8/17/2019 masterplanning the adaptive city by Tom Verebes. Review

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Masterplanning the Adaptive CityTom Verebes (ed.)2014. Routledge. New York

The book Masterplanning the Adaptive City is a speculation on what can happen to cities andurbanism in general in the nearest feature. It is an interdisciplinary attempt to bring ideas ofadaptability and computation - which is getting accepted by the mainstream architecture - intothe field of urban planning and design. The paradigms and the ideas discussed in the bookoriginate from architecture, urbanism, economics, natural sciences and computer science. Theauthor examines historical and theoretical context, analyze current situation, overviewtechnology and methodologies, and review prototypical practices of computational urbanism inthe age of rapid urban growth and globalization.

Computation is defined as “the processing of information and interactions between elementswhich constitute a specific environment.” In design, computation is applied for customization of

performative criteria in buildings and/or cities. Design object can modified through dependentrelationships of its elements and relevant data. This model of design process is argued to be amajor shift from the copy-and-paste mode of design.

To underline the importance of the subject, Verebes starts his argument by addressing now-classical question of Jane Jacobs - what type of problem the city is. He maps the history ofideas of understanding and building cities from the ancient times till today. Both theoreticalthinkers and practitioners of the twentieth century were usually ignoring the “evolutionary natureof cities” and the fact that the process of globalization (tightly linked to the planetaryurbanization) is not a recent phenomena and nor did it happen suddenly. Understanding of thecity as a finite and a “completed” project based on clearly defined principles lead planners toinvention of the two-dimensional master plan, which - as we now know - did not pass the

resilience test. By assuming that “the behaviors of the mechanisms deployed in the city aresensitive, responsive, and adaptive”, Verebes suggests that adaptive masterplanning - based onrules of interrelationships rather than static principles should lead towards the sustainable urbanfuture.

Resilience became a dominant theme in the field of urban design as it more and morefrequently appears in both governmental and corporate agendas. Flexibility of post-Fordistproduction, new labour patterns and heterogeneous geographies question old “traditional” wayswe designed and utilized spaces. Verebes argues that acknowledging the uncertainty ofmarkets and social forces questions the way we produce development plans. One of theexample he discussed in the book was a development of new city district in China, for which heproposed three different plans that were shaped by different amounts of capital investment andpossible needs on property markets.

Although the core of the idea is not to tackle Modernist industrial paradigm of monotonousmass-production because the book deals with the urbanization process in general - Verebessees computational urbanism as a tool to create more identifiable/unique cities rather thanindistinguishable/generic settlements.

8/17/2019 masterplanning the adaptive city by Tom Verebes. Review

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Living in the age of “near-infinite connectedness” and uncertainty highlights the paradoxbetween planning and emergence. If plan can be described as a control mechanism “toorganize future construction” and emergence “has always been about giving up control, lettingthe system govern itself as much as possible, letting it learn from the footprints”, these two canbe considered opposites. But the bigger the scale of the plan, the harder to control every event.This is when emergence happens. Thus, Verebes concludes that “a masterplan can benefit from

“contamination” by the mechanisms of informal urbanization, which operate at multiple spatialscales and speeds, never finished, nor pretending to completeness.” Emerged city is “the resultnot of a luck of overall design but rather of smaller, local decisions with amalgamate to create awhole which exceeds the sum of its parts.

Verebes argues that design for emergence can be achieved through self-organization,democratic participatory processes and mass customization. Self-organized, emergent systemsin biological and physical processes parallel the ways in which collective human activity unfoldsin real time. However, the question whether we have such complex system to compute suchprocesses on city level is still valid. Also, if cities can “learn” and adapt based on the feedbackinformation, how can we determine the relevance of the data? There is an ethical question aswell - how much feedback information from the citizens, who became so sensitive aboutpersonal data can we collect?

The oxymoron in the book!s title - juxtaposition of the words “masterplanning” and “adaptive”reveals other contradictions addressed by the book as well. For example, mass-collected dataused for customization of individual/local needs. Another concern is an illusion of freedom andpersonal liberties “guaranteed" by the neoliberal policies. Computational urbanism first of all willbe beneficial for investors and developers (and the author underlines this in the book), meaningthat it will award capital even greater control over the space.