Masterplanning the Adaptive City

They [the Metabolists] really believed in technology, in mass production; they
believed in systematic urban infrastructure and growth . . . . [T]he
Metabolists had no scepticism toward their utopia.
Arata Isozaki
38
In contrast with paradigms of mechanization, Metabolism 1960: The Proposal 
for New Urbanism was a momentary manifesto for a varied movement with an
original argument, rooted in biological analogies of growth, adaptation, and
regeneration. Noboru Kawazoe’s introduction to the book announced the name of
the movement, “Metabolism,” and claimed “human society as a vital process—
a continuous development from atom to nebula.” The reasoning for using the
biological term “metabolism” was the group’s belief that “design and technology
should be a denotation of human vitality.”
39
The Metabolists were responding to
the contingencies of accelerated urbanization in Japan, and their vision of the
future city was one in which “advanced technology exist[ed] in parallel with an
untainted nature—a techno-utopia.”
40
The western cousins of the Metabolists, Archigram, also assigned
technology a supporting role in a new model of networked urbanism. Although 
not constructed, the group’s Plug-In City of 1965 has had considerable influence 
on the conception of the city as an essential armature, which the inhabitants’
interactions change in small, locally specific interventions. Cedric Price’s Fun
Palace (1960–1965), a “paper” project for an obsessively programmed urban
interior, was one of the precedents which propelled Archigram’s fascination with
programmatic complexity, self-organization, mobility, and technology in the quickly
changing culture of the 1960s. Half a century ago, architects were projecting a
city—and even a world—in which inhabitants were imagined occupying the
“nodes and links” of network systems, where “you never leave the structure of 
the web.”
41
If cities can generate emergent intelligence, a macrobehaviour spawned 
by a million micromotives, what higher level form is currently taking shape
among the routers and fiber-optic lines of the internet?
Steven Johnson
42
In the midst of the current technological revolution, the information revolution, we
are entering an age of “near-infinite connectedness.”
43
Anthony Burke delineates
three types of linked but distinct networks: “network as symbol, network as
organizational diagram or [network as] geometry,” each participating in a
schizophrenia of freedom and control, and the myth of a relation between the
connectivity of networks and democracy.
44
Networks are not neutral; they have
power to connect, deliver, inform, propagate, control, and censor. Networks create
new forms of collective organization. It is through the emergence of bottom-up
organization that the stasis and apparent solidity of institutions could be mobilized
through the interaction of a multitude of agents, who possess the power, if not to
overthrow institutions, at least to transform them. 
The increasing ubiquity and accelerated speed of transmission of information
contribute to the globalization of urban culture. Networks pervade the way we now
think about the world as intelligent and highly distributed. Our understanding of
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TOM VEREBES

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network phenomena, such as the interdependent ecology of a rainforest, informs 
our understanding of the connectedness of the global capitalist network, which
libertarians insist is natural and organic. As a development of the cybernetic theories
of the 1940s and 1950s, today’s networks are assumed to be “self-generating, 
self-organizing, self-sustaining systems” which function through multiple feedback
loops, and “induce effects of interference, amplification, and resonance.” Networks,
despite their dynamics and interactivity, “create local stability and maintain internal
homeostasis in far-from-equilibrium conditions.”
45
For over half a century architects,
through seminal projects such as eastern and western Metabolism, have been trying
“to draw a life in which everything is computerized,” “as if people actually live in the
circuitry itself.”
46
The hyperconnected, mobile, adaptive, and responsive condition of
today’s urbanity, facilitiated by information networks, instantaneously connects us to
all cities, everywhere.
In the last century, modernization was equated with the application of
technology to resolve, even to “cure,” problems, bring efficiency as a hallmark of
technocracy, and to innovate and make progress. The counterpoints to this legacy,
deeply ingrained in the ways in which modernist positivism unfolded, are still
taking shape. New technologies intensify existing networks or supplant them with
new systems in today’s increasingly distributed forms of intelligence. 
In the past the city was a symbol of the world. Now the world has become a
city.
47
1.2 THE EDGE OF CHAOS
Despite a latent and lingering belief in utopianism, the city can no longer be
conceived of or maintained as an ideal construct. The complexities of urban
change should be facilitated rather than constrained by the mechanisms of
masterplanning. We now understand the city as complex, dynamic, and inherently
difficult to manage and control. In effect, cities in the twenty-first century will
benefit from the embracing of complexity, as opposed to the persistence of the
notion that planning prevents the apparent chaos of unplanned urban growth.
How, then, do we manage change and evolution while also investigating the
design implications of the greater cultural, social, economic, and environmental
endurance of cities and buildings? Cities can endure for great intervals, but how
does history explain their fragility and unpredictablility? Cities are complex entities
that are never entirely stable, always in a state of flux, growing, decaying, or dying.
The paradigm of the city as a machine is increasingly being rejected in favor of
biodynamic analogies.
There is no such thing as the ideal city, but there are such things as technical
criteria and there are such things as causative natural conditions.
Frei Otto
48
We lack theories to explain the rise and fall of ancient cities, or the growth,
establishment, and decline of past empires. Many cities, however, have “repeatedly
outlived the military empires that seemingly destroyed them forever,” including, for
example, Damascus, Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Athens.
49
The seeming endurance
of urbanity meant many cities were not abandoned in the face of war, destruction,
or decimation, due to the constant flow of rural populations flooding to the city.
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THE CITY AS EXPRESSION

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