The Temporal City is a reflective, exploratory domain in an ostensibly infinite, procedurally generated world. It is neither the post-industrial grouping of top-down, bottom-up hierarchies, nor the portentous open playable world of the metaverse. The Temporal City inhabits the ‘lack’. It seeks to capture the polyvalent and multi-causal threshold of spatial and chronological experience – between something real and something represented, between the particle and the pixel.

THE TEMPORAL CITY IS A KINETIC ORGANISM THAT IS SIMULTANEOUSLY AND SYNCHRONOUSLY ENABLED BY THE FLOW OF DATA, PEOPLE AND LOGISTICS. IT PROPOSES A SPATIAL OPERATING SYSTEM, A STREAM OF INPUTS AND OUTPUTS – I/O. ITS INTENSITY AND FORM UNRAVEL AND WANE AS AN ORGANIC MECHANISM THAT UNDERPINS A CHRONOLOGICALLY-BASED URBANISM. TRADITIONAL PRINCIPLES OF THE CITY ARE UPTURNED. THE TEMPORAL CITY IS NOT ABOUT ABSOLUTES OR REPEATABLE SPATIAL PRODUCTS - BUT A FRAMEWORK THAT EMBRACES AND AMPLIFIES THE INDETERMINATE, MESSY, CONTRADICTORY, COMBINATORY, UNCERTAIN AND IMPROBABLE CONDITIONS. IT IS OPPORTUNISTIC. AGILITY INSTEAD OF STABILITY, MULTIPLIERS RATHER THAN REPETITION. CHANGE, DIFFERENCE AND TIME ARE ACCELERATED. THE COMPLEXITY OF ITS SYSTEMS BENEFITS FROM VARIABILITY, UNPREDICTABILITY, IMBALANCE AND VOLATILITY.

RMIT Architecture Masters Architecture Studio Semester 1, 2022 led by Ian Nazareth & David Schwarzman