Masterplanning the Adaptive City

This chapter selectively probes ancient and modern history for the successes
and pitfalls of various models of urbanization, relating experiences in Europe,
the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia. The industrial revolution brought
about the standardization and mechanization of cities. Concepts of the new
and the phenomenon of the instant city are recurrent, and the prevalence of
the erasure of heritage and sprawling development are the warning signs of
Modernist history repeating itself in China. The paradox of top-down planning
alongside informal, emergent, and unintended urbanization is framed not as a
crisis but as an opportunity to rethink masterplanning in the twenty-first
century. 
4.1 ANCIENT CHINA AND THE NEW
The city, as one finds in history, is the point of maximum concentration for
the power and culture of a community.
Lewis Mumford
1
In exploring the roots of modern Chinese urbanization, it is helpful to look at China
“with blue eyes,” meaning from the outside, as a foreigner.
2
Through a successful
revolution in 1911, Sun Yat Sen defeated the Qing Dynasty to establish modern
China. This first revolution marks the first of four prominent and turbulent eras 
of change in modern China. Throughout a history which is often forgotten, this
ancient culture has confronted modernity again and again. In the twentieth
century, and more than ever today, change is the only constant. 
Before the twentieth century, two paradoxical tendencies are discernible 
in the history of the Chinese city: moving existing cities to new locations, and
building entirely new cities from scratch. The imperial era in China gave rise to
three millennia of building walled cities, symbolizing and ensuring state authority
while exemplifying the will for insularity and permanence.
3
In a response not
unique to China, as we have seen, the building, rebuilding, altering, and extending
of city walls was carried out according to military, administrative, economic,
demographic, and religious parameters specific to the country’s development.
From the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, a great period of development of
walled cities provided security and more effective governmental control.
4
The
second tendency to note during the imperial era was for emperors and central and
local governments to unilaterally remove entire cities to new locations, indicating
a view of the city as impermanent, ephemeral, and open to radical change.
5
In Mao’s vast urbanization program, the danwei, or work unit, was the
preeminent basis for organizing society, industry, in a low-rise model of insular,
aggregate urbanism. Not wholly new, “the danwei’s spatial logic borrowed from
‘ancestral’ forms of Chinese urbanism—especially the courtyard house, which 
in turn miniaturized many of the spatial design principles seen in larger scale in
Chinese walled cities.”
6
At its peak, ninety percent of China lived in some form of
collective work unit. 
CHAPTER 4
TOM VEREBES >THE NEW NEW

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Fastforwarding to the turn of the millennium, it has taken China only two
decades to urbanize a population and landmass equivalent to those of Europe,
which had endured several centuries. The instant city is not an entirely new
phenomenon. Former Chinese Communist Party Chairman Deng Xiaoping’s
infamous “one country, two systems,” communist–capitalist hybrid has driven
great cultural change over the last two decades. Although the ancient Chinese city
was based on the emperor at the center of the universe, today’s Chinese cities are
far from centralized—in fact they are highly decentralized and laterally extensive.
Even the courtyards of Hutong and Siheyuan housing were limited by walls
dividing internal, private, domestic space from the public realm beyond. Today’s
Chinese cities have lost the boundaries demarcating what is inside and outside the
city, private and public space, the urban and agricultural.
Liang Sicheng, whose efforts were central to the planning of modern China,
argued for the preservation of China’s heritage, protection of “the beautiful bodies”
and “orderly disposition of her environmental settings,” wishing to avoid
destruction of the “integrity of the whole” by the introduction of “unharmonious
things.”
7
The Old and Dilapidated Housing Renewal (ODHR) program, initiated in
the 1990s, sought to rehouse existing residents in situ, but the powerful economic
forces of the times still got the better of Beijing’s physical heritage. Between 1990
and 2002, an estimated forty percent of the Old City was erased. Demolition was
unleashed for the sake of the new, with buildings conceived and executed for
today, not tomorrow. The failure of urban renewal in America, for decades the
mantra for slum clearance, has parallels in modern China, where in the last
decade some of the imminently dispossessed residents became famous as
“stubborn nails”—people who refused to leave their homes, drawing attention
from all over China and the world, with viral internet photos of single remaining
houses surrounded by vast construction pits. 
If the rapid urbanization of today’s China is without precedent, within China
or anywhere else, what is the tradition upon which this urbanism is built? Is it
Hong Kong or Singapore? Is the “Eurostyle” a passing phase or will it in due
course create its own vernacular?
8
Architecture seems to be squirted against facades like sauce from a squeeze
pack.
Neville Mars, The Chinese Dream, 2008
9
Xin Tian Di—literally, “New Heaven and Earth”—is a partial restoration and
conversion of Li Long housing, mixed with some faux historic architectural
interventions, in the French Concession in Shanghai. It is an urban phenomenon
which has now been exported all over China. Despite Xin Tian Di being a
postmodern stage set, its great achievement has been to “make history cool—and
prove that reclaiming the past can be big business.” Xin Tian Di is where the past
can be consumed and the future remains in abeyance. Campanella summarizes
Xin Tian Di as where “China goes to see the West and the West goes to see China,
where the old go to see the future and the young to see the past.”
10
Different to the
top-down planning and investment model of Xin Tian Di, another model of
urbanization is taking hold in Shanghai, in the district of Tai Kang Lu. A bottom-up
model, Tai Kang Lu is an area of pedestrian alleyways in which government
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