Masterplanning the Adaptive City

moment-in-time view of what the city should be, a snapshot. The masterplan
is built, yet who is it given to and how do they occupy, take ownership, and
modify it? In the last ten years, the landscape architect has been moving
slowly to the front end of the development process, from being a designer of
the green elements or the beautification of masterplans to somebody who
has a stronger connection with the existing environment and potential social
community. Landscape architects have interests and skills in helping
communities to develop and find balance with their environment.
TV
You raise some questions concerning masterplanning as a purely 
goal-oriented process. In the history of urbanization, all cities grow, change,
transform, and some even die out. Within the context of Asian urbanization,
there has been so much building, destruction, and rebuilding, which has
already proven the inadequacy of masterplanning and the limited value of the
resulting architecture, and then the whole process starts again almost from
scratch, as a cyclical tabula rasa mechanism. Landscape architecture
sketches out ways in which the city is understood as a paradigm of ecology,
and more precisely that of literal growth and change, learning from analogies
to natural ecologies. There is a prevalent belief that the inorganic matter 
of the city grows and dies, adapts and changes in relation to the symbiosis
with literal organic ecological process. When you describe the role of a
landscape architect, or a sustainability expert or an ecologist, it seems there
is much to learn from disciplines whose expertise on the pre-existing
environment or the natural environment can help to guide the relationship of
the organic stuff and the inorganic crust that we build. In which ways can
masterplanning begin to take on the approach that sees city design as
necessitating a longer-term view of how cities grow, change, and mature as
an evolutionary model? Also, in which ways can this paradigm enable
designers, planners, and policy makers to carry out masterplanning as a
process which embeds indeterminacy that can shepherd the city to adapt
and change in time?
MP
I certainly see the role of the masterplanner as facilitating change rather than
instigating whole new urban structures. The idea of ecology as a potential
framework for understanding urbanization has been of great interest to
landscape architects. It is important to be careful to avoid a partial
understanding of ecology, which is about life, organisms, growth, and
sustainability. The central ecological concept of “carrying capacity” pertains
to how many of a species can live in an area and be supported by its natural
systems. How does this play out in relation to the human population in a
given urban area? My area of interest is in the sustainability of cities, and the
city is indeed a strange vehicle to look at sustainability. Students ask me if
Hong Kong is “sustainable” and I reply by saying that if you want to put
seven million people in this box then yes, it’s probably a pretty good model,
but why put seven million people into this box? This box is probably only
capable of supporting seventy thousand. The footprint of this city is not just
its physical fabric—it goes all over the world, and everything tells us Hong
Kong is an unsupportable model in terms of a sustained population. So
ecological urbanism ultimately only touches the surface of it, and a
fundamental ecological concept such as carrying capacity, or how much a
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MATTHEW PRYOR WITH TOM VEREBES

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city or region can reasonably support, would be a more durable paradigm
through which to approach urbanism.
TV
Is the term “sustainability” so ill-defined that one can level a judgment on a
city such as Hong Kong that it has, in your definition, a hundred times more
people than it can locally sustain itself? In this sense, is there such a thing as
a “sustainable” city, or is it a misnomer if one accepts the impossibility for
contemporary cities to sustain themselves, in terms of self-sufficiency with
respect to its resources, water management, food production, the
minimization of its footprint, etc.? Most cities are inherently environmentally
unsound, and therefore in the many definitions of sustainability, cities can be
deemed unsustainable. Other definitions of sustainability might challenge
short-term construction, and short life span of buildings. Would cities be
more sustainable if cities were built to last longer, rather than to be
disposable? Does this raise a paradox for the mechanism by which we design
and manage cities to concurrently better embed capabilities to adapt to
urban change, and the material and possible social sustainability given that
cities were built to endure?
MP
“Sustainability” is a widely appropriated term, used for whatever particular
argument people want to put forward, without a commonly accepted
definition. The term “sustainable” is not a superlative but rather a
comparative when referring to cities, which can be more sustainable or less
sustainable. I don’t think cities can be fully sustainable, in terms of my
working definition, which is a “no-footprints” view of sustainability. I don’t
think any form of city can leave no damage or create no negative impact,
simply because of the resources it takes to support cities. Going back to the
point about population, urban populations generally far outstrip available
resources. We tend to export our impacts; by gathering food resources from
far afield and exporting our waste to other regions we can give ourselves the
impression the city is manageable. In the long term I have no confidence that
we can find a sustainable city model. We can make cities more sustainable
through making systems more effective and efficient, through increased
density, green building technologies, the use of public transport rather than
private transport, and all sorts of other ways, but I don’t think we can make a
city that leaves no footprints. Cities have big footprints in their physical form
and huge footprints in the unseen network that’s required to support them,
so I won’t say cities are sustainable. 
TV
On one hand, we are discussing cities in opposition to the natural processes
of the planet. In another sense, we are witnessing a diminishing distinction
between the natural and the artificial worlds. Technology has developed a
biological nature, as we see with the simulation software that you alluded to
earlier. Without much technological positivism, we now have increased skills
to generate, monitor, analyze, and provide feedback through technologies
that are increasingly symbiotic with nature. Do you perceive potential for a
greater fusion between the natural and artificial world coming from a greater
understanding and application of technology to problems which are, broadly
speaking, environmental?
MP
I certainly see the potential for it, and I’m optimistic. Cities are based on
technological advances, and we seem to be getting more intelligent in the
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