Masterplanning the Adaptive City

housing tenants sublet their properties (sometimes several times over) to owners
of small restaurants, bars, galleries, and boutiques. Caught up in leisure and
shopping, but also a generative regeneration, Tai Kang Lu is an expression of
urban gradualism, a model of newness without erasure.
In the last decade Shanghai has expanded in a polycentric model of urban
growth, with a series of nine satellite centers taking shape around the periphery of
the city. Some of these “new towns,” including Thames Town (England), German
Town, and Swedish Town, are modelled on national architectural characteristics of
pre-twentieth-century Europe. Although these efforts to model Shanghai’s urban
expansion on European historical models is misguided, the greater challenge for
Chinese urbanization in the coming decades is to negotiate the clash between the
forces of new urbanization and the historic fabric of Chinese cities, which has
consistently been deemed obsolete, valueless vernacular residue, of which little
remains today. Shanghai, largely due to its complicated colonial history, is today the
preeminent locus in China for the negotiation of clichéd oppositions of east and
west, old and new, history and the future, tradition and innovation. Unlike other
colonial set-ups, where locals were confronted by one single invader and occupier,
Shanghai’s modern history is based on the presence of seven concurrent occupying
nations, from the nineteenth until the first half of the twentieth centuries.
11
What is the character of wholly new cities in China? While gridded planning
of streets and subdivisions has its roots in the ancient world, the specificity of the
grid to imperial city planning must be clarified before dismissing it from a western
perspective. Its key principles include “orientation to the cardinal compass points;
symmetrical rectilinear layout with a palace complex at the center; a north-south
cardinal axis or ‘ritual way’.”
12
Modern China is made by the ubiquity of grids. 
The two-dimensional plane of the ground plan is used to order plans based on
infrastructural hierarchies, “megablock” land subdivisions, buildings, residual
spaces and landscapes. With respect to the instrumentality of the plan, it is not 
an implicit instrument of planning but rather a means of mapping the current and
projective state of the city in its primitive, reduced form, and, in turn, it is both an
analytical device for understanding spatial relations and the ultimate form of
representation of the city.
As an urban subdivisional, massing, and programmatic typology, the
megablock is reliant on vehicular transport and most often its organization is 
based on highway arteries, local infrastructure, and a disconnected interior. The
megablock is often comprised of “disconnected big box malls, stores and towers,
behind which low rise development” creates isolated enclaves.
13
Deeply embedded
as it is in patterns of land procurement and investment on a large scale, the
subdivision of Chinese cities into megablocks means megabucks for both suppliers
of and investors in land. As organizational models and mechanisms for planning,
the grid and the megablock seem adequate as ubiquitous and general tools, yet
inadequate to project the specificities of the vast scale of China’s future urbanism.
4.2 URBAN EUROPE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ITS INDUSTRIALIZATION 
AND PLANNING
The world’s current propensity to aspire to betterment, in terms of finances, 
health, and sanitation, can be traced back in western philosophy to Aristotle, who
accounted simply for why cities emerge and grow.
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TOM VEREBES

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Men come together in the city to live; they remain there in order to live the
good life. 
Aristotle
What is lost in the migration to the city, at the expense of material gain 
and comfort?
14
Today’s wish for the “good life” may be insidiously connected to
globalization and consumerism, yet, for the present and future, utopianism in the
twenty-first century is a project about amelioration, not ideality.
The classic utopia was most often designed as an “outopia” (no place) or
“eutopia” (good place), as elucidated by Patrick Geddes in his reading of Thomas
More’s Utopia.
15
In this light, utopia lies between nothingness (or nowhere-ness)
and goodness. Since the industrialization of Europe, utopianism has taken a
different, more context-specific approach, toward visions which seek to renovate,
regenerate, and reconstruct the existing city. With industrialization, utopia became
a social project, fused with literature, philosophy, and political treatises rather than
with religion. In Tafuri’s reading, ideology, to remain relevant and “in order to
survive,” had to “negate itself as such, break its own crystallized forms, and throw
itself entirely into the ‘construction of the future’.”
16
Utopianism thus became, and
possibly still is today, a project about amelioration, about changing the present,
about transformation in general, and was no longer about a vision of a new,
previously unseen, ideal, and potentially unknowable future. Utopia now aims to
undo the mistakes of the past, and to heal the ills of the present. 
The demise of the powerful Roman Empire unfolded over hundreds of years.
Following the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 476, the organizational system
of Europe shifted from “a network of cities and towns to a scattered, unstable 
mix of hamlets and migrants, with the largest towns holding no more than a
thousand inhabitants,” a state in which Europe remained until the first signs 
of the Enlightenment five hundred years later.
17
The reemergence of urban Europe
in the Middle Ages, after a long hiatus, has largely been attributed to technological
innovations in farming. The next wave of urban development was driven by a
similar acceleration in energy flows, “this time arising from the exploitation of
fossil fuels—[which] propelled another great spurt in city birth and growth in the
1800s.”
18
Out of this technological phase transition there evolved new kinds of
cities—industrial cities such as Manchester, as well as the massive new urban
centres of the nineteenth century, in London, Paris, and New York.
The Industrial Revolution encapsulated a great period of urbanization in
Europe, which led the entire continent away from an agrarian society toward the
irreversible dominance of urbanity. Linked to the expansion of European cities
during the nineteenth century was the economic basis of colonialism, which
fuelled the factories of industrialists, providing a seemingly endless source of raw
materials in the expanding colonies, cheap labor from the countryside, and ever
expanding consumer markets. Within the unholy history of European urbanization,
and this ever-so-brief summary of the reasons behind it, it must be noted that it
took about 350 years to reach its current stable condition. Paris was in fact the first
city to have a birth rate higher than its death rate. By the mid-eighteenth century,
large cities had achieved “a changing relationship with microbes,” which had the
effect of transforming them “from death traps into net producers of people.”
19
Compared to the rate of recent Asian urbanization, Europe changed at a snail’s
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THE NEW NEW

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