Masterplanning the Adaptive City

along infrastructural corridors; third, centralization through consolidation of various
urban entities; and fourth, the model of decentralization with new satellite cities, 
as in Shanghai’s One City, Nine Towns model.
30
One of the urgent questions, if 
the mistakes of urbanization are to be pre-empted in China, is what alternatives
may there be to urban decentralization, low density and sprawl? Combating 
the diffusion of a suburban model of development and extension of the city,
Shanghai’s polycentric model is characterized by “limited, governed, and selective
densification in nodes in which public transport is a deterrent for car use,” yet 
there is scope to further densify the existing city, through “reuse, substitution and
implantation.”
31
Asian urbanization has presented such problems and opportunities
for several decades, and now demands contextually specific approaches.
In the 1960s, western modernism’s grand and radical crescendo gave rise to
disillusionment. Big problems were thought to require big ideas. Conceptions of
the future will have—and perhaps ought to have—aspects of science fiction. In the
“space age” of the 1960s, the belief in technology as the vehicle for the discovery
of new potentials for society, if not entirely new worlds, drove a generation of
architects to challenge prevalent notions of the city. In an article in 1960, Fumihiko
Maki defined the term “megastructure,” yet he also theorized “group forms”—
small-scale village-like groupings—as viable alternatives to a pure metropolitan
urban model.
32
The megastructures of the mid-twentieth century created an
entirely new urban order, “in the form of a finite, whole, single building, 
designed and executed in a single architectural project.”
33
Megastructures were
often conceived, designed, and built in one single effort, thereby constraining 
their capacity to absorb change. Jonathan Solomon’s essay in this book, 
“Public-Spheres,” explicates his research into the interior urbanism of Hong
Kong’s fused shopping and infrastructural spaces, demonstrating how large-scale
urban armatures can be grown or evolve over time, rather than designed as a
singular whole. In this sense, the technologies of modernism created new kinds of
networks from which the city gains new potentials to behave in plastic, indefinite,
responsive modes.
Bigness no longer needs the city: it competes with the city; or better still, it is
the city. If urbanism generates potential and architecture exploits it, Bigness
enlists the generosity of urbanism against the meanness of architecture.
Rem Koolhaas, 1995
34
Mumford summarizes the quest for “bigness,” or urbanism, as agency against
architecture. Christopher Alexander set out two “major problems” for architects to
address: first, “the very large,” referring to large-scale public and urban projects;
and second, “the very small.”
35
In today’s parlance, “object-oriented design”
addresses how small interactions and associations can aggregate to form larger,
more complex wholes. 
In short, every successful institution of the metropolis repeats in its own
organization the aimless giantism of the whole . . . . The organic, the
qualitative, the autonomous were reduced to a secondary position, if not
obliterated in every department.
Lewis Mumford, 1934
36
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URBANIZATION AND ERASURE

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As part of an ongoing conversation, Kwinter states in relation to Koolhaas’s 
texts “Bigness”
37
and “Whatever Happened to Urbanism”
38
that architecture’s
“unwillingness to confront the primary shaping forces of our time, modernisation
and urbanisation” is of paramount concern.
39
Bigness is therefore a threshold “that
bears at best an indirect relationship to size alone and a far more precise and
direct relationship to the object’s complexity.” Koolhaas’s seminal essay
championed the “relinquishing of hard control.”
40
Relinquishing to what? Kwinter
asks, before answering “relinquishing to complexity, we learn [of] the shaping
force that hovers like a cybernetic ghost at the edge of that surfer’s wave.”
41
Size matters in Asia’s global urbanization. Asian megacities are much larger
and more densely populated than other megacities in other parts of the world. The
vastness of the project of erasure and sprawl may in fact haunt the planet for years
to come.
42
7.3 AN ECOLOGICAL MODEL FOR TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY URBANISM
A City! It is the grip of man on nature.
Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 1921
43
We face immense challenges concerning the future ecological viability of our
cities. If alternative approaches are not researched, developed, and implemented
soon, the current techniques of urbanization and their associated obsolescent,
disposable architecture may contribute to future ecological disasters.
Contemporary discourses related to “sustainable design” need to be reassessed
and expanded for the cultural, social, and economic endurance of cities and
buildings. Confronting short-sighted, haphazard, investment-driven urban
development, this approach emphasizes public and cultural issues related to
urban and societal evolution. In question is the legitimacy of low-quality building
techniques, which result in buildings with short design life, and “throwaway”
architecture. Key to achieving increased design life is the maintenance and
preservation of existing social structures in new urban conditions, and the
harnessing of new potentials for sensitive urbanization integrating existing
architectural heritage. 
As an alternative to disposable architecture, the economic benefits of high-
quality design emphasize innovation in computational and material research,
aiming for increasing the capacity of cities to evolve and adapt to dynamic
contextual conditions. In addition, questions of the duration (design life) of
individual buildings are concerned with how buildings can be conceived, built,
used, and adapted for the long term, rather than becoming quickly obsolete,
resulting in wasteful demolition and new construction. In the mid-twentieth
century, Mumford lamented the “economic establishment” for how it was more
likely to “destroy [a] product outright than to give it away or to limit the output at
source.”
44
In 1972, the first Club of Rome warned of the imminent limits on urban
growth.
45
Later, in the 1990s, in The First Global Revolution,
46
the group claimed the
world requires a common adversary to unite people, and this common enemy has
become “global warming, water shortages, famine and the like.” Regardless of
culture, the planet’s natural emergencies demand attention, everywhere, without
exception.
47
Throughout history, man’s technological achievements have often
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TOM VEREBES

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