Masterplanning the Adaptive City

modernism: “the machine-made environment, standardized, bureaucratized,
‘processed,’ technically perfected,” and “the natural environment” of open space,
sunlight, air, green foliage, and views. Mumford criticized Le Corbusier’s vision,
accusing him of two mistakes: “the overvaluation of mechanization and
standardization,” and “the theoretical destruction of every vestige of the past,”
which he claimed eliminated lessons learnt from previous errors.
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The growth of large cities was a nineteenth-century phenomenon in Europe.
In 1800, not one European city had a population of over one million. Despite its low
rate of urbanization up until the 1980s, Beijing was the largest city in the world for
centuries, with a population exceeding one million in the 1700s.
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By 1850 London’s
population had reached two million, and Paris’s one million. By 1900 there were
eleven cities with populations greater than one million, including Berlin, Chicago,
New York, Philadelphia, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Tokyo, and Calcutta. By
1930, there were over thirty-seven such cities, now on every continent.
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In 1975
only one-third of the world’s population lived in cities; by 2007, urbanites made 
up half the world’s population; and according to projections the fraction will be
two-thirds by 2050.
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At the time of writing, official census figures put the number
of cities in China with populations of over one million at more than 170. 
Given the speed of the onset of urbanization today, and the speed and extent
of transformation in cities such as Manchester, New York, and Chicago, in what
ways can lessons from the cities of the Industrial Revolution inform the blueprints
for Asia’s instant cities? 
4.3 THE PARADIGM OF THE NEW WORLD INSTANT CITY
At the time cities such as Manchester were mushrooming in Europe, the rate of
growth of cities in the new world was perhaps even more electrifying. Preindustrial
colonial cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Montreal underwent
retooling, expansion, and densification, while a wholly new city emerged at the
confluence of transportation routes—of the railroads of the Midwestern United
States and routes for seafaring shipping on the Great Lakes, via the St. Lawrence
Seaway. This was Chicago, the ultimate nineteenth-century instant city. A new
world city, Chicago charged ahead after the Great Fire of 1871 to become the
fastest growing city in America. Its status as an infrastructural hub is the reason
for its apparently isolated position, and for its rapid growth.
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As a locus for the
sorting, storage and redistribution of “grain from the west, lumber from the north,
and cattle from the southwest,” Chicago only existed because of industry and
trade, and its infrastructural machinery.
36
As Friedrich Engels called Manchester a “shock city”—emerging quickly with
great force—so Chicago was a city which emerged rapidly, and while both
European and American instant cities are “often considered as though they were
unique and discrete phenomena, . . . the first phase of industrial urbanism proved
to be merely the beginning of a long process of urban adaptation and
transformation.”
37
During the eighteenth century, Protestantism, industrialization,
capitalism, and colonialism drove the rapid emergence of cities and created the
conditions for a system of flows of capital, resources, and goods. Le Corbusier
marveled at the pure formal elegance of the grain silos of the American urban
landscape, ignoring the “railway connections to the vast agrarian hinterland of the
Great Plains,” from where the grain emanated.
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TOM VEREBES

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In the United States, the Urban Renewal Act (URA) of 1948 enabled federally
funded projects, yet vast swathes of the historic fabric of New York were razed 
in the name of slum clearance. Renewal, regeneration, adaptive reuse, and
preservation, as understood today, provide a spectrum of ways in which to deal
with dilapidated, defunct, or obsolete urbanism. In her seminal book The Death
and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs advocated the neighborhood as a
unit having the capacity for emergent self-organization, through local interactions
focussed around the street as the locus of urban activity. Jacobs was critical of 
the erasure of historic neighborhoods as a side effect of the goals of the URA.
According to Mumford, her “assault on current planning” rested on her view of 
the nature, function, and structure of great cities, which valorized the “unplanned
casualness” of the sidewalk, street, and neighborhood, yet was underpinned by a
“preoccupation that [was] almost an obsession, the prevention of criminal violence
in cities.”
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Jacobs was reacting to the ills of modernization, and of modernism.
The deep conservatism of her position prevented her from addressing urban
renewal, or urbanization, on any terms other than her own, which were confined to
a definition of a well-functioning city as comprised of polite, well-organized, and
vibrant neighborhoods dependent on “human-scale” urban typologies promoting
interpersonal relations and a sense of “belonging.” Jacobs saw the symptoms of
urbanization as being “disorganization and excessive congestion,” and converted
them into a remedy in which “congestion and disorder [are] normal, indeed the
most desirable, conditions of life in cities.” In 1962, one year after Jacobs
published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Mumford wrote a scathing
critique of her simple position: given cities have continuously vibrant and active
city streets, they establish homeostasis and remain safe as social spaces.
Mumford’s assault on Jacobs can be summarized in his view of the sense of
belonging as resting “not on a metropolitan dynamism, but on continuity and
stability.”
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The space of flows creates proximity and instantaneousness. These
new networks create “serendipitous encounters between strangers” or what
Jacobs called “contact,” in which chance encounter rules over predictable
routines.
41
Jacobs was critiquing an approach to urban renewal which was “a
decidedly top down approach,” in which large-scale modern housing projects in
American inner cities “tried to deal with the problem of dangerous city streets 
by eliminating streets altogether.”
42
To some extent Jacobs’s spearheading of a
grassroots movement against the top-down planning of slum clearance and large
infrastructural projects such as those championed by Robert Moses failed to
recognize some of the ills of American society—principally those of a racially
divided country and the “white flight” of middle-class educated Caucasians to the
suburbs, leaving the inner cities to poor African Americans and lower income
immigrant groups. Jabobs in her writings makes little mention of such
phenomena, which no doubt contributed to American cities becoming dangerous
and depopulated, and generally in decline.
Jacobs’s position is limited as a universal thesis in its inability to explain why
some vast modern cities are in fact safe places to be. Why does Tokyo, a city of
over thirty million inhabitants, have a negligible crime rate? What explains the
safety of public housing estates in Hong Kong and Singapore? And what, then, 
are the self-regulatory control mechanisms of urbanism? In Rem Koolhaas’ 1978
treatise on metropolitan life, Delirious New York, the author argues that what he
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THE NEW NEW

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