This design led research frames a contemporary response to the challenge of achieving scale and variety in the procurement and delivery of large scale housing projects. Through the specificity of the challenges posed by: rapidly urbanising Chinese cities, the scope of the “superblock” to accommodate diverse living environments, current Chinese institutional frameworks and procurement procedures, the argument for an open-ended design and development model is made. The anticipated design protocol incorporates a multitude of participants in a process that is mediated through the (as yet) unproven agency of data driven digital processes and a restatement of the importance of the architect’s design intelligence to co-ordinated and assemble inputs across multiple scales and stakeholders. The motivation is to support a multitude of “civic ways of life” that gather spatial and indeed social difference and that assemble more intensively cosmopolitan urban districts of interrelated spatial and social layers; an imaginary of a thriving urban ecology.