Masterplanning the Adaptive City

ways we use technology, but I don’t believe in an ultimate technological fix
for all the problems created by the city. There is a historical arc of technology
that supported the city and continues to support the development,
sophistication, and complexity of the city. The potential for solving or for
creating a more balanced sustainable system seems to get subsumed by the
inspiration, innovation, and excitement of doing something new, which in
turn just creates more demands on the system. I think there will need to be a
fundamental change in attitude. I rather suspect that, if we want truly
sustainable communities, we will have to revert to a simpler mode of life, and
become antitechnological, antisophisticated. I believe that the biggest
settlement unit that is sustainable is the village. Cities are too big. The city is
pushing us faster and further toward depletion. We will find a better, more
sustainable city model, but at the moment I see us heading toward disaster.
TV
You sketch an imminent, dystopic future.
MP
The future is indeed dystopic.
TV
Speculations and fictions aside, there might be consensus among most
people within the professions that deal with the future that we have massive
challenges ahead, to say the least. Perhaps we should question whether we
will have cities in the future. 
MP
Yes, it’s a bit of a dark note. There seems to be such a strong presumption for
development, and I don’t see it leading anywhere but a greater, faster, more
damaging depletion of the environment that we live in. I don’t see technology
as a solution but rather as part of the problem. It is the presumption for
continuous development that I find so worrying. 
TV
There has never been a stage of urbanization of such huge proportions as has
happened in China in the last twenty years, and will continue to happen over
the next couples of decades. This has occurred principally because of the
centralized policy to urbanize people from rural lands, which has a number of
political, cultural, and social motivations and implications. Asia seems far
from any semblance of stability, and this massive urban project needs to
challenge the limitations of conventional ways of addressing urbanization. 
MP
What I find interesting is the decision-making process: Who is making the
decisions about Chinese urbanization? Is it the government, or is it big
corporate entities? In the development of megablocks in China, developers
clearly recognize that the city is not working, so they build a city within a city
as a self-contained unit. This top-down approach is not working, but at the
other end, individuals feel they have no capacity to influence the city. 
TV
At stake in this argument is how smaller-scale emergent conditions can
generate patterns of activity and use by empowering people to make
decisions, and how this can be brought toward more top-down processes of
masterplanning. This seems to be an immense political challenge to the
ways in which cities are being developed in China. While I am hopeful for this
model, it is unlikely to be installed as a mechanism for the foreseeable future.
Cities need ways of generating design schemes as part of more emergent
processes, where the rules of the game can be established without knowing
how the game ends. 
MP
I share your view. Neither the big corporation nor the individual can come up
with a perfect solution, but the corporation can provide a flexible framework
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MATTHEW PRYOR WITH TOM VEREBES

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which is then occupied by individuals in the community with the freedom to
adapt and change the city on many scales and levels. One of the things I very
much appreciate is Hong Kong’s ability to reinvent itself, to knock things
down and put up something new. After his recent lecture at HKU, I spoke
with Rem Koolhaas about one of the old blocks in Kowloon where
immigrants used to arrive, settle down for couple of years, and then move on.
He had identified the building as a vital element of the cultural heritage of
Hong Kong, and saw the need to preserve it and the story behind it. In the
conversation were some locals who were aghast at this idea, and thought it
much better to knock it down, put up something bigger, and make more
money out of it. One could say preservation is a western ideal. In Hong Kong
there seems to be a ready willingness to exploit and redevelop the city, rather
than to accept it and live with it. 
TV
It’s a complex problem to address the endurance of the social and cultural
order of the city. The paradoxes of continuity and change, old and new,
tradition and innovation are found in their most extreme sense in the
contemporary urbanization in China. Hong Kong has gone through these
changes many times and there is, however, great regret by Hong Kong’s
people, their politicians, architects, and others, of the persistence of an
overarching goal of progress. This throws into question the value placed on
the material heritage of the city and its social and cultural life. The history of
Hong Kong will hopefully remain an influence on policy makers,
masterplanners and design teams in China, to avoid the pitfalls of past
projects of urbanization.
MP
The city is the people, who are nested between those who govern and those
who invest.
TV
And somewhere in the mix are the designers who give shape to political
dreams and business plans!
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CONVERSATION 3

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