Masterplanning the Adaptive City

Many thanks to my research assistants with whom I collaborated on various
stages of this book, including Li Bin, who helped kickstart the initial research and
its first formulation at the 2009 Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale. Nathan
Melenbrink was an invaluable collaborator on research into computational
urbanism, working nonstop for months in the “big middle” of a research project.
Kenneth Sit Hoi Chang helped to cohere some of the strands which have been
woven together in this book. Thanks, too, to Vivian Ho for her transcriptions of the
recorded conversations that appear here. 
I cherish my various colleagues and collaborators, partners and codirectors
over the years at OCEAN UK Design Ltd., ocean D, and now OCEAN CN, especially
Yan Gao and Felix Robbins who have been my coconspirators in helping shape the
thesis and design research outcomes included in this book. Lastly, my thanks are
due to my wife Nicole, and to Rubin, Samson and Elisha for their patience
throughout 2012! 
Tom Verebes
Hong Kong, 2013
xiv
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

---

A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most
beautiful words can be painted on it.
Mao Tse-tung, 1966
1
A pertinent introductory question may be: why write a book on the topic of
adaptable masterplanning and evolutionary urbanism, and why at this time? It 
has become a cliché in recent years to underscore statements on contemporary
urbanism with the caveat that more than half the world now lives in cities. The
equivalent of the population of Europe has been urbanized in China in the last
thirty years. Given this current context of rapid and extensive global urbanisations,
this book is neither an academic treatise on urbanism, nor a pro forma manual on
“how to” engage as a designer with the contemporary field of computational
urbanism. Positioned between discourse and technology, ideas and techniques,
theory and practice, this book uses the written word, or discourse, as a vehicle for
articulating the ambitions, achievements, and innovations of design work at the
cutting edge of the discipline. 
We no longer know where to look to find the glorious ensembles and
performances that we once called the “city.”
Sanford Kwinter
2
While this book is about cities, the term “city” has become antiquated, lacking
both sufficient precision to describe twentieth-century urbanity and specific
relevance to the vast urbanization occurring in this century. The attributes of the
“city of tomorrow” of this century may not be comprehensible through the lens of
the nineteenth-century European and North American metropolis. Patrick Geddes
first used the term “world city” in 1915,
3
and the city taxonomy of the twentieth
century includes the “megalopolis,”
4
“global city,”
5
and “megacity,”
6
each term
aiming to encapsulate the qualities of expanding urbanization. In his research
studios at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Rem Koolhaas initially titled his
endeavor “The Center for the Study of (what used to be) the City,” which later
became known by the shorthand “The Harvard Project on the City.” In order to
comprehend the contemporary city, it seems it first needs to be renamed. 
Contemporary urbanism requires new conceptual and methodological
apparatus with which to address the complex qualities of interaction,
communication and exchange that characterize the twenty-first-century city.
7
Any book about urbanism within the context of rapid urbanization in the early
twenty-first century must inevitably address two preconditions in its formulation:
first, the ongoing instability of the global economy and its political, social, and
urban ramifications; and second, the planet earth’s changing climatic environment
and the imminence of ecological crises. Contemporary design and prototyping
methods, prevalent in architectural milieus, have not as yet been fully explored 
as tools to be applied to mass customization on the scale of the city. Challenging
the paradigm of the repetitive and uniform Fordist production which guided 
TOM VEREBES >
INTRODUCTION

---

much of the twentieth century in Europe and the Americas, the ramifications of
our new design approaches are not stable and singular but rather dynamic and
multiplicious. Masterplanning the Adaptive City aims to interrogate the changing
and diverse qualities of urbanism today across a global field of contexts, histories
and contemporary practices.
Cities are in continuous transformation, even if ever so slowly. Investigating
the social logic of stable, long-lasting spaces within the phenomena of urban
transformation, this compilation of projects, texts and conversations aims to chart
a trajectory of conceptual and methodological apparatus in order to empower 
the designers of cities. Speculating on alternatives to conventional planning, 
the approach that is unfolded follows a survey of the historical disciplinary
background to the understanding of urban complexity. This book explores the
evolutionary nature of cities, addressing issues associated with the duration 
and obsolescence of architecture and urbanism through a projective account 
of how contemporary computational methodologies have the capability to 
manage urban change. Far from a celebration of impermanence and ephemerality,
this book probes the paradoxical tension between the need for contemporary
architecture to endure culturally, socially, environmentally, and economically,
and a seemingly more urgent need for cities to adapt to dynamic contextual
conditions and evolve. There is another paradox here, between visionary urbanism,
the scope of which is grand if not totalizing, and the thesis of evolutionary
dynamics, whereby adaptations emerge locally and grow incrementally. Through
the chapters of this book—the essays, conversations, and projects it presents—
a range of investigations into aggregate, incremental, and time-based models 
of urban growth will correlate top-down and bottom-up methods with which 
to confront and to mitigate the paradox of planning for urban growth and change. 
Regarding the inherent, inevitable obsolescence of buildings and cities, 
it may be necessary to relinquish to some degree the assumption that all
architecture must be permanent, and wholly functional, forever. The history 
of urbanization chronicles how cities become dysfunctional, decline, and die, 
as a symptom of political, economic, demographic, environmental, and other
contextual changes. The emphasis of this book is not on the history of cities, 
but rather on methodologies aimed at heightening the potential of the city to 
adapt to the changing forces which shape it. We aim to sketch out strategies for
avoiding the primacy of short-term ambitions in favor of adaptive mechanisms
which enable the city to evolve to meet current and future needs and desires. 
The central aim of this book is to articulate the goals and means by which to
pursue adaptive models of designing, managing, and maintaining the dynamic
nature of cities. The book is also a theoretical and a rhetorical response to a previous
generation that theorized the complexity of the city—the contributors to this
endeavor can be identified by scanning the citations and bibliography. It is also a
contribution to an evolutionary model of urbanism being formulated by a small yet
growing demimonde of instigators, also too numerous to list in this brief introduction.
BOOK STRUCTURE
The book is comprised of four sections, each with a dense mix of formats and 
a breadth of topics and contributions from a range of specializations. It is
intentionally urban—intense, heterogeneous, congested, even cacophonous
2
TOM VEREBES

---