Masterplanning the Adaptive City

spaces. Yet, considering the characteristics and implications of both, there 
seems to be a lack of reflection on the fundamental question of the city as the
constitution of a public (social) spatio-temporality and potentially a political 
space (although it may be difficult even to arrive at a current definition of the 
term “political”). Before we embark, however, on any programmatic act, we 
need to work out and develop the conceptual practices which will capture the
distinctiveness of, and thereby advance, the new design methodologies and novel
forms of practice. In particular, within what tends to emerge and operate as a
transboundary, often notional, public sphere, which can bypass administrative 
and institutional apparatus at the urban and (inter)national level, to reposition the
question of the border as a critical actor, as a means to articulate the intersection
and interaction of these technologies with social, place-bound, and other material
conditions, is crucial. 
This question—the definition and marking of the border—is unavoidably
engendered in the political economy of urban territoriality. A significant example is
the role that termini, which could be translated as “boundary stones,” played in the
early foundation rites of the city of Rome. These stones served not only to mark 
the boundary of a property but also to demarcate the limit, the limen, within which
all things were under the authority of Rome and therefore subject to Roman law.
Thus the stones in effect delimited the sovereign field. 
At a time when the urban enclave, a form of withdrawal from the collective,
and the rise of global alternatives coexist, it seems that the dynamic nature of
urbanity is not “deprived of any limit” in its processes. In contrast, multiple and
changing demarcations of the singular and the multiple, the individual and the
collective, the globalized local and the localized global emerge. Thus within 
the constantly negotiated transactions between private property, public spaces,
corporate domains, material arrangements, and systems of regulation, the need 
for a strengthening through articulation of borders and thresholds—economic,
juridical, social, cultural, and spatial—is fundamental. It is precisely in these
internal territories that the various regimes of the architectural project, as unfolded
in the economy of the new design technologies, can play a role in the articulation
rather than the management of indeterminacy.
NOTES
1
> See Pierre Merlin and Francoise Choay, eds. (1988) Dictionnaire de l’Urbanisme et de
l’Aménagement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France).
2
> Ludwig Hilberseimer (1955) The Nature of Cities (Chicago: Paul Theobald), 257. 
3
> Michel Foucault (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Picador, first published Paris: Editions du
Seuil/Gallimard, 2004), 17.
4
> Alison and Peter Smithson (1967) Urban Structuring (London: Studio Vista), 29.
22
MARINA LATHOURI

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TV
Dana, I would firstly like to thank you for your enthusiasm to have this
conversation. Our planet is becoming urbanized faster and to a greater extent
than ever, and I would like to hear your thoughts on the most effective current
and past models of urbanization, citing their successes and even their
failures. I’m keen to discuss the extent to which masterplanning can manage
and, perhaps, even forecast the future. Given your expertise as an urbanist,
can you reveal whether you define yourself as a masterplanner? 
DC
I have in fact publicly stated that masterplanning is dead, so the last thing 
I would call myself is a masterplanner. From your question though, it seems
you are interrogating the concept of masterplanning more than a singular
homogenous image. The era of the masterplan was the modernist era, 
which had demonstrated the limits and possibilities of that way of thinking
about the city. Neither have the models that have evolved since then 
taken advantage of the strengths that masterplanning might offer, and 
nor have they formulated a strong enough alternative to stand against
masterplanning. It is interesting now, in particular, to question the
masterplan, partly because of rapid urbanization but also because 
the models pursued after modernism have been so flawed, the most 
well-articulated of those being the new urbanist prescriptive model of form. 
TV
Can you elaborate more on the modernist model of the masterplan? 
DC
In the modernist period, the strengths and limitations of the masterplan 
were made very apparent. To say masterplanning is dead is an intentional
overstatement. The notion that a centralized authority can pursue and
implement a single goal is patently false. No masterplan has ever been
implemented, and that in and of itself should be an indication of a problem
with masterplanning. So to refer to your first question concerning the 
most effective methods of masterplanning, and if by that you mean 
the most effective way to implement a plan, then I would say there are none.
If, however, you’re talking about other goals that you might have through
planning strategies, regimes, or processes, we could probably find
interesting, effective models. 
TV
We share the disbelief that we can fully manage and control an entire 
design process of urbanism to completion, to a teleological end. Whether 
the term “masterplanning” is too loaded, we still need to design for the 
future and to manage change effectively. I believe the tools of conventional
masterplanning are incapable of managing the fundamental indeterminacy
of the ways in which cities develop, grow, and change. Even the daily
complexities of interactions within a city can no longer be represented nor
forecasted by static images. This raises several questions. To what extent,
then, are we able to design and forecast with some level of certainty within 
a world which is quite indeterminate? How can we harness complexity and
begin to manage change differently than with the models and processes of
the twentieth century, which bias the finality of a design outcome? In which
ways do you think the methodologies now available to us have potential to
CHAPTER 3
CONVERSATION 1
DANA CUFF (DC) WITH TOM VEREBES
(TV)

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