Masterplanning the Adaptive City

the future with as much certainty as it eradicates the past. The speed of change, as
Thomas Campanella asserts, can be stunning, but it can also be stupid, and can
come at the cost of “quality, longevity and even safety.”
4
Much has been written in recent decades on European and North American
cities in the postwar era of the 1950s and 1960s. Given the rapid technological
progress of this period, the dysfunctionality of many existing cities in terms of their
infrastructure and building stock became evident. Countless cities embarked on
missions to retrofit themselves, establishing new, radically incompatible schemes
that superimposed the new world order onto the existing city, thus obliterating it
through erasure. The western notion of tabula rasa contrasts the new world with
the old, whereas for the Metabolists the concept of erasure was born out of the
fragility of urbanity in the natural environment; it was the force of earthquakes and
tsunamis, as well as wars, that led to this alternative, eastern notion of erasure.
5
Modernism’s urban program sought to erase traditional, incrementally grown
urban morphology, citing its inadequacy for new functions, discarding figural
approaches to urbanism in favor of formal abstraction. Modernization in China,
according to Jiang Jun, occurred in three stages: initially there was the
Westernization Movement of the 1870s; this was followed by the development of
national industry in the 1920s; and in the 1950s the Great Leap Forward.
6
A fourth,
ongoing stage, as yet without a name, is the largest urbanization project ever
undertaken.
Despite being predominantly rural until the 1980s, China has had an urban
population for over five thousand years. One of the first serious studies of
contemporary Chinese urbanization by a foreign research team was carried out by
Harvard GSD’s Project on the City, led by Koolhaas, in their 1996 study on the Pearl
River Delta (PRD), published as Great Leap Forward in 2001.
7
As a treatise based 
on gonzo-journalistic techniques, Great Leap Forward can be seen as a celebration
of urbanization—in all its crassness. Part historical record, part documentary
photojournalism of the state of urbanization in the PRD, Koolhaas celebrated
China’s victory over the past—a past it had already forgotten. The future was not
the focus of Harvard’s PRD research, rather it targeted the dynamism of the
present and the speed and ruthlessness with which the past can be altered, if not
erased entirely, forever.
Mistakes made by permitting the widespread demolition of China’s cities 
and towns—while now gaining in the public consciousness, as well as that of
professionals, investors, and the government—are irreparable. Images of the
Chinese character chai (
, meaning “destruction”) painted on doorways across
the nation are a reminder of how history, in its manifestation in the architecture of
the city, can be erased.
8
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URBANIZATION AND ERASURE

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As analyzed by Zhang Tinwei, China’s rapid urbanization has four characteristics:
“huge size, a fluctuating trajectory, a rapid growth rate since the 1980s, and an
uneven distribution pattern.”
9
The unevenness of China’s urban history is marked
by a large, relatively poor rural population, despite large urban centres having
existed throughout its history. The Shanyang Reform of nearly 2500 years ago set
up a free peasant economy as the basis of the unification of rural China; the
current context of rapid urbanization has marked a paradigm shift.
10
From 1978 to
2008, China planned and built 468 new cities, and saw over half a billion people
move into its cities, representing the fastest rate of urbanization ever. 
Another imbalance is the tiered zones of “first cities” along the eastern
seaboard, with second- and third-tier cities located inland in the northeast, middle,
and west of China. The China Western Development Strategy, or “Go West,” is an
ongoing policy enacted in 1999 by the central Chinese government as a mission to
(re)develop the central and western regions of China, to “increase connectivity
with the coastal provinces, redress economic disparities, and thus ensure social
stability”
11
and to promote “‘balanced development’ across the nation.”
12
One
particularly noteworthy city, Chongqing, was detached from Sichuan Province in
1997, and on paper it became the largest municipality in the world, with a
population of thirty-two million, though its urbanized population was several
million less than the total population of the municipality. Through relaxation of the
Hukou system for Chongqing, with the aim of registering up to ten million migrant
workers to live in the city between 2010 and 2020, it is likely to become the largest
single city in the world within a generation.
13
Like all second-tier Chinese cities,
especially those located west of the eastern seaboard, Chongqing is on the cusp of
a tremendous wave of development and transformation. 
China’s emblematic instant city must be Shenzhen, the country’s first
Special Economic Zone (SEZ), declared by Deng Xiaoping in 1990. A small fishing
village of twenty thousand people in 1980, Shenzhen’s population is now in excess
of fourteen million, about twice that of its sister city just to the south, Hong Kong.
Unlike other cities, “where population growth is a result of natural birth of
permanent residents,” Shenzhen has grown principally due to “an inflow of
floating residents.”
14
In spite of the boundary between mainland China and the
Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, it is plausible that Hong Kong and
Shenzhen might merge in the future, becoming one vast megacity.
15
The Pearl
River Delta is likely, according to Manuel Castells, “to become the most
representative urban face of the twenty-first century,” the “Southern China
Metropolis,” a continuous urban agglomeration comprising Hong Kong,
Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Macau, Zhuhai, and other cities. Megacities connect
multiple cities in a region, making the influence and impact of urbanism pervasive
and ubiquitous. In Castell’s terms, the megacity is a current trend which can be
traced back to the joining of Tokyo–Yokohama–Nagoya with Osaka–Kobe–Kyoto,
creating “the largest metropolitan agglomeration in human history, not only in
population, but in economic and technological power.” The distinctive feature of
the new urban form of megacities is “being globally connected and locally
disconnected, physically and socially.”
16
In contrast to the metropolitan, high-
density urbanism of Hong Kong, across the boundary the urbanization of the PRD
is modelled on low-density, vehicle-based “mass suburban developments,” created
as enclaves for industry, commerce, or residential programs.
17
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TOM VEREBES

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