Masterplanning the Adaptive City

—mirroring the contemporary metropolitan experience. Each section has
subchapters containing a narrative text by the author, punctuated by a series of 
six contributed essays and six transcribed conversations with experts, as well as
case studies of eighteen recent design projects by a series of leading avant-garde
practices, other experimental research teams, and academic studios.
Section 1, “Context: Endurance, Obsolescence and Change—A Theoretical
Foundation,” charts the historical and theoretical foundation of the inherently
dynamic, associative and evolutionary nature of the city. Cities in an era of
globalization express culture and technology through networks. Via a survey of the
successes and pitfalls of past models of urbanization, and the standardization and
mechanization of cities, the conditions for new adaptive models of urbanization in
Asia are elucidated. 
In Section 2, “Concepts/Paradigms: New Paradigms and Practices in
Urbanism,” the discursive foundation for speculations on alternatives to
teleological modes of development is presented, in which principles of uncertainty,
complexity, and emergence are embraced in what is termed the “age of
indeterminacy.” The tension between top-down planning and informal, emergent
urbanization helps to explicate the concepts associated with computational
approaches to adaptable masterplanning. 
Section 3, “Methodologies: Tools and Moving Targets,” outlines the new
information-based toolbox of the contemporary architect and urbanist, and
assesses the potential for associative design models to inform city design using
dynamic, emergent processes through which the performance of multiple design
options can be simulated and evaluated. The design methodologies outlined in
this section aim toward an ordered sense of spatial differentiation, diversity, and
difference.
Lastly, Section 4, “Projections: Prototyping Multiple Futures,” critiques the
legacy of standardization of material practices and repetitive modes of production.
Prototyping and customization are investigated as the basis for harnessing urban
complexity, as an experimental mode of testing multiple urban futures. An
argument for heterogeneity and high-quality architecture aims to strike a balance
between endurance and change, longevity and adaptability.
Masterplanning the Adaptive City traverses conventional disciplinary
boundaries between architecture, urbanism, critical theory, complexity science,
the natural sciences, mathematics, computer graphics, and programming, among
others. This speculative research project should be judged by the future impact of
the paradigms outlined, and not on the perceived incongruity or imprecision of its
promiscuous disciplinary references. 
NOTES
1
> Quoted in J. Grasso, J. Corrin, and M. Kort (1991) Modernization and Revolution in China
(New York: M.E. Sharpe), 27. 
2
> S. Kwinter (2011) Requiem for the City at the End of the Millennium (Barcelona: Actar), 93.
3
> P. Geddes (1915) Cities in Evolution (London: Williams & Norgate). 
4
> J. Gottmann (1961) Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United
States (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund).
5
> S. Sassen (1991) The Global City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 
6
> M. Castells (1996) The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell).
7
> T. Verebes (2009) “Experiments in Associative Urbanism,” in Digital Cities, ed. Neil Leach
(London: Wiley), 25. 
3
INTRODUCTION

---

This page intentionally left blank

---

I
CONTEXT
ENDURANCE, OBSOLESCENCE, 
AND CHANGE—A THEORETICAL
FOUNDATION

---

This page intentionally left blank

---

This chapter charts the historical and theoretical foundation for an
understanding of the city as inherently dynamic and evolutionary in nature.
Globalization is understood as arising from a deep connection to the
proliferation of networks. The emergence of megacities is a feature of the
radically changing conditions of urban earth. What follows is a critique of the
prevalent western bias in the history of urbanization, focusing on pertinent
issues at stake in the urbanization of Asia. The associative logic inherent to
urbanism is introduced as a fundamental shift from a mechanical paradigm 
to one guided by an understanding of life.
1.1 GLOBALIZATION AND NETWORKS
The city is everywhere. The local is now global. What happens here may affect
what happens elsewhere. No one is alone. Nowhere is isolated. We will be
concerned with the future of urban earth in later pages of this book. Initially, our
investigation focuses on the ancients.
From the first sedentary settlements, over half the world’s population now
lives in cities, a process which has taken 12,000 years. What explains this rate 
of global urbanization? Man as a social animal? Is it our apparent need to
exchange knowledge, resources, and goods? Cities are at once an expression 
of the cultural practices and technologies of the present. The shift from an
agrarian, migratory civilization toward an increasingly sedentary one over 
time evolved into urban civilization, and the origins of globalization. Just as
infrastructural networks and communication technologies have evolved, so have
the civilizations they serve. The beginnings of globalization are located in the
relation of the urban population of the planet—now in the majority—to the
interface of man-made technological endeavors, and their instrumentality as
infrastructure and networks.
Urbanism has its roots in the taming of nature. The first widespread territory
to be altered irrevocably by mankind was the Nile delta, the irrigation canals of
which spawned one of the first sedentary regions. Similarly the draining of
swampland or the taming of the wild tributaries of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers
in Mesopotamia represent the will of mankind to dominate and conquer nature on
a large scale. It is not surprising that natural waterways were the first locus of
urbanity, as the rise of the city was “contemporaneous with improvements in
navigation,” and this newfound mobility provided the city with “command over
men and resources in distant areas,” thus proving the means with which to
procure and distribute goods beyond the locale.
1
Cities grew. They were not designed. Before there were cities (without
wishing to make any claims about when this threshold occured), villages and
towns comprised a new kind of sedentary settlement, “a permanent association 
of families and neighbors, or birds and animals, of houses and storage pits and
barns, all rooted in the ancestral soil, in which each generation formed the
compost of the next.”
2
Urbanization, as defined by Kingsley Davis, is “the increase
in the proportion of the population that is urban as opposed to rural.”
3
Lineated
CHAPTER 1
TOM VEREBES >THE CITY 
AS CULTURAL AND 
TECHNOLOGICAL EXPRESSION

---