Masterplanning the Adaptive City

million today.
22
These figures pale in comparison with the extent of urbanization in
Asia in the last half-century. 
Today’s growing “megacities” are of interest both for their global economic
influence and as “magnets for their hinterlands . . . as a function of their
gravitational power toward major regions of the world.”
23
It is the formlessness of
the megacity which allows its expansiveness. The metropolis of the twenty-first-
century city has no single center, nor any edges. The emergence of megacities
represents “the shift of the urban centre of gravity, in terms of global urban
population, away from Europe, towards Asia and Africa.”
24
Our current era is
defined by an “abundance of information technologies and the associated increase
in the mobility and liquidity of capital.”
25
Henri Lefebvre in his seminal book The
Urban Revolution (1970) “anticipated the ‘generalisation’ of capitalist urbanisation
processes through the establishment of a planetary ‘fabric’ or ‘web’ of urbanized
spaces.”
26
Steven Johnson, in Emergence (2001), writes how “technological and
geopolitical changes obviously have a tremendous impact—killing off entire
industries, triggering mass migrations, launching wars, or precipitating
epidemics.”
27
Urbanity is undergoing profound change as a repercussion of accelerated
globalization and the increasing ubiquity of information and communication
technologies. The softening, or in some contexts the entire disappearance, of
borders and the unit of the nation state are the result of the fluidity created by
deregulated economies, leading to a transcendence of the national unit and, in
turn, the isolated self-sufficient city. Far from heralding the end of cities, Saskia
Sassen sees the result as being “transnational urban systems,” in which the
reciprocal logic of concentration and dispersal that occurs in large metropolitan
centres also happens across interconnected networks of global cities.
28
The global
city relies on transnational flows from city to city, through financial, electronic, and
other networks. No city is therefore independent. All is interconnected; as Sassen
states, “there is no such thing as a single global city—and in this sense there is a
sharp contrast with the erstwhile capitals of empires.”
29
The global city, according
to Castells, “cannot be reduced to a few urban cores at the top of the hierarchy,”
rather cities and their regional and local territories become connected at a global
level.
30
At another scale, cities are now vulnerable to the forces of the global
economy. A downturn in one part of the world can quickly affect cities elsewhere.
From this perspective, current urban planning techniques can neither predict nor
resist economic fallout and its impact on the city. Conveniently, when urban growth
and economic booms coincide, planning takes credit and validates its regimes.
The information age is ushering in a new urban form, the informational city.
Yet, as the industrial city was not a worldwide replica of Manchester, the
emerging informational city will not copy Silicon Valley.
Manuel Castells
31
Steven Shaviro summarizes Castell’s three “material layers” of the space of flows.
The first layer is our new “physical layer of electronic hardware and software, the
technology that has to be deployed in order for the network to function at all . . . or
what McLuhan calls the medium.” The second material layer is constituted by the
“nodes and hubs” of its physical geography, which is how megacities expand and
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TOM VEREBES

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become “differentiated into heterogeneous zones.” The third layer is the “rarified
and homogenous space in which the global financial and political elite lives,
works, and travels.”
32
The global network of business centres requires the “back-
end” infrastructure to feed the physical flow of cargo and people. The “logistic
landscape” as defined by Charles Waldheim and Alan Berger arises from a global
economy that has become increasingly distributed internationally. Logistic
landscape territories spawn “new industrial forms based on global supply chains”
and accommodate the “shipment, staging, and delivery of goods,” shifting from
concentrated organization to an increasingly decentralized and distributed logic of
production and flow of goods.
33
The centrality of a single national city is a residual colonial model. Economic,
cultural, and technological networks have played a role in shaping the status 
of the city as an important economic unit. City-to-city networks facilitate
relationships which render nations not so much moot as secondary. This new kind
of associated urbanism relies on information and communication technologies, 
as well as the persistently expanding flow of people. A distinction can be made
between centralized and decentralized power and decision making, regarding the
ways in which “energy flows through a city—that is with respect to the city’s
distribution systems.” “Hierarchical structures with conscious goals and 
overt control mechanisms” differ from “cross-border networks,” spontaneous 
self-organized patterns of interaction between people forming loosely organized,
short-term affiliations.
34
Cities remain integral to globalization, and to
telecommunications and other network technologies. Given the “denationalizing 
of urban space,” Sassen asks the question: “Whose city is it?”
35
In principle, the new information and communication technologies have the
technical capacities to alter—and indeed eliminate—the role of centrality
and hence of cities as economic spaces.
Saskia Sassen
36
In the past, teleology defined ideality as the betterment of society, but today’s
world is more sinister. “The principal aim of the new ‘liberalism’—the ideological
belief in the free, or self-regulating, market—is to legitimate, through democratic
institutions, the removal of democratic control over economic life.” The neo-liberal
idea of a self-regulating, “intelligent” market “is but a cynically recurring
contrivance that, contrary to its claims, relies on a significant amount of
enforcement.” If the market is to be “left ‘unfettered,’ as though it is separate 
from society,” globalization is complicit with global capitalism and its intellectual
hegemony.
37
The model of Sassen’s global city or Castells’s megacity presupposes 
that all cities operate within global networks. The city is an expression of the
technology of the present. The notion of the city as a machine is implicity created
from modernist architectural paradigms of the twentieth century, and most often
referred to at a domestic scale in Le Corbusier’s idea of the house as a “machine
for living in.” It is arguable the city in the twentieth century was also conceived as
a machine for living in. Following Futurism’s declarations one hundred years ago,
cities are today more closely aligned with natural processes than with paradigms
of mechanical efficiency.
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THE CITY AS EXPRESSION

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