Masterplanning the Adaptive City

The question of forecasting and regulating urban change and growth in 
order to manage the indeterminacy of forces—economic, political, cultural,
social, environmental—is not new; it is a historical process immanent to the
development and planning of the modern city. So is its connection with the
idea of mobility and connectivity. However, the principle of flow, resting on
the dynamic nature of contemporary processes of economic and cultural
activity, which often engender novel forms of citizenship and urbanity,
transforms the city, paradoxically, into a permanent frontier zone. Though 
the problem of the frontier has always arisen in the political economy of 
urban territoriality, at a time when the urban enclave and the rise of global
alternatives coexist, multiple and changing demarcations of the singular and
the multiple, the individual and the collective, the private, the public, the
national, and the transnational emerge. It is in precisely these internal
territories that the various regimes of the architectural project, as unfolded 
in the economy of the new design technologies, can play a role in the
articulation rather than management of indeterminacy.
A particular challenge in the work of identifying contemporary dynamics and
practices is that they are too often absorbed into conceptual frameworks which
obscure their historical settings. The search for design methodologies and
techniques which embed the dimension of time and the element of change is not
new. That is to say, the attempt to forecast and regulate urban change and growth
in order to manage the indeterminacy of forces—economic, political, cultural,
social, environmental—is a historical process immanent to the development and
planning of the modern city. In fact, this was precisely the meaning of the term
“planning” in the nineteenth century: to delineate future developments within a
present plan. The term was associated with the French terms distribuer, meaning
“to apportion between several,” and disposer, “to arrange, to put things in a certain
order.” These definitions may seem simple, but their implications are complex. 
The first is that planning, as a discipline of space, embraces different scales—
everything, from the tiniest physical entity to an entire territory, can be arranged,
put in a certain order; one can claim that the effects of such ordering are
potentially global.
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The second implication is that any “disposition” is an active
process, not just the analysis of what happens. That is, it is at once an analysis of
what happens and a program for what should happen, to bring about what Ludwig
Hilberseimer described as “the transition toward a desired end.”
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Framing this 
way of conceiving and programming things in a more contemporary manner, it
accommodates the transfer of existing arrangements (and old capabilities) into
new organizing logics. 
Reflection on the town was historically situated in a space of geographical,
economic, and administrative relations, and not solely on the basis of the symbolic
and aesthetic relationship between a smaller, geometrical figure, which is a kind of
architectural module, and the territory. It was in the nineteenth century, however,
that the city came to be thought of as an open and dynamic system, its planning
CHAPTER 2
MARINA LATHOURI >
PROJECTIVE ARCHITECTURES
THE QUESTION OF BORDERS IN A 
CONNECTED WORLD

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essentially linked to patterns of distribution of land and population, and forms 
of spatial organization over a larger territory—in short, there occurred the
formalization of a type of urban development. It is worth recalling at this point 
the study Teoria General de la Urbanización (General Theory of Urbanization, 1867)
which Ildefonso Cerdá wrote to support his 1859 project for the Barcelona
Extension, and in which the term “urbanization” first appeared. The objective 
was to develop a plan with no definite limits that would embrace the entire region
while outlining the future growth of the city of Barcelona. In these terms, planning
became the focus of endless discussions that form a broad field of knowledge,
made up of a complex of disciplines and practices ranging from statistics to
sociology, economics to geography, science of finance to administration, design to
engineering. The CIAM debates on the city (1928–1959), to take another example,
placed themselves squarely within this field of knowledge. An interplay of spatial
and temporal scales runs through the negotiation of relationships between
different programmatic categories such as “typical dwelling unit,” “urban
organism,” “region-city” and “ecological field.” The primary rationale in these
categories, expanding from the scale of the intimate to the scale of geography,
is “capitalizing a territory” over time rather than structuring space contained
within a defined programmatic (functional) field.
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The latter understanding 
usually supports the readings and critiques of these debates. Yet, in principle, 
they indicate spatial arrangements that connect the individual to a number of
multiplicities, systems of inhabitation to processes of production of a larger
territory. Leaving aside the strictly utopian aspect of these arguments and projects,
it is interesting that a number of specifically urban agencies and variables appear
as the fundamental problem of design, which aims to formulate “principles which
give the evolving organism consistency and unity” and a “method of applying
these principles.”
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The idea of the spatial, economic and social effectiveness of territorial
distribution and urban structuring has always been linked to the idea of mobility
and connectivity. The problem of circulation has been the most instrumental in
planning, and the imagery of flow, integrating a natural economy, efficiency, and
potentially the question of construction, its most desirable effect. Though the
structuring function of both involves fastening together and mutually reinforcing 
a multiplicity of territories and operations, circulation systems and flows are
inscribed within these territories and therefore involve geographical and social
divisions. 
In a more precise sense, the principle of flow, resting on the open and
dynamic nature of contemporary processes of economic and cultural activity,
which often engender novel forms of citizenship and urbanity, transforms the city,
paradoxically, into a permanent frontier zone. This is not to repeat that there are
invisible borders everywhere and nowhere. But implicit in the urban imagery of
flow is not a smooth continuity which only connects, but the ceaseless moving 
of the boundaries, which actually represents a very literal disruption of the relation
between people and territory, between a system of legality and territory.
Continuing urban growth, on the one hand, has prompted elaborate
arguments on economic policies, new organizational models, environmental
strategies, and sustainable development patterns. On the other, digital
technologies of communication are forming new social domains and knowledge
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PROJECTIVE ARCHITECTURES

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