Masterplanning the Adaptive City

In the last thirty years, Asia has established new terms for the city, the
articulation of which will be defined in the decades to come. The megacity, the
newest of which is the Southern China Metropolis, poses new challenges, and
promises great opportunity. To meet these challenges, “the planner’s dilemma is
becoming more and more visible: cities and megacities seem to be unplannable.”
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Opportunity does not come without the risk of mistakes, regrets, and possible
failure; opportunity is a game of uncertainty. 
7.2 GHOSTS OF THE PAST
The trouble with the modernist architecture of the twentieth century was not that it
created spatial order by repeating building elements, but rather that the effects of
mass production led to monotony in cities. The demise of modernism also led to
disillusionment with the production processes which had underpinned it.
Standardization, as the outcome of a presumed rationalization and reduction of
difference, drove modernist architecture toward the proliferation of homogeneity,
vastness, erasure, and sprawl.
To what extent is homogenization a side effect of globalization? Koolhaas
posed a related question in 1994, asking whether homogenization of urbanity was in
fact an “intentional process, a conscious movement away from difference toward
similarity.”
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The “generic city” was seen as a celebration of mediocrity, with
boredom as the background to life’s spectacle, and was ultimately understandable
as simultaneously any place and no place. Later, in 2001, the “city of exacerbated
difference” was recognized as a feature of contemporary Chinese urbanism,
perhaps even as a contradiction of the generic city, involving the “greatest possible
difference between its parts,” rather than the “balance, harmony, and . . . degree of
homogeneity” of more traditional forms of urbanism.
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This struggle to come to
terms with specificity and the generic continues. Koolhaas, perhaps today’s
preeminent theorist of sameness, remarks on the uniformity of cities in a recent
interview in the Journal of International Affairs, claiming globalization gives rise to
“profit-driven repetition” which “causes anxiety about identity”.
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Opposing the
generic, here is a plea for uniqueness over sameness, difference over repetition,
identity over blankness. Is this also indicative of a “natural” evolution of local
influences, in which globalization “naturally produces indigenous phenomena 
and vernaculars”?
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Sassen’s concept of the global city challenges “the more
diffuse homogenizing dynamics we associate with the globalization of consumer
markets”.
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Global urbanization, and its flow of goods, services, cultures,
technologies, and ideologies, is a force of homogenization. Despite having heralded
the virtues of the generic city, Koolhaas now argues that the need for cities to
promote their identifying uniqueness is paramount. Sameness always requires
difference to striate its smoothness. Globalization, for Koolhaas, “designates a
general schema of the hybridization of thought and action.”
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Increasingly the cities
of tomorrow will negotiate the homogenizing forces of globalization according 
to the particularities of local issues, policies, and practices. This is not a call for 
the revival of Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism, yet it may be a call for
specificities to win out over generalities. This can be restated as the desire to
promote difference through differentiation caused by local influences.
The tabula rasa is a questionable approach to the redevelopment of existing
urban areas, as well as for rural agricultural land and villages in China, which are
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URBANIZATION AND ERASURE

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also being razed flat. This dominant paradigm for development in Asian cities over
the last two decades is no longer a viable option for urbanization in this century.
How will Chinese cities achieve their anticipated growth and densification without
relying on tabula rasa strategies? Confronting the forces of urbanization which are
quickly homogenizing nearly all cities in China, the central question here concerns
how to achieve more performance-based, context-specific architectural and urban
design. 
Modernist principles of planning are still prevalent, as the default mode of
urbanization in China with respect to the development of transport infrastructures,
zoning, and land subdivisions. With regard to the successful management of urban
growth in this critical, “Asian” century, transplanting traditional, evolved European
or American models of urban growth to Asia would be tantamount to taking a
neocolonialist approach. Although ubiquitous, such problems must be addressed
in specific ways, according to local issues. The effect of globalization on China is
evident in the emergence of Shanghai as a center for multinational companies,
and its position “at the intersection of major global manufacturing, trading and
real estate circuits.”
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China will in due course usurp the west. What seems a
potential impediment to this “progress” is the model of urbanization itself, which 
is freighted with the potential to repeat mistakes made elsewhere in the past. 
The paradox of this period of rapid “urbanisation” is that the city itself is
being effaced.
Lewis Mumford, 1938
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Cities in China are being constructed quickly and linearly, with a blueprint for
completion and no operating manual. This approach leaves little scope for
mutation according to a more gradual model of development. Rapid urbanization
has often led to economies in which goods are willingly consumed and disposed,
and an urban order in which infrastructure is often inadequate, and architecture 
is often shoddily built for short-term gain. There is a drive to produce goods (or
buildings) for short-term profit, and little motivation to produce goods that will
endure. 
In 2001 there were still eleven million bicycles in Beijing, but since then
Beijingites have been buying nearly one thousand cars per day.
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Despite the fact
that typical densities of Chinese urban sprawl are much higher than those of
America, suburban settlements in China are often gated and insular, perhaps
because of traditions of courtyard housing, as well as Mao’s danwei system of
cooperative workers’ settlement units. Sprawl in China and the U.S. do, however,
have some traits in common. Both countries “consume an immense amount of
productive agricultural land,” and in both patterns of urbanization are “a function
of rising car ownership.”
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Not only is the move to suburbia in China an expression
of a new socioeconomic desire for material gain and the luxury of space, and of a
wish to leave the “noisome city” behind, it is also a move away from the former
communist collectivism of the danwei.
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Chinese cities seem to have some of the familiar shortcomings of American
urbanism—decentralization, and hence sprawl, based on a model of private
vehicular transportation. Peter Rowe has identified four modes of contemporary
urbanization in China: first, “independent urban expansion”; second, urbanization
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TOM VEREBES

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