Thessaloniki – Seaside Urbanscape.

The project of this thesis included a research in complexity, and more specifically in swarm intelligence. Swarm intelligence is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence.

Swarm intelligence systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The inspiration often comes from nature, especially biological systems. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global behavior, unknown to the individual agents. Natural examples of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling. The basic rules of a system that consists of a number of autonomous agents (multi-agent system) are: -Separation. -Alignment. -Cohesion. This research resulted in the creation of a mechanism, which tries to encode a part of the design intention into a swarm of these agents, with a different, experimental method of distributing hierarchies that have to do with decision making during the procedure of urban design. This mechanism provokes an interactive behavior between movement and space: The movement of the agents of the system is influenced at a certain radius around them from the space they move in and the way that they can understand it, while space is also influenced by this movement and gets redistributed and mutated with the help of attracting and repulsing forces that are locally distributed. The project was generated between Thessaloniki’s music halls, Poseidoneion swimming pool, Sofouli street and the New Coastline, and it was aiming at reclaiming the relationship between the citizens of Thessaloniki and the sea, spacial connectivity and the undisturbed continuity of the walk by the seaside urbanscape.