Masterplanning the Adaptive City

inscriptions of sedentary agricultural patterns are evidence of how “the plough
radically changed the way the Earth’s surface was utilized.”
4
The Neolithic revolution, arising from greater security, the abundance of
food, and higher survival rates, marked the shift from stone-age nomadic groups 
to sedentary agricultural societies and was, for V. Gordon Childe, the first of three
revolutions. It was followed by a second, “urban” revolution, in which trade and
manufacturing enabled more complex and hierarchical organization of the roots 
of urbanity, between 3000 and 4000 
BC
. Later we will investigate Childe’s third
revolution, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
5
A fourth revolution—the information revolution—has since taken place and has
permeated contemporary urbanity.
6
It is at the stage that man’s evolution shifts from the transient huts of
hunting and gathering societies to more permanent, sedentary societies that 
“the basic prerequisites are reached for the birth of urban settlements.” Prior 
to longer-lasting dwellings, presumed by historians to be permanent, housing 
had evolved, as outlined by Norbert Scheonauer, from “ephemeral or transient
dwellings,” to “episodic or irregular temporary dwellings,” to “periodic or regular
temporary dwellings,” to “seasonal dwellings,” and to “semi-permanent
dwellings.”
7
The origins of urbanity remain largely inaccessible, and few physical remains
exist prior to the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. This account is less
concerned with an analysis and reconstruction of the basis of former civilizations
than in the reasons for their emergence, their growth, and their demise. The
endurance of civilization is a misconception, evident in the history of sequential
failed empires and civilizations. 
The Roman Empire was a systematic city-building endeavor. It created 5,627
cities in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Aelius Aristides told the Roman
Emperor in 
AD
144, “you have cast a net over the totality of the inhabited world.”
The Romans had systematized the principles and sequences for establishing and
growing a city by the Roman system, “as a manual, a repertory, a how-to book, a
dictionary, an anthology of quotations—a compromise between a treaty (indeed 
a manifesto) and a book of procedures.”
8
In his Ten Books of Architecture, Vitruvius
detailed a logic of a set of performance criteria and their parameters to be
balanced in the city. Environmental orientation, exposure, altitude, climate, and
flora are set out as the basis for locating the city to create optimal conditions for
health. Military defences, roads, and sea ports are also initial considerations in
setting out the position and height of defenses, and the location and design of 
the buildings and spaces of the city.
9
The Roman guidelines for the desirable
location of a city had predictably led to “simple societies [being] found in the 
least desirable regions, and more complex societies claim[ing] more favourable
regions.”
10
Joseph Rykwert, in his narrative analysis of Rome, laments “the
transition from topological and ritualistic town-making to the imposition of the
geometric grid” and its effects.
11
Nostalgia aside, the grid was a device for the
domination of land, and a tool of globalization.
12
The Harvard Project on the City
studio describes the Roman System as the first pro forma for urban globalization,
its systematic deployment of infrastructural, financial, and military networks
across a vast territory demonstrating the operation of networks enabling vast
connectivities.
13
Rome propagated technology and culture through networks.
8
TOM VEREBES

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The Scottish ecologist Patrick Geddes, in his 1915 book Cities in Evolution,
14
described how the specific topography of cities helped to shape them, in relation
to “where food and water supplies came from [and] where the settlement 
was established.”
15
Geddes defined the period of industrial development as
“paleotechnic” followed by “neotechnic.” Mumford added another term for the era
between 1000 and 1750, calling it the “eotechnic” period, which he saw as the
dawn of modern technologies.
16
This era maintained the balance between industry
and agriculture, between nature and man. The industrial revolution was to
interfere with this balance. 
In the case of primordial settlements, three different path systems develop:
The territorial path network makes searching for food easier, the settlement
path network connects individual resting places and houses. The central
point is the water source. The long-distance path network connects places of
habitation and is used for interregional migrations.
Frei Otto
17
Globalization did not happen suddenly nor did it occur recently, rather it has been
ongoing for centuries, even millennia, beginning in earnest with the opening up of
trade routes in the fifteenth century. Before large-scale and long-distance shipping
created the roadmap for globalization, ancient trading routes facilitated exchange
among far-distant societies, and the development of the world’s infrastructures
solidified land transport, canals, and railways, as well as longer distance transport
by sea and air. Networks enable the flow of people, products, information, and
knowledge. The building of canals and railways in industrial Europe enabled
transport of resources and goods, and connected localities in a web of industrial
relations.
18
Shipyards later emerged for the building of large ships for the
European empires, and car transport, while it did not immediately inscribe a whole
new network onto industrialized regions, brought about more independent and
spontaneous movement. The proliferation of air travel and high-speed railways,
coupled with telephony and the internet, are collapsing time, shrinking space, 
and again creating possibilities for global communication to unforeseen extents. 
The term “city” has become inadequate to describe twenty-first-century
Asian urbanism. Patrick Geddes was one of the first urban theorists to argue for
the history of cities being one of continual, but not constant, evolutionary change.
Geddes had little hope for the future of the city: he mapped urbanity from the
“polis” in Greece to the “metropolis” and the emergence of the “megalopolis,” to
what he called the “parasitopolis” and the “patholopolis,” and through to the
terminus, the “necropolis.”
19
Geddes, who used the term “world cities” as early as
1924, foreshadowed the current generation of urban theorists grappling with the
interconnectedness of urbanization in the twenty-first century.
20
The sociologist
Jean Gottmann coined the term “megalopolis,” in his book Megalopolis: The
Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (1961).
21
“Megalopolis”
refers to the condition of the city when it becomes so large it cannot be conceived
of nor managed as one single city, or when multiple smaller cities grow into
expansive territorial conurbations. Gottman’s research focussed on the “enormous
scale jump that had occurred in an urban agglomeration stretching from Boston 
to Washington,” which connected thirty-two million people in 1961, and fifty-six
9
THE CITY AS EXPRESSION

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