Masterplanning the Adaptive City

of massing, routing, access, topography, hydrology, and other parameters tend to
result in coherent, compelling organizational features, with a high degree of local
differentiation. 
Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 book Architecture without Architects demonstrated
how informal urbanism grows and can become, in due course, permanent.
Christopher Alexander understood favelas as “small-scale self-organizing systems
with local codes” with which architects or lay people could interact.
4
Avoiding
romantic longing for a world before designers in which the cities we created had
coherence, functionality, and beauty, today’s favelas can give clues as to how to
negotiate a new planning model, between “bottom-up self-help and top-down
management.
5
In the 1970s, “officially unrecognized informal settlements” made
up sixty percent of Latin American cities.
6
The United Nations in 2010 estimated
that “one third of the [world’s] urban population of 3 billion people now live in
shanty towns.”
7
Vast informal settlements, for example those in Caracas,
Venezuela or Dharavi, Mumbai, qualify as cities in themselves, equivalent in
population to the London or Paris of the mid-nineteenth century. The phenomenon
of the urban village is particular to China. These enclaves are pockets of residual,
older fabric, yet in the case of Shenzhen, for example, are under thirty years old.
Perhaps the most extreme example of planned urbanism being infiltrated by the
“wild” is Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, demolished in 1993–1994 after a long
eviction process, begun in 1987.
8
Is the favela a model of freedom within the regulatory regimes of planning?
Will cities in the future be “a mixture of the emergent and the planned, the biotic
and the geometric”?
9
The means by which oppositions such as planning versus
informal urbanization, top-down versus bottom-up growth, control versus
deregulation might successfully be negotiated perhaps forms the underlying
motive for this book—to find a balance between mechanisms and processes,
between man and nature. Despite the undesirable qualities of slums, they are
interesting for their associative organizational logic, which results from
algorithmic generative principles. These evolutionary processes suggest higher
orders of complex information are involved in the formation of non-planned cities,
and could in fact be used to rethink masterplanning via the mediation of the
paradox of planning and emergence. 
The medieval core of Venice, “whose labyrinthine structure was the
unintended product of many personal decentralized decisions,” has been
contrasted by Manuel De Landa with Versailles, “a city planned to the last detail by
centralized decision-makers in the French government.”
10
Modern city planning
can be seen to be “founded on the premise that ‘unplanned’ settlements are more
disordered and dysfunctional than planned ones.”
11
When did modern city
planning actually begin? The Renaissance? With Soria y Mata’s ciudad lineal
(“linear city”)? Howard’s garden city movement? Tony Garnier’s Cité industrielle
of 1917? Le Corbusier’s Ville radieuse (1933)? In Baroque planning, the notion of
finality and omnipresence is evident in the propensity for geometric fixity.
Descartes observed the “indiscriminate juxtaposition, the consequent crookedness
and irregularity of the streets” of ancient cities, and concluded that their
arrangement was guided by something other than “human will guided by
reason.”
12
Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, DC is emblematic of
planning in which the final state of the city is planned beforehand, in its entirety.
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TOM VEREBES

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Mumford claims that L’Enfant “forgot, in fact, that time is a fatal handicap to the
baroque conception of the world: its mechanical order makes no allowances for
growth, change, adaptation and creative renewal.”
13
If planning is synonymous with control, then what comes of the absence of
planning?
14
A plan is an itinerary to follow, or, more architecturally, a plan can also
be a drawing used to organize future construction. Planned and emergent forms of
urbanism can be considered opposites, as emergence “has always been about
giving up control, letting the system govern itself as much as possible, letting it
learn from the footprints.”
15
The potential to fully “plan” is reduced as scale
increases, and uncontrollable phenomena and events may intervene. Jane and
Mark Burry have identified a “cosmological, organizational and geometric shift in
perspective to engage with the city from the bottom-up, from the discrete granular
forces from which it unfolds, rather than top-down, in the manner familiar from
19th century planning, and even more so, Modernist planning.”
16
During the
Victorian period, the term “without design” celebrated the apparently natural order
arising in the man-made disorder of the industrial town.
17
In the absence of planning, is control over the future of urbanism relinquished?
Conversely, to what extent can wholly planned urbanism adapt to future challenges?
It is, however, an oversimplification to assume that adaptive, evolutionary urbanism
lacks all planning. The opposition of formal, planned cities and informal, unplanned
urbanism is set against the notion of the unplanned city being shaped by small-
scale, bottom-up interventions, and the idea of masterplanning as the domain of
large-scale hierarchical actions is challenged as romantic. A masterplan can benefit
from “contamination” by the mechanisms of informal urbanization, which operate at
multiple spatial scales and speeds, never finished, nor pretending to completeness.
To assume that traditional urbanism is the result of a “natural” set of characteristics,
in contrast to the rational and technologically driven regimes of modernist planning,
is to color the issue with nostalgia.
The coherence of the traditional city is the result not of a lack of overall
design but rather of smaller, local decisions which amalgamate to create a whole
which exceeds the sum of its parts. Rather than seeking a cure for modern ills 
in traditionalism and preservation, can the grown and evolved urbanism of
Marrakech or Isfahan be simulated and created? Here is a challenge: to reconcile
the grown and evolved processes of traditional cities, with the superimposition of
the new on the existing order of the world.
18
Scholars of the late modern period, including critics of modernism such 
as Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, and Christopher Alexander, have sought to correct
what they assumed to be the errors of the modernist project by reexamining the
merits of the premodernist fabric of the city. At this juncture, an assessment of
postmodernism, neotraditionalism, and new urbanism is needed. Despite the
prevalence of these tendencies and movements, especially in North America, they
represent a reactionary reversal of the utopian models of the twentieth century.
Lacking all confidence to chart out the future, and symptomatic of a reliance on 
a return to the past, these positions are ideologically bankrupt. Vernacular
architecture can inform the mechanisms for formation of emergent, self-organized
order, yet simplistic replication of its appearance is inadequate. 
Houston, a city with a near absence of any zoning control in the
conventionally understood sense, is the antithesis of planning—it is wild. 
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THE DEATH OF MASTERPLANNING

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