Masterplanning the Adaptive City

architects to get things right, not by prescribing it but by setting up a model
that recognizes a form of reality that will align with that. As architects, we
cannot avoid glimpsing into the future, and in fact we spend most of our time
doing projects that don’t come close to fruition. The thing you and I would
share is the vision that these cities being created at lightning speed are
wrong precisely because their models are from several decades ago, instead
of somebody’s new model today that we know will never be proliferated or
even built.
TV
Maybe there is a shift from an understanding of the vision of the future being
fixed and attainable, toward the notion of an interface that engages with 
the complexities that shape the model, or the parameters that need to be
recognized and accommodated in the model. If we accept the inevitable
failure of all models, we can redeem the model if it becomes more plastic 
and interactive. Can this also address the urgent need for architecture or
architects not to be become redundant, that our discipline remains relevant
and capable of projecting futures? I am saying we need to provide tools, 
or interfaces, rather than images, which can be informed by a range of
constituents and contingencies, from the abstract economy, planners and
policy makers, individual investors and clients. For a masterplan to avoid
failure, I believe this will entail the development of adaptive capabilities, to
absorb difference and change without its model, or masterplan, becoming
defunct and useless, or deemed a failure. 
BS
Surely that could be accomplished. I could imagine a team in Google
achieving this, if they would throw enough resources, intelligence,
computational wherewithal, specialization, etc. If you scan the discipline
today for visions of the future of cities, one of the striking features is the lack
of its imagery. Zaha [Hadid] had no problem in 1983 to draw the future of
Hong Kong. The Peak was one little building that was used as an excuse for
drawing a vision of the city. For that generation, images of the future were a
way to organize a kind of research project that careers eventually grew out 
of. At some point the model you are describing will need to be consolidated
into images people can understand. If you think of a global economy now
dominated by the circulation of images, I feel like architects especially are
put in a privileged position to play a key role in imaging the future. Most of
Corb’s images highlight the difference between reality and the model, and he
was able to collapse into literally an image which then much of twentieth-
century architectural culture gets organized around. What you’re looking for
is an equivalent to the Domino House, to scale it from architecture to the city.
TV
It may not be the image of computational architecture, which generally
involves spatial, mathematical, and geometric operations, because these
kinds of models cannot be simply scaled up, despite their topology. So I think
there are potentials to use Building Information Modeling (BIM) for what is
notionally being called City Information Modeling (CIM), a way of conceiving
the model as something plastic and interactive which can take many
different states. The city model is then informational and it produces ranges
of options that potentially house a degree of automation, not for the goal of
the efficiency and construction delivery like the Building Information
Modeling paradigm, but rather to model the city as unfinished, to be
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contaminated, polluted, and still maintain its coherence. We have game
environments that do that, for instance SimCity. In which ways can these new
tools help to reshape models of the city as interactive processes rather than
as representations of static images?
BS
Then urbanism, as a practice, becomes a form of interactivity with which to
reshape the thing you refer to as the masterplan. You want it to be malleable,
elastic, undoubtedly adaptable in time, to take in different kinds of
information that might not be predictable, and with that remain a living,
viable model to unfold the city. I think that’s very interesting, because clearly
Asia disagrees. Asia simply wants to make it happen and they are quite
happy to work with nineteenth- and twentieth-century models, and they have
proven in fact they can house 300 million people with old models. Their
models don’t need to be interactive. It can be entirely top-down. A billion
people in China are saying the opposite: that twentieth-century models can
be scaled up, but with more resources, more centralized control, less
questioning. I agree we should proliferate new models and new ways of
working, but how we do that should acknowledge the fact that we’re an
extreme minority who would like to overcome old models. 
TV
Perhaps there is a parallel of the scale of architecture to the city, which can
piggyback how computational design was sold to developers by convincing
them the buildings can be produced cheaper and faster, and they will last
longer, i.e. they will make more money. This is where the City Information
Model analogy can be understood as a new piece of software that’s able to
manage the city better. It will not result in its infrastructure and its
architecture being defunct and obsolete so quickly, which defines its selling
point. 
BS
That’s exactly right. I was going to get to the same point. If we look at my 
bad analogy, what Le Corbusier did was to create an argument around his
Domino model that people could access and understand. But you’re right 
to say that’s the task for today, as these forces are already at play in the
informational city, and there’s a way in which you can convey that reality
legitimates the tools you want to bring to it. 
TV
But will this thesis succeed? Shall we predict that everything in this book 
will be proven wrong toward the end of our careers?
BS
Much faster than that! The world is moving fast. The leapfrogging is
staggering. When they learn to grow buildings next week, all of this becomes
irrelevant. 
TV
I still believe we need to combat the recurring history of sequential failed
projections which mars the history of twentieth-century urbanization.
BS
It’s funny, we are talking about the Asian experience a lot at the AA right now
for a number of reasons. The difference between European cities and Asian
cities is increasingly interesting. Are you really making an argument, then, for
models that are geographically differentiated in their logics, expectations,
and understandings? This oddly fits with Kenneth Frampton for it ought to 
be differentiation in the geographic sense; he was arguing for cultural
difference, but in the end it was geography which drove the differences of
Northern Europe versus Southern Europe, for instance. I think you are
actually progressing Frampton’s critical regionalism and the universal
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