Parametric design is a process based on algorithmic thinking that enables the expression of parameters and rules that, together, define, encode and clarify the relationship between design intent and design response..........Sounds too technical?? Lets try again.....😁😁

Parametric design is a design driven by parameters.

This doesn’t mean it is created by numbers and algorithms. That’s “generative design”. Lately ,the two are getting mixed pretty easily and yes, there is a lot of common ground.

Parametric design can start with a conventional design - drawing or a model. The dimensions of design are then then turned into parameters - they are made variable. By changing the parameters other designs emerge, which are similar to the starting design but can diverge a long way and be quickly adapted to the some need. A lot of times there will be a combination of parameter values that give nonsensical designs and then we need to make the parameters maybe dependent on each other, or make some simple or complicated checks and start using algorithms to constrain the design.

In example, let’s say a table. You sketch a design of a table making length , width and maybe height variable. By changing three numbers you will get infinite number of designs that share the same design intent. A lot of those tables will be nonfunctional and you will either have to constrain your design or add some logic ( algorithms , procedures ) so that the design adapts to the parameters by changing its starting design slightly , lets say by thickening of the sections or changing the material properties.

Now that we have some sort of clarity about the design defination lets talk about urbanism....huge leap? well keep reading and we shall find the relations

In the last decades there has been an extraordinary advance in the development of parametric design tools. In parametric design, the parameters of a particular object are declared, not its shape. These technologies have been transferred from aerospace and automotive industries to architecture and urbanism, to constitute what is being known as parametric urbanism, a theoretical and methodological procedure developed in the context of the Zaha Hadid Architects' practice. Their large scale urban design proposals have frequently applied parametric design tools.

Parametric Urbanism aims to provide new logic of urban design that operate through the correlation of multiple urban systems as the modulation systems of open and closed spaces, exploring new techniques of formal variation and differentiation, in which nothing repeats itself, and two buildings should not necessarily have the same shape.

Furthermore, it uses techniques of deformation, usually through complex curved geometries such as lines splines, NURBS surfaces and deformed grids to articulate the urban fabric of new projects to pre-existing tissue and thereby promote the connection of the urban grid as a whole. These formal codes that Schumacher calls positive heuristics (rules or positive procedures) result almost always in the differentiation of the form. Perhaps it is this quality which is most desired by parametric urbanism.

Parametric Urbanism excels, so in the notion of field, which can be understood as a third different approach to the notion of space after modernism and postmodernism, as observed by Peponis: "While the space as a concept which underlies the major streams of modern architecture, would refer to abstract and homogeneous extensions that can be freely arranged, the place, as a concept that inspires criticism to modern conditions would relate to specific situations and qualities that must be recognized and consciously cultivated. "

Whereas "to give visual form to the city is a special type of design problem and, moreover, a relatively recent problem," as Lynch says, it is natural and legitimate for the latest advances in digital technologies applied to the project, which in which fit the parametric design tools, have approached both the architecture and urbanism in recent years, and in particular the processes of urban design.

Parametric urbanism could build a more systemic approach, considering the urban design not as a product derived exclusively from the shape, function or environment, but as a product of relationships between the various elements of a more complex system that is the town itself, composed of places and individuals, among others. The parameters of form, function and environment must be interrelated to the configuration parameters of the space.