Masterplanning the Adaptive City

What is presented here is not a unified theory of the city, nor an approach 
to urbanism which can be applied ubiquitously, yet this thesis has its basis in
recognizing the relationality between global tendencies and specific, localized
attributes. The city is now located at the juncture of technology and culture,
networks and populations, interfaces and information. 
Houses make a town, but citizens make a city.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Man is a tool-making species, and civilization has been an ongoing construction
project since the making of primitive utensils, tools for agriculture, and machines
which facilitate labor. The growth of cities is paralleled by the development of
machines and tools. Karl Marx argues for the historic mission of the inventions of
each particular era having a deep connection to the social order. 
The relationship of technology to nature and culture can be explicated
through a history of war machinery. Manuel De Landa notes the origins of the
“arms race between projectiles and defensive walls” can be traced back to
developments in agriculture in the Neolithic Period, when defenses were built to
protect surplus food. The citadel, burg, or walled city as a self-contained round
plan has a long history in Europe, with the form developing as a means of defense.
The parametrics of military defensibility were for perhaps eight thousand years the
principal criteria used in the building of the perimeter of a city.
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The origins of 
the planning of cities can thus be found in the evolution of military plans as the
basis for city design. Leonardo da Vinci recapitulated and consolidated art,
science, technology, and military engineering: his manifold inventions adapted
existing technologies for new applications; the late fifteenth century saw artillery
technology advance, rendering the previously impregnable fortified city vulnerable
to invasion and decimation; and the “arms race” is evident in the plastic variation
and evolution of city plans in the sixteenth century.
Many urbanists have argued for the delimitation of neighborhood units and
functional precincts based on vocation and interest.
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Medieval European towns
had a basis for such limits of size, arrived at naturally through the motivation for
self-sufficiency of the town. Medieval towns were highly distributed, with their
separation based on pedestrian limits from market towns. They were also small.
The period of concentration around larger cities was to follow in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The medieval city articulates a fundamental break with
the countryside. The city becomes artificial, through ever greater fortifications,
“thus contributing to separating the city from the countryside by a no-man’s-land
of glacis and moats,” infrastructure which would shield the city not only from
invasion but from rural life as well.
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The development of larger armies in the Europe of empire, in the eighteenth
century, was facilitated by the standardization of the production of weaponry,
facilitated by the new techniques of machining in factories.
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As the seemingly
impregnable ramparts of European cities were removed in the nineteenth century,
in response to the diminished threat of invasion and the vulnerability of the walls
to modern means of warfare, the inherent associative logic of cities morphed
again. Throughout history, military technologies and their associated dictation of
defensive spatial positioning have informed the organization of the city. Given the
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TOM VEREBES

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removal of threats of invasion from the boundaries of cities to longer distances
away, or to within, the notion of intelligence, as misunderstood as it still is, has
invaded all aspects of urbanity.
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In the case of Paris, Georges-Eugène Haussmann intervened in the largely
evolved medieval urban fabric with the superimposition of a new network of grand
avenues. Haussmann’s vast reorganization of the city’s infrastructure in the latter
part of the nineteenth century was motivated partly by hygiene, sanitation, and
safety, but also by the military objective of preventing invasion by enabling vast
troop movements within the city, and control of the population through greater
surveillance and presence of the authorities on the ground. Dominance, power and
control may not have been the explicitly stated goals of Paris’s transformation, but
they were undeniably the effects which it gave rise to, and Haussmann became the
archetypical planner.
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In another case of militarily motivated urbanism, Beijing’s
series of ring roads was conceived to control movement toward the political centre
of the city, the area surrounding the ancient seat of the emperors, the Forbidden
City. Thus advances in military technology have shaped the “norm” in many
civilian—and civic—systems. The notion that the city developed for military and
economic reasons misses out an essential component, however: it is the sharing 
of culture, or for that matter the evolution of culture, which is the city’s great
achievement. 
After the expansion beyond defensive city walls, an interconnected Europe
was forecast by Arturo Soria y Mata in his concept of the ciudad lineal (linear city)
in 1892—a “roadtown” based on a perpendicular street grid laid out along an 
inter-urban or even transcontinental network, conceived as potentially connecting
all of Europe. As an inadvertent prototype for urban sprawl along the strip, the
linear city may seem extreme, yet nearly all rapidly growing cities expanded along
railway lines, and later along roads. 
Though facilitated by the proliferation of affordable cars and the seeming
abundance of petrol, it is now well known that the U.S. military’s evacuation plans
for the centers of cities in the event of nuclear war contributed to the sprawl of
suburbia, away from downtown city centers. Wright’s Broadacre City concept, 
first published in his 1932 book The Disappearing City, depicted the sprawl of
America across the expansive Jeffersonian grid. Hilberseimer’s 1949 project 
The City in the Landscape sees the city from the air, as a “continuous system of
relational flows” more than a composition of objects such as buildings and land
subdivisions.
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Conventional contemporary masterplanners continue to deploy two-
dimensional plans as a basis on which to pursue stability and order. The intention
in this book is to conceive of a four-dimensional mode of “planning” in which 
time is the context for the negotiation of a set of dynamic processes. Inevitably 
the notion of the organic arises. Over a century ago, Patrick Geddes wrote on the
organic, biological attributes of cities. While cities can transform with seeming
lifelike behavior, it is questionable whether the city is indeed like an organism. The
city as an organic entity is more than mere metaphor.
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Expanding this narrative
from architecture, which is presumed to be fixed and enduring, to the city, requires
the metaphor of the organic to be not only convenient but also relevant.
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The
argument presented here does not contradict earlier formulations of the city as a
living, changing entity, but rather supplements these. In the work of Ebenezer
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THE CITY AS EXPRESSION

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