Computational Landscape

Surfacing Physical Intelligence for Design Intervention in Post-Fire Debris Flow Flooding

Computational Landscape Architecture reconceptualizes landscapes not as static compositions to be designed, but as active computational substrates continuously executing their own algorithms.

## The Dual Field Model Two reciprocal fields in bidirectional negotiation: - **Potential field**: carries energetic drive (heat, moisture, momentum, gravitational head, resource gradients) - **Constraint field**: encodes structure, boundaries, and memory (topography, vegetation patterns, soil structure, built form) These fields engage in iterative trans-action until they reach least-action configurations that manifest as observable landscape forms: channels, ridges, vegetative mosaics, fire scars, desire lines, debris fans.

## Dynamical Regimes | Regime | Character | Computation | |--------|-----------|-------------| | **Frozen / Too Ordered** | Locked in basin, ignores inputs | None—system is dead | | **Chaotic / Critical** | Deterministic but sensitive | Turing complete—perceives, computes, remembers | | **Noise / Too Unordered** | Random, structureless | None—no memory, no propagation | **Chaos is the target, not the hazard.** At criticality, the system is maximally sensitive, information transfer is maximized, and it can compute.

## Post-Fire Context Fire doesn't destroy the computation; it violently edits the constraint field while leaving potential fields intact. The system recomputes, often catastrophically. Post-fire landscapes are computational systems in crisis. Debris flows mobilize within minutes of intense rainfall, channelizing through landscapes whose constraint fields have been catastrophically altered.

## Design Implications You don't design paths. You design the fields that make desired paths least-action. **Traditional design:** Draw path -> build path -> enforce path **Computational design:** Read what paths the system is computing -> identify divergence -> edit field parameters -> let the system re-solve The desire line isn't failure—it's the system reporting what's actually least-action.

## The Stream Table Laboratory A physical computational laboratory where landscape processes execute in accelerated time. Students observe, measure, and intervene in a system that computes its own form. The stream table makes visible what field conditions typically hide: the bidirectional transaction between flow and substrate, the emergence of channel networks, the phase transitions between erosion regimes.

## Decentralized Observation Commodity hardware as instrument: phones and projectors for structured light, photogrammetry, particle tracking. **Sousveillance inverts power geometry.** The phone is already in the landscape, carried by people who live there. The observation network is the community, instrumented. You're not democratizing model outputs. You're democratizing observation.