Masterplanning the Adaptive City

bridge relations between top-down regulatory planning processes and more
bottom-up emergent conditions? 
DC
I think there is a false dichotomy between the so-called top-down masterplan,
which has a quasifascist level of control, versus the bottom-up emergent
model, which is a populist, anything-goes model with no need for
architecture or urbanism. Architects and urban designers more specifically
have an important role to play in formulating the way in which a city will
grow and change. The way I’ve been working on this, in all the projects we
take on at CityLab at UCLA, is through the umbrella structure of scenario
planning. These are strategies which target the gap between the masterplan
and bottom-up citizen-activism. This involves working with forces of interest
from a number of ways, including economies, ecologies, or demographies, 
as a means to determine likely scenarios that could emerge in a particular
city. What we always look for are the places where design can act as a lever
that enables a different and better kind of city to emerge over time. It is 
this kind of structure that has some predictive value about economic, the
environmental, and cultural systems, which would make one scenario more
likely than another.
TV
Multiple scenarios for urban design and city planning is an approach which
aims to confront the ideological bankruptcy of masterplanning, while also
not giving in entirely to a laissez-faire mode of urban development. If we
surrender all control, the complexity of the city will overwhelm. Here lies a
paradox, because all cities have some degree of planning. Another paradox
involves the process and sequence of how cities are built and undergo
change in time—whether incrementally and slowly, or in totality and quickly.
If we unravel the short history of the evolution of cities, which is between
6,000 to 12,000 years, we find cities inevitably adapt by remaining responsive
to the demands of the forces that shape them, either from bottom up or from
top down. Here, though, I find a paradox between the evolutionary logic of
the formation and accretion of cities, to the parallel necessity for endurance
of the city’s material fabric. Within today’s short-term investment models,
cities and buildings are not built to last very long. Do you see this as
problematic?
DC
By contrasting the notion of a dynamic emergent city and endurance, do you
literally mean cheap building techniques and the fact that they crumble,
versus preservation?
TV
This paradox has different implications in different contexts and material
histories in the world. Perhaps in Europe or North America, to argue for the
need for cities to endure seems that of the conservator’s prerogative for
material and cultural continuity. Within the rapidly urbanizing context of Asia,
particularly in China, buildings are poorly built in a model of investment with
equally short-term vision. In China’s vast urbanization, construction
standards have generally led to buildings having a short design life,
indicating a distinct lack of material, and environmental and ecological
sustainability.
DC
You’re right to distinguish between what’s happening in different parts of the
world. Los Angeles developed in what people consider to be unplanned
growth, sprawl, and short-term thinking. I’m not sure how much I can speak
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to the parallel between China and the southwest of the U.S., as similarities in
kind or in degree, but the way cities are growing in China seems like a totally
new phenomenon. From an architectural perspective, and not that of an
urbanist, the question for me is: What role does the material environment
play, and design more particularly, in the tension between the expression of
politics and economics, and urban transformation? Take for example the 
New York City grid, which came about from a decision by the city council 
in 1811 to restructure land in the city and provided a physical and formal
infrastructure of the particular street pattern that New York adopted that then
allowed for a variety of transformations for the next two hundred years. There
are complaints about that grid but it turns out to have actually been flexible
and adaptive, and had produced a captivating cosmopolitan form. Was that
something that was predicted? It might be called a successful scenario
model which looked at the farmland patterns to the north of Manhattan, but
the grid was not seen initially as a way to create an urban design model, or 
as a machine for city building thereafter. People could grasp the political
repercussions and they could see its economic advantages, despite the 
short-term economic disadvantages as it transformed property boundaries.
There was also an ecological or environmental model built into the
organization of streets and building plots. That seems to me not quite a
masterplan but something like a scenario-form with material infrastructural
components that have an ability to adapt within it. So the grid has been very
enduring but also intrinsically flexible. To compare the New York City grid 
to the New Urbanist prescriptive form models, which are used more like
deterministic masterplans, and are thus less capable of flexibility and cannot
operate over the long periods of time which cities need to evolve. The
problem of Mazdar in Abu Dhabi is the same as Seaside, ironically, because it
lays down at a single moment in time the vision of what the city is intended
to be, which is inherently inadequate, because there will inevitably be
different economic and political conditions in the future. So instead of laying
out a scaffolding or an infrastructural originating point, it lays out the entire
formula.
TV
We share a belief in the emergent nature of urbanism, however the new
urbanists might argue for the exact opposite of your summary of the objectives
of new urbanism. Traditional vernacular urban form grows incrementally, and
the gradualism of this older urban model did have the openness you value in
the Manhattan grid, or sprawl as an unplanned condition, which can indeed
generate heterogeneity and grow and change gradually.
DC
Let’s be careful about any romantic models of vernacular urbanism because
they are also planned, but the issue is the time increment of planning.
Medieval or Renaissance walled cities were more strictly top down and
absolutely formal than Brazilia or Chandigahr. The question to ask is: What is
a proper increment of planning? In some of my recent projects I have been
looking at how large-scale interventions in the city fit within existing
urbanism, as a moderately utopian plan. For example, the public housing
schemes or new-town planning of the 1950s, 60s and 70s in the United States
and Europe dealt with increments which in my mind were clearly too big 
to lead to reasonable urban design formulations. As designers, we are
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