Masterplanning the Adaptive City

increasing application of computational coding to design has led to a renewed
interest in these kinds of evolutionary processes. 
Theories of complex natural systems have proliferated in the discipline of
architecture. Nature is so complex, “there is no single ‘natural landscape’ to be
found, no ideal state of nature that can be reconstructed or modelled.”
59
Far from
finding analogs in the behaviors of species, and hence being isolated from the
behavior of “man-made” constructs, systems, and networks, cities have behaviors
similar to other complex natural phenomena. In principle, the interactions within a
city, or across the global network of cities, are analogous to models in which
“interacting individuals can respond to the information gathered by just a few.”
60
In the history of urbanity, which spans six millennia, cities have evolved to be 
“the largest and most complex material forms constructed by humans.” Any
understanding of enduring civilizations and the evolutionary nature of cities
requires an alternative theoretical apparatus: “[monuments] are the most static
and enduring constructions of cities, but a chronology of monumental architecture
and emperors, of cathedrals and kings, will not serve to unfold the complex
interactions of the systems of nature and civilisation.”
61
The parallels between
natural systems and civilization, according to Michael Weinstock, are such 
that “all forms of nature and all forms of civilization have ‘architecture,’ an
arrangement of material in space and over time that determines their shape, size,
behavior, and duration, and how they come into being.”
62
Over the last two decades, natural systems have increasingly been seen as 
a source of inspiration for the formal organization of design work, drawing on
parallels between natural geometries and their equivalents in three-dimensional
modeling environments. Computation is also opening up new design arenas for
working with material performance, forces, and effects, which “marks a significant
transformation from the primacy of representations to the use of computation as 
a simulation and map of performativity.”
63
The potential of performance-driven
computation for urbanism is yet to be theorized, yet there has been some research
and practice based on an understanding of the growth of the city, as well as its
quotidian routines, as essentially dynamic. Ecological systems give clues to a new
view of systems for urbanism, questioning pervasive classical science, which
“began to discover that many of its systems were not in fact ‘simple’ but ‘complex,’
. . . a new paradigm grappling with the essence of such systems began to
emerge.”
64
The paradigm of dynamic equilibrium, a term associated with
thermodynamics, can be interrogated for equivalence within discourses on
urbanism. The ancient history of urbanization indicates a pattern of shifting from
an agricultural society to an urban one. Manuel De Landa has identified the
physicist Arthur Iberall as perhaps the first “to visualize the major transitions in
early human history (the transitions from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist, and
from agriculturalist to city dweller) not as a linear advance up a ladder of progress
but as the crossing of nonlinear critical thresholds (bifurcations).”
65
A central issue in dynamics is the idea of equilibrium; and in contrast to the
idea of the city has having a stable, enduring nature, “In fact, disequilibrium [is the]
more characteristic state of urban systems.”
66
The term “far-from-equilibrium”
originates from the field of thermodynamics, where it has come to refer to “the
special states of a system in which it is most likely to produce radical, productive
100
TOM VEREBES

---

101
THE DEATH OF MASTERPLANNING
Airport proposal for Sendai (above) and the new coastal landscape
(below). (Studio Tutor: Tom Verebes; Students: Ho Lai Ki Nikki, Tang
Wai Kwong Danny; MArch II Studio, 
Projective Design Manual for
Rebuilding Coastal Japan, The University of Hong Kong, 2011)

---

and unforeseeable behaviours. When close to equilibrium, the disturbances,
anomalies and events passing through a system are easily absorbed and damped
out; but as a system is moved further from its rest places it becomes increasingly
disordered and differentiated.”
67
One of the key concepts in complexity theory “is
that of small, simple parts, which are replicated, combined or changed, following
simple rules,” which through iteration become varied and less predictable.
68
Michael
Batty describes how images of the city at any particular point in time “reflect a
system far-from-equilibrium, in disequilibrium, whose elements are changing at
different rates and whose impact is diverse across different spatial scales and time
spans.”
69
Whether viewed in real time or over longer historical durations, the city is
far from dead, inert, and enduring, rather it is alive, active, and volatile.
Any evolutionary approach to urbanism relates the making of the city to 
the forces which create form, which in evolution is called morphogenesis. The
generative principles of morphogenesis have to do with the formation of shape,
“based on laws that describe how forms are initiated in systems with particular
types of space–time organisation.”
70
Symmetry-breaking processes, pattern
initiation, and formation of morphogenetic fields are explained as the “capacity 
of all life forms to develop ever more baroque bodies out of impossibly simple
beginnings.”
71
Complexity in architecture has for some time been understood in
light of a new appreciation of complex geometric articulation. As much as
geometrical complexity provides a potent arena for investigation, static
conceptions of geometry can also be limiting. With respect to emergent
complexity, without adaptation “it is like the intricate crystals formed by a
snowflake: it’s a beautiful pattern, but it has no function.”
72
Emergent behaviors
have the “distinctive quality of growing smarter over time, and of responding to the
specific, changing needs of their environment.”
73
In such a “lifelike” approach to
organization, formal geometric complexities in organization matter less than 
the capacity for change, which roughly provides a definition of intelligence—the
102
TOM VEREBES
Section of proposed
Sendai Airport. (Studio
Tutor: Tom Verebes;
Students: Ho Lai Ki
Nikki, Tang Wai Kwong
Danny; MArch II Studio,
Projective Design
Manual for Rebuilding
Coastal Japan, The
University of Hong
Kong, 2011)

---