The research was originated by the identification of the topic as worthy of investigation and capable of being concluded - the lacuna in architectural theory of the concept, origins and significance of Emergence. The enquiry sought to acquire new knowledge of the relations of ecology and climate to the emergence of the cultural and architectural systems of civilisation, to their subsequent evolutionary diversifications and developments, expansions and contractions, and to their eventual collapse and reorganisation. It has been informed by knowledge produced in the disciplines of archeology and anthropology, the life sciences and the physics of climate, oceanography and geomorphology, and the sciences of complexity, and in architectural history. The primary aim of the research is to contribute to design science knowledge that is necessary for the design of cities and their systems that will enable them and their citizens to successfully transit through the critical thresholds of chanqe driven by climatic, ecological and social forces that are currently transforming the world in which we live and which our descendants will inherit. The secondary aims are the abstraction and systematisation of knowledge of biological morphogenesis and evolution to contribute to innovative computational processes of architectural design and materialisation that are necessary to sustain human societies through the impending changes. The principal contributions to knowledge of the body of work are to architectural theory and to design research. The four publications constitute a coherent body of work that has provided a contribution to architectural theory of the correlation of the dynamics of the systems of the natural world to the origins and evolutionary development of human architecture from the scale of pit dwellings to settlements, through to cities and systems of cities. The publications have also outlined the precepts for computational morphogenetic design procedures, for evolutionary computational design, for models of building and urban metabolism, for their materials, and for their future. The publications have made a contribution to the pedagogy of architectural design research within academia, and to a wide architectural design community.