WORKS Positive Feedback

A place that until then was not especially distinctive can suddenly become, for one reason or another, assort of Mecca. I am talking of, not places that have been planned beforehand such as areas zoned for similar functions for the purpose of efficiency or areas where people with contagious diseases are quarantined, but places that come into being spontaneously. In such cases, positive feedback in which like attracts like with ever increasing speed is invariably at work. Positive feedback is the polar opposite of the vicious circle (or negative feedback), a circumstance in which a negative condition is increasingly aggravated. The reason community development so often falls to gain momentum is that the groundwork for it has not been properly laid; synergy is thus unable to do its work. The idea of positive feedback is naturally important for cities, those places where people draw their energy from one another, but it must also be carefully considered in the design of new buildings whose uses are not fixed beforehand. That is because in today's architectural spaces, the contents are always changing and diverse functions coexist. How do we generate from these complex interrelationships conditions satisfactory to each function? The answer is not to try to arrive at an objective, overall image or to anticipate everything. We need to rely on self-regulating processes and to let phenomena, as they actually occur in a given place, generate forms of coexistence and eliminate things that are unnecessary. Our eyes can only see the things that are immediately around us, but something like a sixth sense often enables us to read the situation in which we find ourselves.