Mateus van Stralen
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Biography
Mateus van Stralen is a practicing architect and lecturer at the Architecture School of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), where he has been a faculty member since 2015. There, he is a researcher at Lagear (Graphics Laboratory for Architectural Experience) and at NEXT (Experimentation Center in Digital Technologies), where he investigates the use of digital technologies for training, learning, design, and urbanism. He is also a director at Kubus4D, a studio exploring the use of computation in architecture, and a member at large of the Executive Committee of the American Society for Cybernetics. In his work, the circularity between acting and understanding is structured from a cybernetic perspective, which forms the basis for the general conceptual framework to explore and understand the systemic nature of architecture. Mateus' research interests address design education, architecture, computational design, and Second-Order Cybernetics, intertwining theory and practice.
Sessions
From Cybersyn to the City: Variety Engineering and the Design of Open Urban Infrastructures
Contemporary urban digital twins (UDTs) are frequently deployed as tools of technocratic optimization, reducing cities to data mirrors that serve efficiency rather than democratic participation. This paper argues that Stafford Beer's cybernetic principles, particularly variety engineering (Beer, 1979, 1993), offer a rigorous alternative for designing UDTs as instruments of citizen empowerment rather than centralized control. Building on a framework for participatory UDTs grounded in Beer's Viable System Model and lessons from Project Cybersyn (Medina, 2011), this paper expands the treatment of variety engineering by distinguishing eigen-variety, the internal capacity of citizens and institutions to act, from hetero-variety, the complexity of the urban environment (Schwaninger & Ott, 2023). Drawing on Ashby's law of requisite variety (Ashby, 1956) and its recent formalization (Schwaninger & Ott, 2023), we show how amplification and attenuation function as complementary levers: attenuation renders overwhelming urban complexity legible without flattening it into a technocratic dashboard, while amplification expands citizens' capacity to engage meaningfully with governance. The paper then points to a digital twin platform currently under development that operationalizes these principles through federated, interoperable data structures and algedonic feedback mechanisms (Beer, 1981), in contrast to the vertical, single-point decision structures typical of commercial smart city platforms. Rather than concentrating variety management in one technical layer, the tool distributes it across autonomous subsystems tied to different stakeholders, echoing Cybersyn's recursive architecture (Medina, 2011) while addressing its historical shortcomings in decentralization. Positioned within the theme of Emerging Methods and Tools, this contribution argues that Beer's project remains extremely relevant in face of the new developments of digital platforms and offers the conceptual tools for building open, participatory information infrastructures suited to governing complex urban and social systems.