Masterplanning the Adaptive City

pace. Beijing, for example, was larger than any European city for hundreds of
years, before it was surpassed by London and Paris. 
Men had become mechanical before they perfected complicated machines to
express their new bent and interest; and the will-to-order had appeared once
more in the monastery and the army and the counting-house before it finally
manifested itself in the factory.
Lewis Mumford
20
The machine age started much earlier than the European Industrial Revolution, 
in the tenth century, and it was followed by a steady rise in mechanization until 
the eighteenth century. The routinized order of the monastery was transferred 
to the mechanical routines of bureaucratic processes. Modern science emerged,
heralded by Alberto Perez-Gomez as the introduction of a scientia universalis,
marking for him an era in which poesis was lost through the dominance of
mechanization.
21
As much as one cannot deny European civilization’s shift 
from a totalizing sense of religiosity, this is a deeply troubling, nostalgic
epistemology, which can only look backwards for its inspiration, justification,
and resistance. 
An important paradigm which emerged as a result of the Industrial
Revolution was the assembly line model of production. This new ability to
standardize and repeat components of products through mass production made
for mass consumption and pushed aside the notion of the bespoke, one-off
product, made by a single craftsman for a single consumer. As an effect of mass
production, the industrial cities began to take on repetitious qualities, both within
themselves and increasingly through shared characteristics. 
Rationalist epistemologies, however, continued to be touted throughout 
the period of first-world modernization. For Banham, the twentieth century was
marked by “faint echoes of a far from faint-hearted epoch when men truly tried to
come to terms with ‘the Machine’ as a power to liberate men from ancient
servitudes to work and exploitation.”
22
The Futurists wanted to destroy material
heritage in celebration of speed and new machinery; Frank Lloyd Wright’s The 
Art and Craft of the Machine (1901) presented an argument for mechanization and
the machine aesthetic, while laboring through a hangover of a Berlagian craft
movement. Modernism’s aversion to the “supposed excesses of personal
wilfulness” in Art Nouveau and Jugenstile places the mechanistic in opposition 
to the organic, which can also be seen as opposition to Ruskin’s anti-technology
position.
23
The Deutscher Werkbund in 1907 was foregrounded by its rejection 
of Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts Movement. The Werkbund proposed
standardization as a new virtue, and the divorce of aesthetics from material
qualities. The new standards emerging in the twentieth century formed the basis
of a new aesthetic zeitgeist, a new model of uniform production.
24
Mechanization, as an ontological orientation for industrialization, had little
space for the organic world. Instead, the standards and conventions of repetition
and routinization led from the introduction of machinery toward the underpinnings
of all aspects of urban life being industrialized, and in due course mechanized. The
mining town of the nineteenth century represents the extreme of this un-building
of social organization and the human condition. 
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Industrialization seemed to bring on rapid urbanization, evident in the coal
towns of the era. The literature of Charles Dickens best captures the decrepit,
filthy, vice-ridden qualities of the industrial nineteenth-century city. In his Hard
Times, the fictional Coketown was described as a new kind of city, which rested 
on three main pillars: “the abolition of the guilds and the creation of a state of
permanent insecurity of the working classes; the establishment of the open market
for labour and the sale of goods; and the maintenance of foreign dependencies 
as sources of raw materials.”
25
The horrid hygienic and moral conditions of the
early industrial cities and the disparities between rich and poor are not limited 
to the industrial Europe and America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The current industrialization and urbanization of Asia has also created massive
economic divisions between urbanites and the rural population, and between
workers in cities and the emerging wealthy classes. 
In the late nineteenth century, suburbs represented the means of escape
from the degenerated, congested, unhygienic, and unsafe conditions of urbanity.
Perhaps no other cause addressed the ills of the Industrial Revolution so
directly as the garden city movement, exemplified by Ebenezer Howard’s concept
of the “balanced community.” The garden city model engaged with the “archaic
and false opposition” of the city and country, and aimed to lessen the extreme
bipolar condition of man divorced from nature, and to humanize the city and
relativize it to the country town.
26
Philanthropic in spirit, Ebenezer Howard believed
growth was planned by civic authorities, not driven solely by the initiative of
private investment. Tafuri has critiqued the garden city and city beautiful
movements, questioning the relevance of “urban naturalism, [as] the insertion of
the picturesque into the city and into architecture” as an attempt to mask the then-
obvious “dichotomy between urban reality and the reality of the countryside.”
27
The proclaimed “self-sufficiency” of the garden city is a compelling idea with
relevance for today’s ecologically motivated initiatives, however questionable its
claims may have been. This idea was based on limiting the size of the domestic
and neighborhood unit, and its optimization to contain a mixed of functional
zones. Mumford asserts that “the worst sin of zoning is that it violates an essential
social characteristic of neighbourhood planning, namely, that each unit must be
balanced—it is the city writ small.”
28
Howard’s garden city movement was based
on creating smaller urban centers, with these limits rooted in a “lack of confidence
in metropolitan self-regulation.”
29
This performance model of urbanism, requiring
limits on size in order to achieve a balanced functionality, raises the question of
where the threshold between a town and a city lies. 
Shifting the scale of armature from nineteenth century infrastructure to vast
boulevards and superblocks, mid-century Soviet-era urban designers modelled the
expansion of Moscow and other Soviet cities after Howard’s garden city prototype,
with programmatic self-sufficiency based on smaller urban units.
30
The garden 
city model sees the city as a mosaic of cellular towns, and may be limited in its
relevance to the vast scale of urbanization occurring in the developing world.
Hilbersheimer similarly proposed the deployment of the modular “settlement unit”
in a model of the city which functions as an organism, exemplified in his Rockford
city plan. 
Le Corbusier’s vision of the City of Tomorrow, translated from his 1925 book
Urbanisme, achieved great impact, in that it conjoined two paradoxical concepts of
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