Masterplanning the Adaptive City

supposedly have the added benefit of dissolving and removing a central feature of
informality: its irregularity. However, the fact is that throughout these decades the
informal kept growing in size, diversity, and complexity. 
Toward the mid-1990s, when the shortcomings and the socioeconomic costs
of the neoliberal recipes were becoming more evident, a new generation of ideas
and policies began to emerge in connection with issues of urban development in
general, and urban informality in particular. Alongside this, a new understanding
of scaling up surfaced, one that saw scaling up as a much more complex, fragile,
and contradictory process which is inescapably multi-dimensional in nature; and
one that recovered the spatial as a necessary and relevant dimension. Scaling 
up was increasingly seen as a result of multidimensional, multisectoral, and
multiscalar processes; as not a quantitative process but a change in the quality of
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INFORMAL CITY
(opposite and
left)
Caracas metro
Cable (U-TT),
indicating
landscape and
other systems,
and the proposal
inset into the
context. 

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the city itself and in the nature of its political institutions; and as a political
restructuring of urban institutionalities through synergies and contradictions
across processes operating at multiple dimensions and scales, including social,
economic, politico-institutional, and spatial. 
In this context, debate on the project for the informal city gained new
impetus. For many, this project—whether focussed on housing or any other
sectoral concern, whether small or large—was now seen as necessarily urban 
in its ambition. The emphasis was increasingly on integrated urban projects,
multidimensional, multisectoral, multiprogrammatic, and multiscalar in nature—
“extroverted” projects that understood the requalification of site as inherently
related to the requalification of its multiple articulations with context and
ultimately with the city. This was redesigning site as redesigning the city, through
a multiplicity of “footprints” operating in multiple dimensions and at multiple
scales. From this perspective, scaling from the project level “upwards” would be
the result of the articulation of the multiple footprints of multiple projects—small
and large—operating at multiple scales and across multiple periods of time. This
was a perspective that posed an almost impossible challenge, while at the same
time enabling an understanding of the true and full complexity of the endeavor.
It is not accidental that within this overall debate there should have been a
return to discussions on the role of architectural and urban design in addressing
the spatial dimension. Among policy makers, academics, and practitioners,
governments, international organizations, and NGOs, there was a growing
acknowledgment of the relevance of “good design.” A spectrum of experiences,
programs, and projects across the world—and particularly in the developing
world—started to address the issue of design more explicitly. However, these
developments still reflected different understandings of the informal, of the
meaning and relevance of scaling up, and of the exact role of design. In our 
view, despite the new openness to the role of design, many of the previous
misconceptions regarding the nature of the informal and the challenge of scaling
up were unchanged. It is difficult to elaborate on these differences in a short text,
but it is our contention that the one dividing line among those experiences and
projects that is particularly relevant to this discussion is to do with the
understanding of the relation between site and context, and of the relevance of
multiscalarity. 
On the one hand, there are projects that aim to requalify site in quite small,
localized, often monoprogrammatic interventions that do not use spatial design as
an instrument to irradiate transformations beyond the location. These can be
referred to as microprojects. On the other hand, there are projects—small, large,
and very large, and almost invariably multiprogrammatic and multisectoral—that,
in line with the ideas formulated above, seek very explicitly to impact beyond site,
articulating and connecting different and multiple scales. 
Microprojects have often been associated with an understanding of the
informal as the negation of planning—as unplannable, unpredictable, and in
continuous mutation, as nonsystemic—hence there is no place in this perspective
for the concepts of scaling up or of multiscalarity. Indeed, it argues that scaling 
up amounts to an attempt to reintroduce the logic of homogenization through 
the imposition of the dominant formal system of relations and rules, and 
the dissolution of the informal in all its potential. While often romanticizing the
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spatial qualities of the informal, this perspective acknowledges the potential of
architectural and urban design in very small “doses.” In our view, this is a
perspective that returns to the dilemmas of previous approaches to the informal,
and can lead down a blind alley. One of the most interesting exponents of this
perspective is the Brazilian architect Paola Berenstein Jacques.
However, there are other microprojects—perhaps the majority of them—
which are not informed by the same analysis of informality, but motivated by a
search for high-quality interventions at an affordable level and scale. Often
community-based, almost invariably focussed on provision of housing, these
projects tend to be limited in scale and have limited urban ambitions more out of
necessity than as a matter of principle. They are frequently associated with a
desire for scaling up through a quantitative replication of a successful formula in
ways not dissimilar to early understandings of scaling up. Good examples of such
projects would be Elemental—an approach to incremental housing initiated by the
architect Alejandro Aravena in Chile—or the experience of community-based
housing projects by CODI in Thailand. 
While many microprojects have shown considerable inventiveness and often
good architectural design, their contribution to an urbanism relevant to the
conditions of informality is very limited.
On the other side of the dividing line is what we might call “open urban
projects” with the explicit ambition of multiscalar impact. Often reflecting 
an understanding of the informal as “another way of planning,” they also 
see the informal as being part of systemic relations. Or, to be more precise, 
part of a network of multiple systems of informality that interconnect and
interpenetrate at multiple levels and scales with the formal city. It is this
understanding that makes it possible to talk about scaling up and to use terms
such as “footprints,” “acupunctures,” or “benign metastasis” to describe the
ambition of impacting beyond site on a larger system of relations, and indeed
across systems.
Such projects over almost two decades have encompassed interventions of
very different sizes and scales, from small to extremely large. At the small end 
of the spectrum, interventions are mainly on an architectural scale, introducing
one or few buildings within an area of informality. The impact beyond site and the
ambition of scaling up is often linked to the ways in which buildings are inserted
into the informal fabric, to the creative mixing of programs, to the explicit attempt
to connect to a network of existing or future plans for the area, and to the adoption
of a new set of rules and institutional arrangements that take account of the
informal ways of doing things and informal rules. 
A project that became emblematic of this type of urban acupuncture is the
Vertical Gym by the Urban Think Tank (UTT) in Caracas, Venezuela. Its success, 
not only as a sport facility, led to the creation of many new multipurpose gyms in
Caracas. Similarly, the proposal by UTT for a Modular Music Factory that can
provide all the resources for the musical training of around a thousand children a
day in sites as small as 1200 square meters follows an analogous logic of insertion
in the informal urban fabric. The library Santo Domingo by Giancarlo Mazzanti, at
the top of a squatter settlement in Medellin, Colombia, is another instance often
cited. Some interesting examples of this type of small-scale intervention are
provided by the architectural practice of Teddy Cruz at the border of Tijuana,
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