Masterplanning the Adaptive City

assumptions of the twentieth century. There are ways to defend the Asian
bias, but I have to confess complete innocence to the whole thing, since I
don’t get Asian cities at all. I’m completely baffled as well by European cities
because I come from America.
TV
There are parallels between American and Asian urbanization. Contemporary
Asian urbanism has a propensity toward a tabula rasa model, generally
incapable of negotiating and including preexisting historic urban conditions. 
BS
You see, you’re Colin Rowe in the end! 
TV
The conflict arises recognizing that ancient cities, towns, or villages are
incapable of meeting current demands of urbanization, so this exceeds
juxtaposition, as in Rowe’s incoherent assemblages, it is really the
inadequacy of history to remain relevant and for current models to make it
relevant. So history is pickled and left unable to negotiate, accommodate,
and fulfill contemporary demands. Yet erasing Asia’s material history is an
incredible mistake. 
BS
It’s hard to not agree with that position. China locked into the notion that
heritage drives global economies much too late. Travel and tourism is the
largest segment in the global market today, without which they’re left with all
the factories.
TV
The problem with heritage in mainland China is that it is equated only with
tourism. This is really a kind of different problem than the one that Colin
Rowe and Fred Koetter faced when trying to reconcile the failures of
modernization in Europe through layering the contemporary world onto the
historical world, which meshed neatly, even if incoherently. The historic fabric
in Asia, tragically, due to its total dysfunctionality, is unmeshable with the
new.
BS
We’re publishing a series of Mao essays in the Words series. He does not 
see urbanization as two conditions with an onus to negotiate a historical
condition. Mao sees only one condition. The failure of all previous models is
the justification of his singular model. That’s what makes it a political project.
He’s barking mad. This is a guy who thought he was the center of the
universe. 
Thanks, Tom, this has been super-interesting and I’ll be thinking about
it all day.
TV
Thanks Brett, for an inspirational conversation this afternoon and for helping
to shape the discourse emanating from this book.  
272
BRETT STEELE WITH TOM VEREBES

---

In the months of working through the writing and editing of this book, the
cumulative mission has been to challenge the static nature of conventional
masterplanning practices. The line of questioning has focussed on the relevance
of pursuing conclusive, determinable projections of the future. In this light, it may
be somewhat fitting that the reader now be presented with a conclusion arguing,
in effect, against conclusions. 
In considering an information-driven approach to urban growth, change,
densification, and time-based long-term development, this book has probed the
complex implications of advanced computational design technologies for the
design and management of dynamic urban systems. These new approaches to
urbanism engage with a multiplicity of factors, contingencies, and responsibilities
involved in the design of large scale architectural projects, urban design, and
masterplanning. It is against such projects, and their behavior as temporal
constructs, that this thesis will be measured in the future.
A series of oppositions characterizing the evolutionary mechanisms of
urbanism have arisen, including history and the future, convention and innovation,
endurance and ephemerality, permanence and change—all of these help to
explicate the concept of evolution in cities, society, and culture. These are complex
issues, and we have sought to negotiate these seeming dichotomies, rather than to
present them as polarizing. The ways in which oppositions such as planned versus
informal urbanization, top-down versus bottom-up growth, or control versus
deregulation can be discredited perhaps provide this book with its underlying
motive—finding a balance between mechanisms and processes, man and nature.
These negotiations encapsulate the urgent issues facing contemporary
urbanization.
Although aspects of computational approaches to design are increasingly
prevalent in architectural research, education, and practice, these methodologies
remain largely untheorized. Despite the disciplinary and professional
transformations which have occurred as a result of the progressive embedding of
digital design, analysis, simulation, management, and production systems, there 
is an absence of theory underpinning contemporary design work. There is a need
for research and intellectual formulation to catch up with the proliferation of
emergent technologies, which has been driven primarily by the technical interests
of avant-garde design technologists. This technological retooling in practice and
education presents one of the most profound intellectual challenges for our
generation: to discover the theoretical, cultural, political, social—and urban—
implications of these new computational practices. In this light, this book
elaborates the intellectual formulation of the rich, and relatively undiscovered,
conceptual arena inherent in designers’ new ways of working.
The thesis of this book represents a unique opportunity to overcome some of
the familiar criticisms of western dominance in architectural culture, and to
articulate a new, evolutionary approach to urbanism with immediate pertinence for
professionals, academics, and students worldwide. Within the rapidly growing
community of computational designers, the repertoire of computational design at
TOM VEREBES >CONCLUSION

---