Adam Greenfield wrote a post about a week ago using Berlin’s Allianz Arena as a test case for a general shift in urbanism from “constant” to “variable”, which is one of the shifts he’s previously identified as composing a condition he calls “networked urbanism”. Greenfield speculates about how the Arena’s current, relatively limited ability to reconfigure itself in response to stimuli (it varies the color and lighting of its facade, depending on what team is using it) might be expanded to incorporate more sophisticated feedback loops, allowing building and crowd to interact successively and more directly, as well as noting that the increasing mutability of architectural properties (which he describes as “architecture… learning to dance”) has the potential to have massive effect on the future of the city. I’d be fascinated to see what this shift — constant to variable — looks like as it develops in less strictly delineated, much more individuated incarnations — such as buildings or landscapes that evolve or mutate in response to the generative and emergent properties of crowds, or, to extend the soccer analogy, an Allianz Arena whose architectural properties are as much a result of the interactions of the crowds (within or without) as the interior landscape of Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion is of the Südtribüne.