The 21st-century has brought with it entirely new demands on urban form. Cities are transforming at unprecedented rates with unprecedented results. We have never before had a greater need for confidence — for a capacity to project a new kind of city. And we have never before faced such exhilarating unpredictability: people are moving, economies are moving, ecologies are moving, social contracts are moving, technologies are moving — moving in small and massive increments, locally and globally, together and independently, hopefully and disastrously.

We no longer have the luxury of imagining that we can merely control, relinquish control, or escape the city.

WW's Track Jumping project proposes an urbanism in which the thumbprint of design and the suspension of certainty are bound to one another, each amplifying the significance of the other.

Track Jumping begins with a simple hypothesis: the new city will depend not on being "green" or "global" or "local" or "efficient" or "beautiful"…it will depend on "green becoming global becoming local becoming efficient becoming beautiful…" The new city will jump from small to large, from public to private, from legible to mute, from inert matter to life, from artificial to natural…and back again.

Tracking Jumping is founded on dynamic relationships among spatial figures and non-figures. "Figures" are explicit geometric organizations (alignments, encirclements, adjacencies, and overlaps) of programs, surfaces, circulation, landscapes, and technologies — all of architecture's parts. "Non-figures" are these same organizations in suspended states. Track Jumping promotes both kinds of space, as well as frequent leaps from one to the other.

Track Jumping depends on fissures and openings as much as it depends on continuities and alignments. Fissures provide opportunities for programs to be inserted into landscapes, walkways to be connected to buildings, and infrastructures to be linked to forms. Openings enable unknowable outcomes and unknowable relationships. Fissures and openings grant certainty to urbanism's uncertainties.

Track Jumping organizes complex sub-sets of urban life (functions, economies, infrastructures, leisures, ecologies, and technologies) all the while maintaining open dynamics across those same systems.

Track Jumping articulates urban form not as single states — buildings, or landscapes, or streets, for example — but as multi-states: building-plazas, road-landscapes, walkway-programs, etc.

Track Jumping doesn't produce a city. It produces a Many City. The Many City is a city that reverberates with many urbanisms, each coming into focus and receding again, ebbing and flowing alongside the flux of contemporary urban life.