Masterplanning the Adaptive City

accessible to the public, an amenity provided by the developer to maximize the
floor area of the adjacent tower, Cheung Kong Center. Despite the verdure, Cheung
Kong Garden is a fabrication; complete with cement formed into the shape of
rocky outcroppings and artificially circulated watercourses, it sits atop a parking
garage. Contrast this with Cheung Kong Center, designed by César Pelli and
opened in 1999, which boasts the cities cleanest (most filtered) interior air.
Conditioned via TAAS, or Totally Adaptive Air-conditioning System, it could not 
be less natural, and yet it is the most “pure” of atmospheres in Hong Kong.
Unlike formal public spaces, public-spheres do not rely on coded
relationships between space and meaning. They work in broad strokes: the
creation of cool air, whether by the planting of shade trees or the running of 
air-conditioning, will engender subjective readings of the city’s structures, leading
some to treat the space as a thoroughfare, others as a plaza, others as a café. At
the extreme, a tube of air kept below freezing in the desert can engender, or at
least allow the possibility of, a ski slope. Precisely because of their aformal and
asymbolic construction, public-spheres are agents for the adaptable city.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author’s research was supported by the University of Hong Kong’s Small
Project Funding grant scheme. An early draft was presented at The City and Public
Space in Asia workshop, organized by the author and Gregory Bracken with the
Delft School of Design International Institute for Asian Studies and the University
of Hong Kong. The author’s research is an elaboration of themes explored with
Adam Frampton and Clara Wong in Cities without Ground (Oro Editions, 2012).
Airtek Hong Kong provided early support of the measurement of temperature
differentials in Hong Kong malls. 
NOTES
1
> Discovery Channel, “Ski Dubai World.” Accessed July 7, 2012.
http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/really-big-things-season-2-shorts-ski-dubai-world.html
2
> Jonathan Solomon (forthcoming) “Hong Kong: Aformal Urbanism,” in Shaping the City:
Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design, 2nd ed., eds. Rodolphe El-Khoury and Edward
Robbins (New York: Routledge).
3
> Mark Wigley (1998) “The Architecture of Atmosphere,” Daidalos 68: 18–27. 
4
> Reyner Banham (1969) Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (London: The
Architectural Press); Sylvia Lavin (2011) Kissing Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University
Press); Jeffrey Kipnis (1997) “The Cunning of Cosmetics,” in El Croquis: Herzog & de Meuron
(Madrid: El Croquis).
5
> David Gissen (2010) “APE,” in Design Ecologies: Essays on the Nature of Design, eds. Lisa
Tilder and Beth Blostien (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), 65–66.
6
> Peter Sloterdijk(2009) “Atmospheric Politics,” in Space Reader: Heterogenous Space in
Architecture, eds. Michael Hensel, Christopher Hight and Achim Menges (London: Wiley),
173–174.
7
> Mason White (2009) “99.7 Per Cent Pure,” AD Architectural Design 79, no. 3: 21–22.
8
>“Diller Scofidio + Renfro.” Accessed July 7, 2012. http://dsrny.com/
9
> Peter Sloterdijk (2009) “Foam City: About Urban Spatial Multitudes,” in New Geographies
0, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 136–143.
10
> Zoe Ryan (2006) The Good Life: New Public Spaces for Recreation (New York: Van Allen
Institute), 29, 31, 56, 61.
11
> Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong (2012) Cities without Ground
(San Francisco: Oro Editions).
12
> David Howes (2005) “Architecture and the Senses,” in Sense of the City, ed. Mirko Zardini
(Baden: Lars Mueller), 326–327.
74
JONATHAN D. SOLOMON

---

TV
This book’s core thesis questions the legitimacy of conventional
masterplanning techniques to address the complexities of urban growth and
transformation, and in particular to rapid urbanization occurring at the pace
it is in China. As a landscape architect based in Hong Kong for so many
years, and given your experience of working within multidisciplinary
masterplanning teams alongside your teaching and research, I am interested
to hear your views on the preeminent models and methodologies from which
urbanization takes shape and the extent to which masterplanning can deal
with the speed and complexity and quantity of urbanization taking place,
especially within the context of the unrelenting and unprecedented
urbanization occurring in Asia. What do you believe to be the merits and
pitfalls of top-down centralized planning processes, and by what means can
bottom-up emergent processes be developed and engage local
constituencies, issues, and desires, to generate local specificities within
global models?
MP
Your question doesn’t have a yes/no answer to it, so I’ll start by briefly
outlining my experience in urbanization. I came to Hong Kong in 1991, and I
was involved in the latter end of the New Town Development program in
Hong Kong, and the new airport in Hong Kong. Within this part of the world
masterplanning seems to be a mainstay of private consultancy in the
planning, architecture, and engineering fields. Most of the masterplans I’ve
been involved in have been driven by very much top-down, large-scale
planning methods, and I think the largest masterplan I’ve worked on was for
six to seven hundred thousand people, but I know that doesn’t even compare
with the size of some cities being developed. 
Approaches to masterplanning range from the very basic laying out of
roads, building massing, and land uses to highly sophisticated techniques
which use computer models to test the sustainability of proposed
development against various sustainability indicators, e.g. energy efficiency,
waste, etc. These masterplans have tended to be premised on the basis of
accommodating a certain population with the requisite commercial,
infrastructural, institutional, industrial facilities, within a given area, as a
response to migration from surrounding areas, or commonly from the
speculative opinion of a developer or governmental organization. Up until
about the mid-1990s it was just about laying it all out, as evident in the New
Town layout plans, which are highly engineered. 
From the latter half of the 1990s, masterplanning teams were becoming
more sensitive to the fact that it should be more than just an urban fabric of
roads and the buildings: there was a soft component to new urbanization.
You need to have community facilities to actually make places for people. Yet
this is very difficult for masterplanning teams to achieve that because they’re
coming at it from the wrong angle. They largely deal with physical form and
they do not have a connection to engage with community, and nor do they
have the capacity to create community. So masterplanning becomes a one-
CHAPTER 9
CONVERSATION 3
MATTHEW PRYOR (MP) WITH 
TOM VEREBES (TV)

---