Masterplanning the Adaptive City

registered as domination of nature rather than sensitive adaptation to it.
Discoveries are sought perhaps selfishly, in pursuit of control through short cuts.
Mankind seeks to command rather than to grow, to control rather than to allow
form to emerge.
48
For decades society has called on contemporary architecture to be more
“sustainable,” more “green,” more “eco-friendly,” with an increasingly loud voice.
Only recently has the call for reform in the face of crisis extended to cities. In
Reyner Banham’s 1969 book The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, a
new paradigm for environmental performance was sketched,
49
yet larger issues
are at stake than well-tempered buildings. In their 1960s projects, World Resources
Inventory and World Game, Buckminster Fuller and John McHale documented “the
unequal distribution of world resources and population on ‘Spaceship Earth’.”
50
Fuller now seems one of a few anomalous personalities in architecture who
focussed on global environmental issues imminently challenging the next
generation. His influence can be understood as an “apotheosis of [the]
combination of nature and network” in which the global logic of the planet was
seen as our collective responsibility.
51
The future, as understood by those who
conceived and designed Expo 1970, was something that urgently needed to be
projected. World Fairs and Expos of the 1950s to the 1970s were broadcast to the
world to describe the architecture, urbanism, infrastructures, and products of the
future. Technology, the environment, and man make up a three-fold relationship
which, due to imbalances in the world, is most often an asymmetrical relationship.
The opposition man versus nature is a false distinction; in fact humans are a
fundamental part of nature. James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia
hypothesis, formulated in the 1970s, views the earth as one single “self-managing”
ecosystem. The “deep ecology” movement (a term coined in 1973) also saw man
as part of nature, not as its opponent.
52
While some see the merging of an ecological sensibility with urbanism as 
the basis of the discipline of landscape urbanism, this is only one avenue for
remediation of the presumed split between man and nature.
53
The integration of
the natural and the artificial was a central theme guiding the Metabolists. Marshall
suggests that “in recognizing a city as an ecosystem it naturally accommodates
the biological and non-biological”
54
and does away with false dialectics of nature
and artifice, organic and inorganic . . . . This concept of a complex, dynamic whole
differs from the idea of a city designed as a finite and fixed object, and raises
several questions about how to design, plan, or predict with certainty the
inherently malleable order of the city. Balance needs to be discovered, urgently.
The scale of East Asian and South Asian urbanism demands a more robust
and practical approach to the future of cities. The ecological and social
implications of China’s recent revision of Socialism—now “Socialism with Chinese
characteristics”—and its adoption of a market economy at a local, national, and
global level, are extreme and irreversible. Damage to the environment and vast
migrations of workers are the two most challenging side-effects of urbanization in
China. Although the dialectic of “nature and society” is principally a western one,
the realities of vast urbanization and their associated challenges have been most
prevalent, in recent decades, in the East.
55
It now seems urgent for China to find a
role in leading the world in creating cities which not only thrive economically but
that are more ecologically sensitive, and achieve a better social and economic
61
URBANIZATION AND ERASURE

---

balance between urban and rural populations, industry and agriculture, man and
nature. 
Paradigms of technological progress, scientific achievement, mechanistic
positivism need to be evaluated. As alternatives to the tenets which drove
modernist ideology, the concept of the city as an ecology which grows and
changes over time, following a soft, evolutionary mode of growth, development,
selection, and adaptation, seems at once a natural argument and a wholly artificial
ambition. The paradoxes inherent in man’s legacy of dominance over nature are
acute, given the increasing scarcity of natural resources, including food and water.
In various guises, there are calls for cities to go “back to nature.” In some sense,
this is a literal ambition for designers, planners, and policy makers “to foresee
spaces for a nature that is close to us and yet not controlled, toned down or
artificial”.
56
The equilibrium of the environment requires balancing man and
nature, urban and rural, and also industry and agriculture. More than ever urbanity
needs to find the dynamic equilibrium inherent in biological and physical
processes. An opposition such as the artificial versus the natural denies a model of
urbanity in which interrelated systems and agents form a continuously dynamic
concept of matter. The paradigm of the city as an ecology is not limited to the
simple understanding of organic matter in the city. Ecological concepts involve
“the interrelation and causality in hierarchical systems, a heuristic interest in
development pathways and behaviors, and a sensitivity to temporal pattern and
the subtle but inexorable process of ‘spontaneous’ formation, particularly in
technological milieus.”
57
Cues offered by natural systems, which are self-organized
and take shape without a designer, will help to elaborate the complexity of
urbanism. 
7.4 THE PROBLEM OF FUNCTIONALITY, ENDURANCE, AND 
OBSOLESCENCE
Form does not always follow its intended function. Functionality does not have any
ideal, stable state. Fitness for purpose is questionable. All buildings eventually
become dysfunctional, even though functionally fit on opening day. A balance
needs to be struck between fulfilling a stated purpose and allowing for the
capacity of a building to adapt to future criteria. What is the status of cities with
regard to their functionality? What triggers cities to adapt, evolve, and be
continually renovated to fit the contingencies of the present? 
The first machine age, the age of mechanization which culminated with the
modernist movement, reflected a thoroughly positivist ideology, in which
technology was seen as the catalyst for change, supported by blind belief in
modern science. This certainty waned with mid-twentieth century ‘revisionist’
modernism, and functionalism was deemed an inadequate paradigm to drive and
substantiate architectural culture. Reyner Banham viewed the inadequacy of
functionalism as lying “not in the extent to which functionalism as a theory had
pushed architecture in the direction of mindless mechanization, but in the extent
to which functionalism, as practiced, had failed to go anywhere near as far as
developing technology could carry it.”
58
Functionalism, perhaps largely through
the influence of Le Corbusier, was seen as interchangeable with rationalism. Recall
Hilbersheimer’s sanitized images of a pure matter–function approach to urban life.
Modernists, with their wish for mechanical order, confused “mere formalism and
62
TOM VEREBES

---