Masterplanning the Adaptive City

PART II  >CONCEPTS/PARADIGMS: NEW PARADIGMS AND PRACTICES
IN URBANISM
CHAPTER 10  >THE DEATH OF MASTERPLANNING IN THE AGE OF
INDETERMINACY >Tom Verebes
10.1
Planning and/or Emergence
10.2
Teleological Fallacies of the Masterplanner 
10.3
Principles of Uncertainty: Planning after the Global Financial Crisis
10.4
Complex systems, Equilibrium, and Emergence
10.5
Parametric Patterns and Models of Evolutionary Urbanism
CHAPTER 11  >FREE-MARKET URBANISM: URBANISM BEYOND PLANNING
>Patrik Schumacher
CHAPTER 12  >Conversation 4 >Tom Barker and Tom Verebes
CASE STUDY >ONE NORTH SINGAPORE SCIENCE HUB, SINGAPORE >Zaha
Hadid Architects
CASE STUDY >URBAN CHINA RESEARCH >OCEAN CN
CASE STUDY >KAILI ETHNIC CULTURAL COMPOUND, GUIZHOU, CHINA >dotA
and Shanghai Tongji Urban Planning and Design Institute
PART III  >METHODOLOGIES: TOOLS AND MOVING TARGETS
CHAPTER 13  >A NEW TOOLBOX FOR ADAPTABLE MASTERPLANNING >
Tom Verebes
13.1
Models as Information
13.2
Parameter Space, Solution Space, Urban Space
13.3
Simulation and Gaming Environments as Management Systems
CHAPTER 14  >MORPHOGENETIC URBANISM: TOWARD A MATERIALIST
APPROACH TO MASTERPLANNING >Peter Trummer
The Aggregated Figure
The Ground as Matter
CASE STUDY >PARAMETRIC PEARL RIVER DELTA >OCEAN CN
CASE STUDY >SERIAL SYSTEMS: REMODELING HONG KONG HOUSING
>OCEAN CN
CASE STUDY >DENSITY AND OPENNESS REVISITED: RECODING BUILDING
BULK IN HONG KONG >Rocker-Lange Architects
CHAPTER 15  >COMPUTATIONAL URBANISM >Tom Verebes
15.1
The Evolution of Computational Methodologies and Urbanism
15.2
Automation, Optioneering, and Optimization
15.3
Parametric Urbanism
CHAPTER 16  >PARAMETRIC URBANISM REDUX: URBAN DESIGN AND
COMPLEXITY IN AN AGE OF INFINITE COMPUTING >David Jason Gerber
CHAPTER 17  >CONVERSATION 5 >Su Yunsheng with Tom Verebes
viii
CONTENTS
118
123
129
132
135
87
141
153
154
156
158
162
165
168
186
193
85
139
87
92
95
99
106
141
144
148
168
175
180

---

CASE STUDY >YAN JIAO HUA RUN 4D CITY, HEBEI PROVINCE, CHINA >
dotA and OCEAN CN
CASE STUDY >MICA URBAN PICTURESQUE, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND >
Group8 Architects and Kaisersrot
CASE STUDY >THE MEGABLOCK AND ITS POPULATED FIELD, AND THE
AGGREGATION OF STREETS >Peter Trummer, Associative Design Program,
Berlage Institute
CASE STUDY >ENDURANCE AND OBSOLESCENCE TOOLBOX: STUDIES 
OF ADAPTABLE MASTERPLANNING >The University of Hong Kong
PART IV  >PROJECTIONS: PROTOTYPING MULTIPLE FUTURES
CHAPTER 18  >ENDURANCE, OBSOLESCENCE, AND THE ADAPTIVE CITY >
Tom Verebes
18.1
New Prototypical Practices
18.2
Typological Variants and Topological Transformations
18.3
Icons and Innovation
18.4
Control, Resilience, and Change
CASE STUDY >DEEP GROUND: REGENERATION MASTERPLAN FOR
LONGGANG CENTER AND LONGCHENG SQUARE, SHENZHEN, CHINA
>Groundlab
CASE STUDY >XIN TIAN DI FACTORY H, HANGZHOU, CHINA >Serie Architects
CASE STUDY >REGENERATION OF PHOENIX SHOPPING STREET, BEIJING,
CHINA >XWG Studio
CASE STUDY >ORDOS MUSEUM, ORDOS, INNER MONGOLIA, CHINA >MAD
CASE STUDY >LIANTANG/HEUNG YUEN WAI BOUNDARY CONTROL POINT
PASSENGER TERMINAL BUILDING, HONG KONG SAR/SHENZHEN, CHINA
>Hong Kong Parametric Design Association, dotA, and OCEAN CN
CASE STUDY >COUNTERPART CITIES: FUTUREPORT, HONG KONG SAR,
SHENZHEN, CHINA >The University of Hong Kong Research Team, Led by 
Tom Verebes
CHAPTER 19  >CONVERSATION 6 >Brett Steele with Tom Verebes
CONCLUSION >Tom Verebes
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
ix
CONTENTS
198
205
209
214
237
241
245
248
253
259
266
273
275
283
291
223
221
223
226
230
232

---

This page intentionally left blank

---

Economic uncertainty, the birth of a transdisciplinary urban design agenda,
divergent reactions to conspicuous resource depletion, and affordable access 
to massive computing power all combine to encourage us to seek new ways to
theorize on and practice the design of our cities, with a fresh set of assumptions. It
is time to put away our comfortable preconceptions of the ideal city: resplendent in
the eternal sunshine of an untroubled existence—and completed. We know that
cities are never finished, rely on differences of wealth and status as a weird kind 
of motivating dialectic, require constant regeneration and rethinking, and cannot
dreamily be assumed to evolve into a utopian existentialism. We have no
successful precedent for the ideal city, but we have plenty of experience and
understanding now of what does not work, and that includes any master plan
incapable of nimbly adapting to rapid shifts in population growth, wealth, climate,
and consumer expectations. 
Masterplanning the Adaptive City is being published in distinctly volatile
times. Against a backdrop of arguably the most serious and comprehensively
disastrous global financial crisis ever, for the first time in history over 50 percent 
of the world’s population are now citizens rather than rural dwellers. We are truly
urbanized, meaning that the basics of life now need to be conveyed long distances
to where the majority live rather than the majority clustering around convenient
local sources of water and food. Human settlements once sited in predominately
defensible places that afforded ready trade and transport, inter alia, conformed to
unwritten rules of sustainability. We seem to be presumptuously urbanizing today
in ever greater numbers, confident that food sources will be secure, water
abundant, global warming abated by means other than human agency, potential
pandemics readily checked, and fuel always available at affordable prices pending
the invention of free energy. On that basis we continue to plan most of our cities’
expansion in much the same way that postindustrial society has massively
urbanized in the past—through the inexorable commandeering of peripheral
agricultural land for the purposes of building over. Or going up and up, thereby
swelling the numbers drawing on the relief offered by ever-scarcer public space.
How is this possible? 
If times are volatile in terms of sustainability, they are also volatile in terms 
of trying to maintain the status quo of the traditional approaches to increasing
population sizes in our existing towns and cities and to the design of new ones.
Consider the seven decades since the conclusion of World War II, and the
challenges and opportunities for postwar reconstruction. Politicians, planners,
sociologists, and architects confidently set the agenda in a strange fusion of the
prewar early modernist urban theory, applied originally to accommodate natural
growth but then used to mitigate the extraordinary circumstances of smashed
cities requiring massive and rapid repair. The lack of a sense of civitas that has
tainted so much of the resulting urban fabric, regardless of continent, does not
reflect lack of imagination but rather a complex set of deficiencies that no single
profession or discipline can fully admit to. The complexities of the dynamics
involved and the speed at which they operated successfully frustrated earnest
efforts to draw resplendence from the wastelands of war, slums, brownfield sites,
terrain vague, and uncontrolled immigration. It is improbable that any single theory
from any single discipline is equal to the task; Le Corbusier’s “radiant city” has
never emerged to specification, even when a tabula rasa is accompanied by
FOREWORD

---