Masterplanning the Adaptive City

design for long lifecycles while the city continues to develop? Architectural
design should be based on an understanding of the dynamics of urban
contexts. 
GY
So you think the inherent paradox between long lifespan and urban change
can be reconciled? 
XF
This is a complex question. Computational design inevitably needs to
address current requirements with fixed forms. Nevertheless, our new
design methods allow designers to embed variable parameters which may
reflect changes in the future as various scenarios. To reconcile this paradox,
a balance of bottom-up and top-down processes will need to emphasize
social, political, and economic factors. 
GY
Regarding the design life of buildings, how can buildings be conceived to
be more adaptable, rather than becoming quickly obsolete, resulting in
wasteful demolition? For example, can feasibility studies become more
future oriented to generate adaptable design briefs? 
XWG
Alejandro Zaera-Polo has theorized how the architectural is about surface,
as the architectural surface has the most direct relationship to the city.
Surface houses open spaces which are autonomous and independent from
the skin. Such interior spaces can satisfy current needs, but also can adapt
to changes in the future. 
GY
Many cities in Europe have taken this approach to transform historical
buildings, by hollowing out the interior and leaving only the façade to
maintain the street appearance. 
XWG
This trend of façadism addresses ways of designing with the past for
present and future needs.
XF
Architecture in China cannot escape short design life unless its status as a
commodity will be diminished. The government now grants seventy-year
leases for housing in China. No one knows what will happen in seventy
years. Even some governors have officially stipulated the design life of
buildings to be only thirty years. The short design life of architecture is
deeply rooted in the country’s political and economic policies. I don’t think
the short lifespan of buildings is necessarily a bad thing. Architects and
planners should have a vision toward a variable future. Buildings can be
classified, for example, for some to be demolished, some to be upgraded,
some to be renovated, some to be expanded.
GY
In other words, architecture in China should be more than a vehicle for
generating profit or political face. Architecture needs to satisfy other
measurements for the benefit of the community, the users, and the
environment. 
The last question I would like to raise is: How can architecture and
urbanism achieve a more durable architecture for more sustainable cities? 
XWG
I would like to come back to the exciting prospects of CIM, in parallel to
BIM. There is great potential to develop intelligent buildings in city
information models, which can adjust the distribution of energy sources for
the city according to the dynamic behavior of individual buildings. If we
expand the way we control buildings through artificial intelligence based on
BIM models, we can control urban complexity as well. Firstly, there are
many layers in a neighborhood, including, drainage, water supply, waste
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XU WEIGUO WITH XU FENG AND GAO YAN

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discharge, vehicle circulation, air conditioning, etc. All these systems are
linked parametrically in a city information model, so an entire neighborhood
can be managed efficiently. If we expand this to a district of a city, the
immediate benefit is to mediate different design options based on the
simulation of the information model. 
GY
This represents a significant research endeavor to investigate.
XWG
Definitely! We are still focussing on research at an architectural scale. The
city needs to be investigated in greater depth. 
GY
The more I think about it, the more exciting this seems, because decisions
about urbanism can be validated with more scientific rigor. What the digital
pioneers have achieved formally, in computational design and parametric
urbanism, is only the tip of the iceberg of immersive computation in
urbanism. 
XWG
I agree that the most significant value of parametric design is beyond
creating irregular forms. The potential of associative tools to manage the
city is unlimited. Architects determine relatively little. 
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CONVERSATION 2

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Given the unprecedented rapidity and extent of urban growth occurring in
China, some of the side effects include the erasure of material heritage,
haphazard, uncontrolled growth, and low-density sprawl. Cities have become
homogeneous through repetitive and poorly built architecture. There also
seems to be an urgent need for new paradigms in the face of imminent global
ecological crisis. The paradox of the endurance of architecture and its
inevitable dysfunctionality and possible obsolescence creates the conditions
for new adaptive models of urbanization. This chapter presents an
evolutionary approach to urban development, in which change is the only
constant. 
7.1 THE TROUBLE WITH SPEED FREAKS
We are currently in an unprecedented era, in which the greatest extent of city
building that has ever occurred in any part of the world is taking place. China has
the goal of urbanizing a further four hundred million people within the next twenty
years. Rapid urbanization has manifold side effects, including badly constructed
buildings with little cultural value or longevity, pointing toward a crisis in cultural,
social, economic, and environmental sustainability.
In recent years, with booming economies fuelling accelerated global
urbanization, the phenomenon of the instant city has often been the subject of
celebratory commentary. It seems as though rapid urbanization has been set on
automatic, while we marvel passively, powerlessly, and remotely, like a movie
audience, at its impressive, awesome force. Far from being innocent, the architect
who honors or condones this mass—or mess—of urbanization can be seen as
being implicated in a myopic frenzy of short-term production. In this light, should
the architect be credited or blamed, or rendered impotent because of the state of
our buildings, our cities, and our planet?
1
In the chapter entitled “A Contemporary City” in his 1929 book The City of
Tomorrow, Le Corbusier announces his project for a city of three million people,
arranged in identical housing blocks on vast, blank fields of modern space. His
scheme for “skyscrapers in the park” located in the centre of Paris made claims 
of “eliminating congestion in the centre” and providing “open spaces which are
the lungs of the city.”
2
One of the twentieth century’s most recognized projects,
criticized as emblematic of modernism’s denial of history and its ruthless drive to
erase and replace all remnants of the past with a sanitized and standardized
future, the City of Tomorrow is the ultimate prototype for tabula rasa urbanism,
having as a precondition the obliteration of the equivalent footprint of the old
Paris. 
Two pronounced effects of the speed and scale of urbanization are evident:
erasure and sprawl. Following a model of low-density sprawl, China’s cities have
undergone “lateral expansion,” often beyond the city boundaries—a phenomenon
colloquially referred to as tan da bing, or “making a big pancake.”
3
Tabula rasa
modernism is widely practiced in contemporary Asia, with the state-sponsored
apparatus of urban change wielding great power and carving a relentless path into
CHAPTER 7
TOM VEREBES >URBANIZATION
AND ERASURE

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