine-grained moves, open optionality and local adaptation, step by step.
Today I want to zoom in on an even more structuring principle: Recursiveness.
Recursiveness isn’t just “one more project” : each intervention reshapes the frame in which the next one will happen.
Anyoji Beltrando, My Lucky Pixel
Left: Nad Al Sheba, Dubai, UAE
Right: Vodnjan, Croatia
Three urban production modes
Duplication – repeat the same model, over and over.
Incrementality – add projects one parcel at a time, unsynchronised and tailored, following shared rules yet flexing with local context.
Recursiveness – link every new project to the state generated by the previous ones, so what you build today actively sets the options for what can be built tomorrow.
Recursiveness: context isn’t given – it’s constructed, and it constrains what’s possible
Left: a standardised subdivision in Dubai.
Right: a Croatian town shaped by successive adjustments that are not only incremental but recursive – each building answers a configuration created by earlier ones, and in turn re-sculpts the terrain for what comes next.
It may look improvised; it isn’t. Rules evolve because the context has changed and each stage takes that change seriously.
The urban fabric as a recurrent sequence
In mathematics, you cannot compute the 10th term of a recurrent sequence without calculating the nine that precede it.
Urbanism works the same way here: every project starts from the situation produced by its predecessors. The designer of each small project operates autonomously, yes – but inside a context that has been transformed and shaped, and that will transformed again by the following project.
Design becomes recursive when each phase absorbs the entire outcome of the previous phase as its new baseline.
Two opposing design models
Global Planning fixes a complete masterplan upfront. It might be delivered all at once or incrementally, but it leaves little room to evolvution.
Recursive design moves project by project, more radically than simple incrementality. At every turn it seeks a fresh overall coherence – one too powerful to be drawn in advance.