Masterplanning the Adaptive City

downtown Los Angeles—which since the 1960s has been revived—is not entirely
clear. Detroit is a city which is either, optimistically, in decline, or has all but died. 
It is often cited as a casualty of the shift of the automotive industry to the East, as
well as an emblem of the racial division of American cities, and white flight. At one
time the Motor City, as it is known, was a symbol of capitalist supremacy and of
the automobile industry, but as “the largest capitalist machine in the history of
civilization, its viability lasted barely a few decades . . . . [T]he city came and went
in less than a hundred years.”
55
Today much of the city is in ruins and seems quite
close to abandonment, despite the presence of one of America’s wealthiest
suburbs, Grosse Point, just across the city’s “8-mile line.”
56
In fact Detroit’s city
council is reviewing legislation to change the zoning in parts of the city from
residential or commercial to farming, thereby de-urbanizing it.
57
Coming full circle, one of the centers of the Industrial Revolution, London’s
Docklands, suffered desolation in parallel with the decline of the British Empire
and changes in British manufacturing, and also due to the removal of shipping
from the River Thames to better seaports. The redeveloped Canary Wharf was
prematurely deemed a failure in its first few desolate years, only for it to grow into
a global center of finance. Similarly, Manchester and Liverpool also decayed on all
fronts in their postindustrial, postcolonial, and postwar conditions, only to be
regenerated by government investment coupled with an extended property boom
in the 1990s and 2000s. 
Do these cities represent a warning about how urban decline can lead to
eventual abandonment, or do they simply attest to urban change as a given? 
Is imbalance the new paradigm? Models of urbanization which lack basic 
self-sustaining capabilities and resilience seem wholly inappropriate for 
export, especially to China. Far from a mirage, Dubai came about through the
consolidation of real flows of energy, goods, people, and capital. These dynamic
flows, when understood as bottom-up interactions of the type which all cities need
to maintain themselves, took place within a top-down model of planning, urban
design, and architecture. With its laissez-faire economic model, Dubai, as a freak
of desert urbanism, persists, but for just how long? 
NOTES
1
> L. Mumford (1986) The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. D.L. Millner (Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press), 104. 
2
> M. Hulshof and D. Roggeveen (2011) How the City Moved to Mr. Sun (Amsterdam: SUN), 309.
3
> T. Verebes (2010) “Endurance and Obsolescence: Instant Cities, Disposable Buildings,
and the Construction of Culture,” in Sustain and Develop: 306090, Vol. 13, eds. Jonathan Solomon
and Joshua Bolchover (New York: Princeton Architectural Press). 
4
> J. Grasso, J. Corrin, and M. Kort (1991) Modernization and Revolution in China (New York:
M.E. Sharpe). 
5
> W. Skinner (1977) The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford Press). 
6
> T.J. Campanella (2008) The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It
Means for the World (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), 191. 
7
> Campanella, The Concrete Dragon, 103. 
8
> N. Mars (2008) “Cities Without History”, in The Chinese Dream, eds. N. Mars and A.
Hornsby (Rotterdam: 010), 525. 
9
> Mars, “Cities Without History,” 534. 
10
> Campanella, The Concrete Dragon, 277. 
11
> D. Scott Brown and R. Venturi (2008) Shanghai Transforming, ed. I. Gil (Barcelona: Actar),
66–71. 
12
> Campanella, The Concrete Dragon, 94–95. 
38
TOM VEREBES

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13
> D.G. Shane (2011) Urban Design since 1945: A Global Perspective (London: Wiley), 53. 
14
> L. Mumford (1961) The City in History (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch), 111. 
15
> See Mumford, The Lewis Mumford Reader, 217. 
16
> M. Tafuri (1976) Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge:
MIT), 50. 
17
> S. Johnson (2001) Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software
(London: Penguin), 110. 
18
> M. De Landa (1997) A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone), 83. 
19
> De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 150. 
20
> L. Mumford (1934) Technics and Civilisation (London: Harvest), 3. 
21
> A. Perez-Gomez (1985) The Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT), 11. 
22
> R. Banham (1960) Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Oxford: Butterworth-
Heinemann), 12. 
23
> Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 44. 
24
> Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 72, 76. 
25
> Mumford, The City in History, 447. 
26
> S. Kwinter (2010) “Notes on the Third Ecology,” in Ecological Urbanism, eds. M. Mostafavi
and G. Doherty (Baden: Lars Müller) 94. 
27
> M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 8. 
28
> Mumford, The Lewis Mumford Reader, 171. 
29
> Johnson, Emergence, 147. 
30
> Shane, Urban Design since 1945, 91. 
31
> Mumford, The Lewis Mumford Reader, 177, 182. 
32
> Shane, Urban Design since 1945, 9, 87. 
33
> Mumford, The City in History, 529. 
34
> UN HABITAT, World Urban Forum III. 
35
> R.E. Park, E.W. Burgess, and R.D. McKenzie (1996) “The Growth of a City: An Introduction
to a Research Project,” in The City Reader (London: Routledge), 165. 
36
> R.T. LeGates and F. Stout (1996) “Editor’s Introduction,” in The City Reader (London:
Routledge), 161. 
37
> R.T. LeGates and F. Stout (1996) “Introduction to Part One: The Evolution of Cities,” in The
City Reader. (London: Routledge), 18. 
38
> Shane, Urban Design since 1945, 140. 
39
> Mumford, The Lewis Mumford Reader, 184–189. 
40
> Mumford, The Lewis Mumford Reader, 192–194. 
41
> S. Shaviro (2003) Connected, or What it Means to Live in the Network Society (Minnesota:
Regents), 133. 
42
> Johnson, Emergence, 50. 
43
> Koolhaas, R. (1978) Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.
44
> Campanella, The Concrete Dragon, 281. 
45
> R. Koolhaas (2007) The Gulf (Baden: Lars Müller), XVIII. 
46
> R. Koolhaas (2011) Volume 23: Al Manakh Gulf Continued, ed. T. Reisz (The Netherlands:
Archis), 5. 
47
> Shane, Urban Design since 1945, 157. 
48
> T. Verebes, “Endurance and Obsolescence.” 
49
> F.T. Kryza (2006) The Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa’s City of Gold (New York:
Harper Collins), xiii. 
50
> Campanella, The Concrete Dragon, 15. 
51
> J. Jiang (2011) Volume 23: Al Manakh Gulf Continued, ed. T. Reisz (The Netherlands:
Archis), 494. 
52
> O. Bouman (2011) Volume 23: Al Manakh Gulf Continued, ed. T. Reisz (The Netherlands:
Archis), 180. 
53
> S. Boeri (2010) “Five Ecological Challenges for the Contemporary City,” Ecological
Urbanism, eds. M. Mostafavi and G. Doherty (Baden: Lars Müller), 451. 
54
> R. Banham (1971) Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Pelican). 
55
> S. Kwinter and D. Fabricius (2001) “Houston,” in Mutations, ed. R. Koolhaas, S. Boeri, 
S. Kwinter, N. Tazi, and H.U. Obrist (Barcelona: Actar), 594. 
56
> Shane, Urban Design Since 1945, 141. 
57
> Shane, Urban Design Since 1945, 261. 
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THE NEW NEW

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