Masterplanning the Adaptive City

regularity with purposefulness, and irregularity with intellectual confusion or
technical incompetence.”
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The challenges in this current century are in part the result of the
unprecedented scale of urbanization, and also perhaps of uncertainty over the
basis upon which cities can be planned. Do we even have the right terms, yet, to
describe the task of designing dynamic patterns of interaction in space? Space is
not immutable, but is rather responsive to shifting demands. This, then, is the
central task of planning—and its intrinsic paradox—to design that which changes
over long periods of time. 
The paradox of endurance and impermanence is evident in Metabolism’s
fascination with impermanence, which has cultural roots in the making of
temporary structures. The Ise Shrine in Japan, meticulously rebuilt every twenty
years since 
AD
690, is perhaps the emblematic example of temporality as a device
for instilling cultural continuity, involving the ritualized inheritance of the cultural
and technological knowledge required to reconstruct the shrine precisely as it has
been for centuries.
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The theme of endurance can, however, be misconstrued as 
a reactive, even reactionary position, fundamentally at odds with modernization
and urbanization. Considered as a model for contemporary Asian urbanization,
the ideas of Jane Jacobs are “lost in translation,” lacking pertinence for the
unprecedented extent of urbanization in Asia. Jacobs’s arguments, if not 
obscured by sentimentality, might be made tangible in the last ditch effort of
preservationists, who are desperately seeking to save some of the existing
traditional fabric of Chinese cities, most notoriously the Hutongs in Beijing and
the Lilong housing of Shanghai. 
Koolhaas, in an interview with Arata Isozaki, has claimed there were two
tendencies in the Metabolist movement, “one is very formal, and very harsh, 
the other shapeless and undefined.” Fumihiko Maki’s notion of “group form” 
grew out of his observations of “recurring vernacular patterns in different parts 
of the world.” His interest in organic urban growth runs counter to the hard
masterplanning sensibility of late modernism, and specifically to that of some of
his Metabolist peers. Related to the organizational concept of group form is the
principle of “slow-growth urbanism,” which counters what Maki labels “a product
of absolute power from the past or a by-product of some techno-utopia future
expressed by everyone from Le Corbusier to Yona Friedman to Kenzo Tange.”
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Marshall has observed that “some traditional urbanism can have functional
order without planning while some Modernist planned urbanism is dysfunctional
despite planning”
62
While a distinction between planned cities and unplanned
cities is helpful in highlighting historical differences in urbanism, these are not
options to choose between. Historically, cities grew as aggregates, emerging 
from local, small-scale architectural interventions which collectively shaped 
the whole. 
As a side effect of a larger ecology of matter, the lifespan of a building is
directly related to the severity of the climate, the extent of maintenance, and the
inherent resilience of its materials. Decay and failure of materials can lead to
ruination.
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Although time will ensure a building undergoes continual material
change, its use also often changes. In this sense, a building becomes obsolete if 
it is no longer suitable for its intended purpose. Users might, however, alter uses 
or introduce wholly new uses to buildings to make them relevant. What is the
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URBANIZATION AND ERASURE

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equivalent of these architectural issues in urbanism? How can cities function well
over long periods? How can they adapt and remain relevant, and thrive? 
7.5 TIME, CHANGE, AND ADAPTATION
Let us revisit the paradox of planning for urban growth through the investigation of
the endurance of cities, and how urbanism can mature over long periods, and
allow for growth, change, evolution, and transformation over time.
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A set of
oppositions have been interrogated, including the relation between flexible design
approaches and singular solutions; permanent or long-lasting buildings versus
adaptable or reuseable buildings; and how cities can be planned to be complete
versus patterns of urban growth and change. Within the various theoretical
stances of contemporary urbanists, many will agree that “there is a certain
looseness in urbanism, and a certain fixity and rigidity in architecture.”
65
Whether
it manifests as flourishing or as decay, when we try to understand how cities take
form and how they transform over time, change is the only constant. This is a call
for new techniques to address what is articulated here as the surrender to the
forces of time. Although time, as its relation to movement is a prominent theme of
the twentieth century, in art, literature, cinema, some arenas of avant-garde
architecture, reconsidering “materialist” approaches to space, will serve to explain
the formation and functioning of modernity.
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The only inevitable and unavoidable
fact of urbanism is that space is not fixed, but changes through time. 
Le Corbusier, among other modernists, was fascinated by traditional urban
fabric, and sketched in particular the white villages of the Mediterranean. This
fascination with grown or evolved morphology may have been a complement to
the top-down modes in which he projected urbanism in his day job; or is it a
paradoxical aberration? Perhaps the modernists, with their will to make the world
anew, lacked the tools with which to negotiate the morphological integration
evident in these villages. 
Regarding an understanding of complex systems, Christopher Alexander
made an important distinction between “generated structures” and “fabricated
structures.”
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He cautioned, however, against “gradualism” as a basis for
understanding step-by-step processes, akin to “evolutionary adaptation,” as
“making the same mistake that the early adherents of Darwinism made in
biology—to assume that small steps alone, modification coupled with selective
pressure, would be sufficient to get a genotype to a new state, hence to create
entirely new organisms.”
68
Marshall contrasts a paradigm of evolutionary urbanism with a “creationist”
model, in which the city is designed as an object, and a “developmental” model, 
in which the city is understood as a growing organism.
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Despite the religious
metaphor, “creation” remains a prevalent model for masterplanning, with the
“master” planning the city as a prescribed outcome from a position of authority
and omnipotence. Metaphors aside, the “developmental” model was argued for by
Christopher Alexander, albeit metaphorically. 
The creationist and developmental paradigms are helpful in characterizing
the reciprocity between design as a form of omnipotent control, and the inevitable
adaptation of the city, and they set up the argument for an evolutionary
understanding of the city, in which “designers and planners are only ever partly—
only temporarily—in control.”
70
In his book The Nature of Order: The Process of
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TOM VEREBES

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