Masterplanning the Adaptive City

Venturi and Scott Brown celebrated the infiltration of pop culture through the
suburbanization of the city in their seminal Learning from Las Vegas (1972). Sprawl,
according to Albert Pope, is the aggregation of spine units, and he claims sprawl is
not an uncontrolled, unplanned condition, but rather an extensive spatial model.
19
Marshall argues that “ad-hoc Modernism and post-planning sprawl is the true
evolutionary inheritor of unplanned organic urbanism” without giving judgment on
whether neotraditional urbanism or postmodernism is preferred—yet he leaves
practically no other alternative paradigm or tendency to pursue. In the American
context, postmodern and neotraditionalist movements can be dismissed as
reactionary fallout from the radicalness and single mindedness of orthodox
modernism.
20
90
TOM VEREBES
Series of
masterplanning
interventions in which
the site is always
complete, yet always
able to gain further
density in the future.
(Studio Tutor: Tom
Verebes; Students:
Lindsay Bresser,
Claudia Dorner, Sergio
Reyes Rodr guez;
Architectural
Association, 2009)

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Form, in the usual sense of the word, is the result of the accumulation of
many local accidents.
René Thom, 1975
21
Self-organized, emergent systems in biological and physical processes parallel the
ways in which collective human activity unfolds in real time, including how cities
grow and evolve over the years, decades, or centuries. Emergence, in Kevin Kelly’s
terms, “requires a population of entities, a multitude, a collective, a mob, more.
More is Different.”
22
Kelly was here echoing the now-famous edict of Philip
Anderson, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist, that “more is different,” which refers 
to phase change within an emergent system. By the addition of “more energy, 
or information, or mass, or whatever, . . . a system will reach a critical point 
and jump into a new regime [and] new patterns of organization can emerge
spontaneously.”
23
In this sense, emergent order occurs precisely when control is
relinquished, and here lies the essential contradiction between planned cities and
evolutionary forms of urbanism. 
In his short but seminal book, An Evolutionary Architecture, John Frazer
proposed an alternative methodology for design, in which “the model is adapted
iteratively in the computer in response to feedback from evaluation.”
24
One of the
aims here is to sketch out an evolutionary approach to urbanism, and in fact these
concepts can be mapped back to Metabolism, in which architecture is seen as part
of living processes. “An evolutionary architecture will exhibit metabolism, as a
thermodynamically open relationship with the environment in both a metabolic
and a socio-economic sense.”
25
Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, believed
that the intelligence of all species lies in their capacity to act as machines to
process information from stimuli, and to learn from feedback. The study of
metabolisms opens architecture up to a range of concepts and methodologies
which are “strongly correlated to the organisations and systems of the natural
world.”
26
Manuel De Landa argues for bottom-up processes, which, if modelled by
“a top-down analytical approach that begins with the whole and dissects it into its
constituent parts (an ecosystem into species, a society into institutions),” will fail
to capture the emergent qualities of complex interactions.
27
City forms, as Michael
Weinstock defines them, are “material constructs” which “emerge from regional
variations” of localized systems and patterns of settlements.
28
Christopher Alexander posits that traditional society was not aware of what
he delineates as “living structures” and “non-living structures,” and that, “although
traditional society was filled with human-created processes—human inspired and
human invented—it was dominated by living processes.”
29
Alexander’s aims in 
his seminal Nature of Order do not include explaining the forms of cities, either
traditional or contemporary, in terms of how living things form, develop, and evolve;
rather he sees the traditional, premodern city as existing prior to the distinction of
nature from artifice, living from nonliving, grown from designed, and so on. Despite
the risk of nostalgia in positing or valorizing the inherent attributes of the formation
of the traditional city, the argument here is distinctly against a return to traditional
formal order or spatial articulation. The “structure-preserving transformations” of
traditional cities, Alexander argues, resist the tabula rasa, obliteration approach in
urbanism, which dominated so much of the twentieth century and which persists
in regions currently undergoing urbanization on a vast scale.
91
THE DEATH OF MASTERPLANNING

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Echoed again and again in recent years by complexity scientists and writers,
Alexander’s fascination with patterns observed in natural systems and his
conviction that design can be connected with the “natural” world resonate deeply
and pervasively, and raise many questions about the characteristics of man-made
order as part and parcel of, for lack a better term, life. For Alexander, life is a
metaphor for order—order is not an operative quality of the processes of artificial
formation—rendering moot the distinction between nature and the artificial. What
is of interest here is the process of formation of the city. Today’s computational
approaches to urbanism are unleashing processes which involve interactive rules
that create variable outcomes, thereby simulating the ways in which emergent
systems create unexpected yet coherent organization. 
Conventional techniques of masterplanning, as we have seen, are inflexible
in the face of changing requirements and limited in their adaptability to new
contextual criteria, and therefore less intelligent than they ought to be. The 
most-used planning tools inherently lack feedback mechanisms, or the ability to
process information and learn from input–output relationships. And it is an
oversimplification to set top-down design in opposition to bottom-up growth and
development of urbanism—both approaches understand and project the city as a
coherent whole. The central question to address is how coherent, compelling
evolutionary patterns can be embedded in our existing planning processes.
10.2 TELEOLOGICAL FALLACIES OF THE MASTERPLANNER
There are questions that one chooses to ask and other questions that ask
themselves. 
Henri Poincaré, 1890
30
Cities are at once an expression of the present, and hopelessly retrospective 
in their inability to meet current demands and expectations. Cities are forever in
need of maintenance and renovation. If the city is never fully adequate, never
functionally fit for the requirements of the present, then it is logical to conclude
that urbanism will in time lead to obsolescence. The problematics of urbanism
include fulfilling the apparent needs and contingencies of the present, as well as
those of what amount to predictions of the future. Regardless of whether one is
considering rarefied visions of urbanism—utopias—or the prosaic yet brutal,
tenacious yet transformative tasks of the masterplanner or urban designer, the
future is not entirely knowable. 
92
TOM VEREBES
Diagrams indicating
possible evolutions 
of urban densification
in a peripheral site in
Shenzhen, China.
(Studio Tutor: Tom
Verebes; Thesis
Student: Guo Jia; MArch
Thesis, The University
of Hong Kong, 2011)

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