Masterplanning the Adaptive City

apparently inexhaustible funds—the rows and rows of worker huts in the desert
glare outside Doha are testament to the inevitability of exclusion for a proportion
of a city’s population. 
A beauty of this book is that it sets out to augment rather than sniff at or
snuff out any movement or theoretical base that has gone before. The authors do
not claim a “right answer” based on a particular theory or realpolitik and a highly
selective body of evidence. Joel Kotkin may well be right about the universal
desirability of suburbia and a natural instinct for personal and not collectivized
conveyance, and therefore reliance on the ability of the market to set the agenda.
Jane Jacobs’s conviction that we need to retain the past in order to help explain
the future may be as valid as Le Corbusier’s densification created at the expense of
whatever formerly occupied the site. Christopher Alexander’s pattern language
might be the key to accommodating the individual’s core sentiments through
rules, systems, and generative processes rising above the master plan at any
scale. Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist humanism and community engagement may be 
as valid as Gordon Cullen’s cityscape appropriate for any age and anywhere, and
Kevin Lynch’s image of the city might always be the “right” one. What the pioneers
of modern urban renewal and expansion have in common are deeply held
convictions that urban planning needs guiding principles. 
Theories from so many disparate disciplines with an interest in urbanism are
inevitably oppositional. Principles of market-led self-organization can work across
the economic spectrum, for example in the dockland redevelopments in London
and Melbourne, and in the favelas of Brazil—unexpectedly functional slums that
are not necessarily chaotic failures of unplanned human agglomeration. Such
principles are incompatible with top-down masterplanning, whether state driven 
or developer led. Masterplanning the Adaptive City transcends any disciplinary
sectarianism by nimbly leaping away from consideration of the evolving city as
plan (as in “planning”) and into the city as volume (space), and in considering
spatiality the chapters are not limited to a cute three dimensions. Design
computation recognizes neither disciplinary boundaries nor Cartesian space. As a
means of enabling rich conversation across all urban design intelligences, access
to massive and rapid design computation can deal with complexity in entirely new
ways. This book facilitates novel and nonpartisan speculation on the nature of the
adaptive city in ways not remotely possible in the predigital age. Alternate theories
can be tested without fear or favor, whatever their provenance, and this is far richer
in implication than testing alternative solutions. In this context, the term
“masterplan” has an entirely different set of meanings, all of them positive. 
Mark Burry
Design Research Institute Director
RMIT University
Melbourne
xii
MARK BURRY

---

This book was triggered by my ongoing research at the University of Hong Kong
(HKU), within a funded research project titled “Endurance and Obsolescence: The
Problem of Rapid Urbanization in China”, started with a University Grants Council
(UGC) Seed Grant in 2009. I am grateful to the late Dean Ralph Lerner for his clear
vision, which lured me to HKU. This book is only one of numerous projects which
Ralph sadly could not see to its conclusion. In this light, I also thank Dean David
Lung for his ongoing support, which has allowed me the time and space to
complete this book. 
To track my personal engagement with the central themes of this research, 
it was Jeffrey Kipnis’s persistence in 1993, when he set out to discover “a New
Architecture at the Architectural Association,” which so enticed me. Kipnis,
together with Barham Shirdel and a team of thirteen grad students at the AA, set
out to boldly sketch a vision for a new sixty-four-square-kilometer city in Hainan
Island, China. That experience has helped to shape my interests and ambitions
ever since, and this book is in many ways a culmination of a twenty-year journey 
of experimentation in urbanism. It is not a coincidence that I am in Hong Kong
twenty years later, researching issues associated with Chinese urbanization. I am
grateful to many other teachers, including Donald Bates and Ricardo Castro, who
helped shape my interests as a young graduate in the 1990s. 
Thanks to those who contributed essays: Patrik Schumacher, Jonathan
Solomon, Marina Lathouri, Jorge Fiori, David Gerber, Peter Trummer; to those
whose conversations have been transcribed for this book: Brett Steele, Dana Cuff,
Tom Barker, Xu Weiguo, Su Yunsheng, and Matthew Pryor; and to the many
architects and urbanists whose projects are included in this theoretical endeavor. 
My time spent at the AA, including sixteen months as a graduate student and
then thirteen years teaching and codirecting the Design Research Lab (DRL), was
a time that nurtured experiments now consolidated in the thesis of this book. 
My invaluable collaborations with Brett Steele, Patrik Schumacher, Christopher
Hight, Yusuke Obuchi, Hanif Kara, Tom Barker, Bob Lang, Laurence Friesen, Alisa
Andrasek, Theo Spyropoulos, Jeroen van Amejde, Marta Male Alemany, and many
others will be challenging to parallel. Our conversations, discussions, and great
intellectual arguments, especially those on computational design and the city,
during the years of our Parametric Urbanism agenda, are sublimated in this book.
Others, including Mohsen Mostafavi who hired me as a kid and countless former
AA colleagues, are also recalled in these pages. 
Thanks to my valued colleagues at HKU, who have helped to shape this
position in a new and challenging context, giving their vital feedback in
discussions, studio reviews and juries, especially Jonathan Solomon, David
Erdman, Yan Gao, Christian Lange, Jason Carlow, Kristof Crolla, Dorothy Tang,
Vincci Mak, Oliver Ottavaere, Cole Roskam, Eunice Seng, Joshua Bolchover, Wang
Weijen, Juan Du, among others. 
There are several authors, architects and urbanists without whom, and without
whose research, which foregrounds this book, the outcomes of this project would
not be possible. These include Manuel De Landa, Sanford Kwinter, Steve Johnson,
Kevin Kelly, Juval Portugali, Michael Weinstock, Rem Koolhaas, Lewis Mumford,
Reyner Banham, Christopher Alexander, Stephen Marshall, and Michael Batty,
among too many others to list in these acknowledgements. They had sketched out,
before me, the foundation for an evolutionary understanding of the city.
PREFACE AND 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

---