Masterplanning the Adaptive City

This was true of biblical cities and of European cities in the middle ages, and in the
new world of the Americas. 
Stability, as understood in classicism and neoclassicism, depends on fixed
part-to-whole relationships. This can be exemplified by the relations between
building elements (columns, architraves, pediments, and so on), as well as by 
the building blocks of the city—buildings—to the city itself. By their nature cities
seem stable, yet history proves the contrary. Steven Johnson raises the question
“why cities took so long to emerge, and why history includes such long stretches
of urban decline.”
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Remarkably, Rome, the population of which peaked at one
million inhabitants, was repeatedly sacked, and by the eighth century had a
meagre population of seventeen thousand. 
What paradigms, if any, can be pursued to generate, guide, and explain
tomorrow’s urbanism? In a “conversation” between Koolhaas and Kwinter, in
various texts over several years, the city was retheorized as by located at the edge of
chaos. If there is to be a “new urbanism” or even the possibility of a future for
urbanism, Koolhaas asserted in 1994, “it will not be based on the twin fantasies of
order and omnipotence.”
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Kwinter follows up to explicate a “new” urbanism, as 
“a soft urbanism, a liquid urbanism of grazing, perpetually interacting forces, free 
of hard control, certainty, predictability or permanence.”
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In his Requiem for the
City at the End of the Millennium, Kwinter asks, “What do we get in return for the
surrender of control?” It seems mankind is engaging in a last-ditch effort to gain
control and mastery, but instead of continuing the quest to conquer nature mankind
needs to learn to ride with dynamics, and to design flexible and adaptable control
systems to engage with a world in flux. Deleuze credits Foucault as the first to say
that “we’re moving away from disciplinary societies . . . toward control societies
that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and
instant communication.”
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The discourses surrounding electronic data collection
systems, sensing and feedback systems, smart materials, intelligence, and
interactivity and responsiveness all pertain to a “control society” in which
information is “immediately fed back into the system” in real time. Urban planning
as a regulatory regime urgently needs to catch up to this networked,
technologically proficient, more supple and adaptable model of control.
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The reawakening of the vital and the organic in every department
undermines the authority of the purely mechanical . . . . The clue to modern
technology was the displacement of the organic and the living with the
artificial and the mechanical. Within technology itself the process, in many
departments, is being reversed: we are returning to the organic. At all events,
we no longer regard the mechanical as all-embracing and all-sufficient.
Lewis Mumford, 1934
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Aristotle‘s philosophy can be thought of as being more akin to biology than
mathematics. Whereas Plato’s understanding of the polis was based on stable
hierarchies which resisted change, Aristotle understood the city through an
analogy of the diversity of species and the wonder of life. For Aristotle, the ideality
of the city “was not a rationally abstract form to be arbitrarily imposed on the
community: it was rather a form already potential in the very nature of species,
needing only to be brought out and developed.”
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The notion of controlled growth
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TOM VEREBES

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in Aristotle’s musings is akin to concepts in biology for limits on the size of the
parts or whole of an organism. Greek colonization struggled with the limits of the
land and resources available to feed its population, and begs the question whether
there are natural limits to the city. Given today’s expanding urban population and
the reliance on resources from far beyond the confines of the city, the issue of
limits and controlled growth is now a moot one. 
Kisho Kurokawa believed Metabolism aimed to make sense of “the shift from
a mechanical to a biodynamic age.”
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At the same time, in Europe, visionary
architects were speculating on the ways in which technology could become more
lifelike. Yona Friedman’s Ville Spatiale (1958) hovered above the natural earth as a
three-dimensional freeform city in the sky, while Konrad Wachsmann proposed 
a modular model of organic growth, and Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon
(1959–1974) aimed to “put an end to the separation of city and landscape” in a new
symbiosis. The massive challenges of the damage to the world’s natural ecology
demand such a sensibility.
A mechanistic paradigm of order can be seen as an effect of the
repercussions of the origins of modern science, starting with Descartes in the 
mid-seventeenth century.
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Through the isolation of a physical process its
analytical basis can be summarized, or reduced, to a machine-like linear mapping
which behaves according to specific rules. We have been witnessing a remarkable
yet slow transformation throughout the twentieth century, a “superseding of the
physics model of space and the adopting of a biological model of explanation.”
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Fascination with the complexity sciences and natural sciences was preceded by
postmodern reactions to an ancient yet persistent, mechanistic view of matter, 
one with its origins in the seventeenth century, but called upon to act as the
conceptual foundation of modernism. Science does not fail to provide a model of
the world to adequately explain how things form and how they work, but the
science of modernism was still propped up by old science. Positioning design as
part of what we identify as nature explicates the fundamentally intertwined order
of the world. Nothing comes into being without association with other systems or
a context. A particular order is therefore dependent on an environment providing
the specific conditions for it, and processes in nature do not follow linear paths
toward fixed, uniform outcomes each time the rules are played out. Rather,
emergence, though not life in the strict sense of living biological systems, helps 
to explain how nothing is unconnected, yet not everything is connected.
Less concerned with the social logic of stable, long-lasting spaces than with
the phenomena of urban transformation, the challenge for architects and urbanists
in this century will be to specify and instrumentalize the theoretical and practical
apparatus with which to confront massive urban change, and to chart new, as-yet
unforeseen trajectories. The associative logic of urbanism is a product of the
capacity for urban self-organization, amid the hierarchies which plan and maintain
cities as a defense against descent into chaos and disappearance. 
1.3 THE ASSOCIATIVE LOGIC OF URBANISM
Historically, the tools used to shape the city evolved in parallel with the changing
contingencies of the city. Military defenses help us to understand the evolution of
relational urban form, and the changing nature of urbanism raises questions of the
city’s complex, adaptable—and organic—attributes. 
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THE CITY AS EXPRESSION

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