Masterplanning the Adaptive City

Aerial view of the maximum extent of proposal, one hundred years in the future.
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UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG RESEARCH TEAM

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261
COUNTERPART CITIES: FUTUREPORT
Energy Plots
Factory Plots
Port Plots
Secondary Circulation
Primary Circulation
Shipping Routes
Urban Plots
Axonometric drawing of four systems: urban, port, industry, and energy harvesting.
Projected growth of the Futureport
over one hundred years.

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UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG RESEARCH TEAM
Changes to existing transport diagram in the Pearl River Delta, in the next one hundred years.

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263
COUNTERPART CITIES: FUTUREPORT
Projected growth of the ports of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, in the next one
hundred years, towards the Hong Kong Macau Zhuhai Bridge.

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UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG RESEARCH TEAM
Urban 
Port
Industry
Energy
Detailed axonometric
drawing of one island
indicating four
systems: urban, port,
industry, and energy
harvesting.

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265
COUNTERPART CITIES: FUTUREPORT
Physical model of the
proposed scheme,
demonstrating the
integration of the
urban, port, industry,
and energy harvesting
fields.

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TV
This book aims to challenge the pervasive urban planning masterplanning
concepts and methodologies which aim to project the final state of the city. In
a context in which never before has so much urbanization occurred as in the
last twenty years in China, cities are growing and changing so quickly, I am
championing an evolutionary approach to urbanization. What is interesting 
at this stage is we have computational tools to not only design formal
differentiations and specificities, but also to develop the capacity to manage
and to control change without determining its final state. This thesis
assumes all cities are not finite but rather that they are always in transition.
The city offers a whole new level of complexity to harness and manage, but
not to overdetermine. 
BS
I understand the thesis and the argument. Firstly, the city is a different
category of problem than a structure, and also that the tools of the
computational project might be aimed at new problems that architecture in
its traditional scale cannot confront. 
TV
As the background from which to confront the reality of the extent of
urbanization that has never before occurred, let’s discuss and evaluate the
pervasive models of urbanization of the twentieth century, and their relative
successes, ongoing relevance, or even their pitfalls and possible mistakes
that might be recurring within the extreme urbanization of Asia.
BS
I sense a need to distinguish between what we think of as the city and the
topic of urbanization. Urbanization is the history of how to modernize the city.
The city itself is a concept and a reality that exists in a historical and
contemporary form. What we think of the Asian urbanization today—it’s very
fast, it’s very big, it’s very unpredictable—is an iteration of phenomena that
in the twentieth century could be found in Europe. In fact, I’m fascinated by
the fact that Asia is Europe Version 2.0. It’s not something that’s wholly new,
it’s happening at a different scale, which brings an increasing complexity, but
I think we need to reflect upon the European experience in the twentieth
century. Problems of genericization, of universalization, were played out at a
smaller scale when industrialization swept across cities beginning in the
middle of the nineteenth century, and continued throughout the twentieth
century to the rebuilding after the war. I don’t find the condition of the early
twenty-first-century in Asia new at all in terms of anything but quantities. The
question that it raises has to do with our continuing expectation that a new
condition demands new tools, which is what our generation has grown up on.
Now what’s most interesting about urbanization now, especially in Asia, is
how old fashioned the models and the tools are. In this latest wave of
urbanization, of which China is just an extreme end of something that started
in Europe 150 years ago, built into architectural urban culture during this
period is an expectation which many of us share, that new tools must be
found to recognize new complex conditions. China is a record of bad urban
strategies and histories being played out in real time. For me, when I come to
the question of what are the new tools, techniques, ways of working, where I
CHAPTER 19
CONVERSATION 6
BRETT STEELE (BS) WITH TOM VEREBES
(TV)

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try and intersect it right now is at the level of saying: How do we take what’s
already out there and transform those rather than to invent a whole new
category of how to think and act? The reality is China is a horrible record of
this right now; nineteenth century stuff works. However bad those cities are,
that’s exactly what’s driving the greatest wave of urbanization in human
history. They are working on stuff Semper developed in the nineteenth
century. I’m interested in, as a discipline, how those strategies and
techniques can be reinvented, rather than just to ignore them and develop
alternative universes. I feel like in the DRL world we created together, all that
stuff didn’t exist and we would start each year, on an October morning,
developing a whole new way of thinking and working. In terms of our long-
term conversation, that’s where things for me have changed in the last
couple of years. I’m oddly attracted to the old fashionedness of Chinese
urbanization today, because it’s not something to replace with a completely
different world, it’s actually something to work with in some ways.
TV
It would be an impossibility to entirely supplant the current modes of
production in China. One of the features of contemporary Asian urbanization,
which I find problematic, is the spatial homogeneity of Chinese cities, which
results from Fordist standardization of architectural production, brought
toward urban planning. Increasingly nearly all Chinese cities look alike and
they are ruthlessly repetitive and monotonous. In some ways there are
opportunities to enable specificities to topographies, climates, local policies,
cultural histories, and such. It may seem like I am harping on the legacy of
Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism, but in some ways he recognized
some of the limitations of modernist ideologies and methodologies, which
had failed as a universal model. A Brazilian city looks different than an Indian
city, which looks different than Switzerland. So, in effect, what are the
potentials for the kinds of tools that can create and amplify specificities? To
what extent can computational design and production methods usher in
large-scale nonstandardization as a means to confront the generic nature of
contemporary cities?
BS
For me the striking thing about Chinese cities is not how much they look
alike, one to the other, but how much they look like Le Corbusier’s urban
visions a hundred years ago. The legacy of modern principles has persisted
to an almost unbelievable degree. The differentiation I’m looking for is a
disciplinary or discursive one, which is that cities ought to look like
something other than last century’s modernism. That’s where I think Asia is
crushing the world by validating Le Corbusier’s primacy on infrastructure
and his relationship of figure–ground. The consultants building those cities
are trained with the legacy of modernism, and this needs to be combated in
some way. In how you frame your question, I don’t know if the specificity
should be that of the specific differences of one city to another. For me
personally, I don’t need local differentiation the way Kenneth Frampton does.
Computation does not necessarily deal with specificity because the computer
is a machine designed for universalization. When Turing invented the
computer, he called it the “universal machine.” There are other technologies
and ways of working that can introduce specificity, but I’m not so worried
about making cities different from one another. 
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CONVERSATION 6

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