Masterplanning the Adaptive City

condemned to try to operate at a large scale, yet we ought to be critical about
scalar models in which you cannot make design material, formal, and
architectural design propositions. Instead, we can formulate infrastructural
and developmental scenarios, and strategies for subsequent development.
TV
The grid has also had different manifestations in different parts of the world,
arguably with mixed levels of success. If one contrasts the openness of the
Jeffersonian grid in what it creates in the historic American context to the
way in which the grid is used in China’s contemporary urbanization, the
rolling out of the megablock grid can be understood to bring homogeneity
through overly standardized planning methods. Does the instrument of the
grid overly delineate and segregate the disciplinary tasks of designers from
that of planners?
DC
I was making reference to the Manhattan grid from which to learn lessons,
but instead let’s talk about grids as infrastructural formations. The grid as is
currently used in Chinese cities is a perfect case of the wrong infrastructure
for what cities could become. In Albert Pope’s work about the end of the city
of form, the point is well taken that we haven’t built a city in United States
with the grid since World War Two. Automobile and vehicular infrastructure
has very little resemblance to the romantic ideas that we had about
nineteenth century cosmopolitanism. I’m interested at the moment about 
the future of infrastructure with the high-speed rail networks that are being
planned across Europe, China, and the United States. If we think of the 
high-speed rail network as the contemporary equivalent of how Manhattan
city council had thought about the grid in 1810, what kinds of new urban
forms can grow around high-speed rail stops? My research has been
concerned with scenarios of how particular cities might evolve with the
arrival of the high-speed rail stations and what they would do to instigate
positive urban effects. My experience of Xi’an [China], is where people walk
for a mile and what you get is another identical giant block; another giant
Walmart, Starbucks, eight stories of shopping, and it’s unclear why one
would ever leave that one block. 
TV
You are raising two kinds of forces of globalization, the first of which has
been going on for hundreds of years, in the ways in which infrastructure
connects people and cities. We are now connected through the flow of bits 
of information that allows for a conception of the city as instantaneously
globalized. And the other kind of globalization you talked about, of which
Walmart and Starbucks are emblematic, is the homogenization of the world.
For one megablock in China to be identical to the next megablock is, I
believe, deeply problematic. It is not clear to me whether this is rooted in the
limits of the organizational model or whether homogeneous cities continue
to be linked to a model of standardized production. I’m interested in how
homogeneous urbanism can be countered through the ways in which
architecture has embedded design and production methodologies aiming
toward increasing heterogeneity. Computational tools and methods have
permeated every architect’s office, teaching studio, and research lab
worldwide, but the ways in which we make cities and the kinds of cities we
make have been less affected by computation. If we can make a distinction
between a building and a city, or between an architect and an urbanist, how
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DANA CUFF WITH TOM VEREBES

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might you imagine city planning being altered by contemporary design and
production technologies, which have become well rehearsed in architecture,
but are as yet not fully tested in urbanism?
DC
At the moment there is a fracture between computational models of
urbanism and scenario planning, yet I see these eventually being
complementary models. In computational urbanism it seems, at present, the
notion of contingency can be better built in. In scenario planning, politics and
economics are absolutely the contingencies that are understood to play a
strong role and through design you can elucidate economic and ecological
alternatives and contingencies. I recall joining your final reviews at the
[Design Research Lab at the] AA years ago, and the models that were
emerging were super interesting because they allow the visualization 
of urban algorithms that are so complex one could never have imagined 
them before. This is less strong in scenario planning, since the logic of
representation is not so fundamentally built into the logic of the planning
itself. In computational urbanism there is a bond between methods and
representations, which is its strength. Now, the question is: Can you build 
in enough uncertainty and contingency in computational urbanism to avoid 
it becoming a gaming strategy, for instance? There are some interesting
applications of this going on now in California related to various kinds of
growth scenarios. In community planning models where, for instance, if you
want fewer greenhouse gases and more public transportation, a series of
diagrams about the city can be generated for people to make choices about.
If you want everyone to live within a quarter mile of a park, the urban form
can be constrained to evolve toward this goal. This kind of applied
computational urbanism becomes less interesting in terms of design but is
highly relevant in terms of promoting new debates about the city, if you think
of the city, as I do, as political, economic, and design processes. I question,
however, whether there is enough capability for idiosyncrasies in the current
status of computation.
TV
Dana, it is through communication infrastructures that we have connected
our voices and thoughts, between Los Angeles and Hong Kong. I’m grateful
for your time to discuss and debate models and methods of urbanism at this
important juncture. 
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CONVERSATION 1

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