Masterplanning the Adaptive City

Design Team: James Corner, Richard Kennedy, Hong Zhou, Hang Cheng, Biyoung
Heo, Brad Goetz, Stephanie Ulrich
This masterplan for a major new urban zone of Shenzhen prioritizes water as both
the functional and qualitative driver for urban design. Water City is an innovative,
sustainable model of development for a rapidly urbanizing region. The masterplan
creates a large-scale water-treating framework that incorporates fine-grained,
human-scale spaces, resulting in a hyperdense, ecologically sensitive urban
territory with an iconic waterfront, diverse building stock, cultural and recreational
destinations, and unique public open spaces that are accessible from any point
within Qianhai.
CASE STUDY
JAMES CORNER FIELD 
OPERATIONS >QIANHAI 
MASTERPLAN, SHENZEN, CHINA
2011
Aerial view of the proposed masterplan. 

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81
QIANHAI MASTERPLAN
Masterplan proposal. 
Diagrams indicating the relationship of the urbanism to the ecological
corridors. 
Diagrams indicating the aquatic and flora systems of an
ecological corridor for treating water and for public use. 

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Plasma Studio collaborated with BIAD, Arup, and John Martin and Associates on
the building design, and with Groundlab, Laur Studio, and the Beijing Forest
University on the landscape design.
Design Team: Eva Castro, Holger Kehne, Mehran Gharleghi, Evan Greenberg,
Xiaowei Tong; with Tom Lea, Ying Wang, Nicoletta Gerevini, Peter Pichler,
Benedikt Schleicher, Katy Barkan, Danai Sage
Landscape: Groundlab (Eva Castro, Holger Kehne, Sarah Majid, Alfredo Ramirez,
Eduardo Rico)
Client: Chan Ba Ecological District, Xi’an
The project, titled Flowing Gardens, was generated as a synthesis of horticulture
and technology, where landscape and architecture converged in a sustainable 
and integral vision, comprising a 5,000-square-meter exhibition hall, a 4,000-
square-meter greenhouse and a 3500-square-meter gate building sitting in a 
thirty-seven-hectare landscape. Flowing Gardens creates a consonant functionality
of water, planting, circulation, and architecture as one seamless system. At the
major intersections of the pathways lie three buildings, each standing independent
of yet interconnected with the landscape. The gate building is created at the
junction of public meeting space, landscape, and circulation; entering the site
along the major axis of Flowing Gardens, it creates framed vistas of the gardens.
An exhibition centre is formed at the seam of landscape, circulation, and water.
Lastly, a greenhouse sits at the top of the South Hill, connecting various landscape
features. The greenhouse allows one to experience the beauty of Flowing Gardens
from across the lake while appreciating plants and flowers from four different
climatic zones.
CASE STUDY
PLASMA STUDIO >FLOWING
GARDENS, INTERNATIONAL
HORTICULTURAL EXPO, 
XI’AN, CHINA
2011

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Aerial photos of the
built Xi’an Expo site.
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FLOWING GARDENS

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84
PLASMA STUDIO
Aerial view of the
site, indicating the
complexity of its
organization, and 
its integration 
into the existing
infrastructures and
landscapes of the city.
Plan of the flows and
subdivision zones of the
site.

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II
CONCEPTS/
PARADIGMS
NEW PARADIGMS AND 
PRACTICES IN URBANISM

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This chapter explicates the discursive foundation for speculations on
alternatives to teleological modes of development, with principles of
uncertainty, complexity, and emergence embraced in the current era, termed
the “age of indeterminacy.” The chapter surveys the multidisciplinary
discourses associated with an understanding of the city as fundamentally
dynamic, and as having a future that is never fully determinable. It also
elucidates concepts associated with computational approaches to urbanism,
the methods and applications of which will be further elaborated on in later
chapters. Finally, the theoretical lineage of the study of dynamic patterns is
investigated as a fundamental issue in evolutionary urbanism.
10.1 PLANNING AND/OR EMERGENCE
Planners can certainly force a city into a particular form. In fact, planners
have to give their forms, as the old self-optimizing process, requiring no
planner, no longer functions. In spite of this, self-optimization processes can
be encouraged, but only if one knows how they work and how to initiate
them. The recognition of self-developing processes in our time enables us 
to create prognoses for the future, as urban development processes are 
long-term in nature.
Frei Otto
1
Informal urban growth often shows evidence of evolutionary patterns of formation,
due to its incremental, grown rather than planned nature. The attributes of
unplanned or informal urbanism can be understood as the outcome of emergent
processes. Cities exemplify “how well-adapted designs emerge from what appear
to be the countless uncoordinated decisions generated from the bottom up that
produce order on all scales.”
2
Architects are often enamoured of evolutionary patterns of urbanization, of
urban entities that appear as though they were not designed but rather just
happened, with some seemingly invisible intelligence at work. Medieval European
towns and cities appear as though they were not designed, but evolved gradually
through the playing out of the rules of a dynamic game. Such cities, “far from
being messy, disorganized forms, have rather well defined spatial structures.”
3
Though often viewed as undesirable from social, political, economic, and hygiene
perspectives, slums grow according to the conditions set by minimal resources
and topographically constrained sites. The contrast between highly planned parts
of cities and adjacent slums, and the corresponding contrast in relative wealth 
or poverty, is perhaps greatest in South American cities. In such slums, these
relations between minimal material means, highly constrained dimensions, and
extreme topographies determine the location of buildings and flows of movement
in what is a set of endogenous processes, in other words a set of small, local
actions which accumulate to form a coherent whole. Although systems are not
being deployed as regulatory mechanisms by a central planner, local interactions
CHAPTER 10
TOM VEREBES >THE DEATH 
OF MASTERPLANNING IN THE
AGE OF INDETERMINACY

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