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In Beyond Sustainability: Architecture in the Renewable City, Peter Droege focuses a lot on the no-longer-prominent meaning of sustainability. The rapid globalization has taken a lead and put the nature and environment on a backseat mostly. With the Industrial Revolution, the environmental conditions have been distorted and there has been an abuse of technology and unsustainable methods and processes. Should the category of "sustainable" or "Green" buildings even exist? Shouldn’t all buildings be sustainable or green? As designers, how difficult is it to maintain this balance between the aesthetic or style and the ethical ways of creating it? How much does sustainability affect the design or vice versa or does it even need to have a relationship?

Should tropical architecture be thought of as an entity with a fixed identity that is determined by an unchanging external tropical nature or should tropical architecture be seen as a set of shifting dialogues that prefer tropical nature and climate, as the determinant of built structures combined with social, cultural, and technological conditions?

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1 II From the City to Urban Society I'll begin with the following hypothesis: Society has been completely urbanized. This hypothesis implies a definition: An urban society is a society that results from a process of complete urbanization. This urbanization is virtual today, but will become real in the future. The above definition resolves any ambiguity in the use of our terms. The words "urban society" are often used to refer to any city or urban agglomeration: the Greek polis, the oriental or medieval city, commercial and industrial cities, small cities, the megalopolis. As a result of the confusion, we have forgotten or overlooked the social relationships (primarily relationships of production) with which each urban type is associated. These so-called urban societies are often compared with one another, even though they have nothing in common. Such a move serves the underlying ideologies of organicism (every urban society, viewed on its own, is seen as an organic"whole"), continuism (there is a sense ofhistorical continuity or permanence associated with urban society), and evolutionism (urban society is characterized by different 1 2 II From the City to Urban Society periods, by the transformation of social relations that fade away or disappear). . Here, I use the term "urban society" to refer to the society that results from industrialization, which is a process of domination that absorbs agricultural production. This urban society cannot take shape conceptually until the end of a process during which the old urban forms, the end result of a series of discontinuous transformations, burst apart. An important aspect of the theoretical problem is the ability to situate the discontinuities and continuities with respect to one another. How could any absolute discontinuities exist without an underlying continuity, without support, without some inherent process? Conversely, how can we have continuity without crises, without the appearance of new elements or relationships? The specialized sciences (sociology, political economy, history, human geography) have proposed a number of ways to characterize "our" society, its reality and deep-seated trends, its actuality and virtuality. Terms such as "industrial and postindustrial society:' "the technological society:' "the society of abundance," "the leisure society:• "consumer society:• and so on have been used. Each of these names contains an element of empirical or conceptual truth, as well as an element of exaggeration and extrapolation. Instead of the term "postindustrial society"-the society that is born of in·dustrialization and succeeds it-I will use "urban society;' a ( term that refers to tendencies, orientations, and virtualities, , rather than any preordained reality. Such usage in no way "precludes a critical examination of contemporary reality, such as the analysis of the "bureaucratic society of controlled consumption." Science is certainly justified in formulating such theoretical hypotheses and using them as a point of departure. Not only is such a procedure current among the sciences, it is necessary. There can be no science without theoretical hy- From the City to Urban Society II 3 potheses. My hypothesis, which involves the so-called social sciences, is based on an epistemological and methodological approach. Knowledge is not necessarily a copy or reflection, a simulacrum or simulation of an object that is already real. Nor does it necessarily construct its object for the sake of a theory that predates knowledge, a theory of the object or its "models." In my approach, the object is included in the hypothesis; the hypothesis comprehends the object. Even though this "object" is located outside any (empirical) fact, it is not fictional. We can assume the existence of a virtual object, urban society; that is, a possible object, whose growth and development can be analyzed in relation to a process and a praxis (practical activity). Needless to say, such a hypothesis must be validated. There is, however, no shortage of arguments and proofs to sustain it, from the simplest to the most complex. For example, agricultural production has lost all its autonomy in the major industrialized nations and as part of a global economy. It is no longer the principal sector of the economy, nor even a sector characterized by any distinctive features (aside from underdevelopment). Even though local and regional features from the time when agricultural production dominated haven't entirely disappeared, it has been changed into a form of industrial production, having become subordinate to its demands, subject to its constraints. Economic growth and industrialization have become selflegitimating, extending their effects to entire territories, regions, nations, and continents. As a result, the traditional unit typical of peasant life, namely the village, has been transformed. Absorbed or obliterated by larger units, it has become an integral part of industrial production and consumption. The concentration of the population goes hand in hand with that of the mode of production. The urban fabri£ grows, extends its borders, corrodes the residue of agrarian life. This expression, "urban fabric;' does not narrowly define 4 II From the City to Urban Society the built world of cities but all manifestations of the dominance of the city over the country. In this sense, a vacation home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric. Of varying density, thickness, and activity, the only regions untouched by it are those that are stagnant or dying, those that are given over to "nature." With the decline of the village life of days gone by, agricultural producers, "farmers," are confronted with the agricultural town. Promised by Khrushchev to the Soviet peasants, agricultural towns have appeared in various places around the world. In the United States, aside from certain parts of the South, peasants have virtually disappeared, and we find islands of farm poverty alongside islands of urban poverty. As this global process of industrialization and urbanization was taking place, the large cities exploded, giving rise to growths of dubious value: suburbs, residential conglomerations and industrial complexes, satellite cities that differed little from urbanized towns. Small and midsize cities became dependencies, partial colonies of the metropolis. In this way my hypothesis serves both as a point of arrival for existing knowledge and a point of departure for a new study and new projects: complete urbanization. The hypothesis is anticipatory. It prolongs the fundamental tendency of the present. Urban society is gestating in and through the "bureaucratic ,ociety of controlled consumption." A negative argument, proof by the absurd: No other hypothesis will work, no other hypothesis can cover the entire range of problems. Postindustrial society? Then what happens after industrialization? Leisure society? This addresses Jnly part of the question, since we limit our examination of trends and virtualities to "infrastructure;' a realist attitude :hat in no way circumvents the demagoguery inherent in this :lefinition. The indefinite growth of mass consumption? Here, Ne measure current indices and extrapolate from them, hereby running the risk of reducing reality and virtuality to mly one of their aspects. And so on. From the City to Urban Society II 5 The expression "urban society'' meets a theoretical need. It is more than simply a literary or pedagogical device, or even the expression of some form of acquired knowledge; it is an elaboration, a search, a conceptual formulation. A movement of thought toward a certain concrete, and perhaps toward the concrete, assumes shape and detail. This movement, if it proves to be true, will lead to a practice, urban practice, that is finally or newly comprehended. Needless to say, a threshold will have to be crossed before entering the concrete, that is, social practice as understood by theory. But there is no empirical recipe for fabricating this product, this urban reality. Isn't this what we so often expect from "urbanism" and what "urbanists" so often promise? Unlike a fact-filled empiricism with its risky extrapolations and fragments of indigestible knowledge, we can build a theory from a theoretical hypothesis. The development of such a theory is associated with a methodology. For example, research involving a virtual object, which attempts to define and realize that object as part of an ongoing project, already has a name: transduction. The term reflects an intellectual approach tO: ward a possible object, which we can employ alongside the more conventional activities of deduction and induction. The concept of an urban society, which I introduced above, thus implies a hypothesis and a definition. Similarly, by _revolution" I refer to the transformations that affect contemporary society, ranging from the period when questions of growth and industrialization predominate (models, plans, programs) to the period when the urban problematic becomes predominant, when the search for solutions and modalities unique to urban society are foremost. Some of these transformations are sudden; others are gradual, planned, determined. But which ones? This is a legitimate question. It is by no means certain in advance that the answer will be clear, intellectually satisfying, or unambiguous. The words "urban revolution" do not in themselves refer to actions that are violent. Nor do they exclude them. 6 II From the City to Urban Society But how do we discriminate between the outcome of violent action and the product of rational action before their occurrence? Isn't violence characterized by its ability to spin out of control? Isn't thought characterized by the effort to reduce violence, beginning with the effort to destroy the chains that bind our thought? There are two aspects of urbanism that we will need to address: 1. For years scholars have viewed urbanism as a social practice that is fundamentally scientific and technical in nature. In this case, theory can and should address this practice by raising it to a conceptual level and, more specifically, to the level of epistemology. However, the absence of any such urban epistemology is striking. Is it worth developing such an epistemology, then? No. In fact, its absence is highly significant. For the institutional and ideological nature of what is referred to as urbanism has-until a new order comes into being-taken precedence over its scientific nature. If we assume that this procedure can be generalized and that understanding always involves epistemology, then it is clear that it plays no role in contemporary urbanism. It is important to understand why and how. 2. As it currently exists, that is, as a policy (having institutional and ideological components), urbanism can be criticized both from the right and the left. The critique from the right, which is well known, is focused on the past and is frequently humanist. It subsumes and justifies a neoliberal ideology of''free enterprise:· directly or indirectly. It opens a path for the various "private" initiatives of capitalists and capital. The critique from the left, frequently overlooked, is not associated with any so-called leftist group, club, party, apparatus, or ideology. Rather, it attempts to open a path to the possible, to explore and From the City to Urban Society II 7 delineate a landscape that is not merely part of the "real," the accomplished, occupied by existing social, political, and economic forces. It is a utopian critique because it steps back from the real without, however, losing sight of it. We can draw an axis as follows: 0----------------------100% The axis runs from the complete absence of urbanization ("pure nature," the earth abandoned to the elements) on the left to the completion of the process on the right. A signifier for this signified--the urban (the urban reality)--this axis is both spatial and temporal: spatial because the process extends through space, which it modifies; temporal because it develops over time. Temporality, initially of secondary importance, eventually becomes the predominant aspect of practice and history. This schema presents no more than an aspect of this history, a division of time that is both abstract and arbitrary and gives rise to operations (periodizations) that have no absolute privilege but are as necessary (relative) as other divisions. I'd like to plant a few signposts along this path delineated by the "urban phenomenon" (the urban, in short). Initially there were populations that had been identified by anthropology and ethnology. Around this initial zero, the first human groups (gatherers, fishers, hunters, possibly herders) marked out and named space; they explored it while marking it. They indicated place-names, fundamental topoi. It was a topology and spatial grid that peasants, attached to the soil, later perfected and refined without upsetting the overall fabric. What is important is that in many places around the world, and most certainly any place with a history, the existence of the city has accompanied or followed that of 8 II From the City to Urban Society the village. The representation according to which cultivated land, the village, and farm civilization slowly secreted urban reality reflects an ideology. It generalizes from what took place in Europe during the breakdown of the Roman Empire and following the reconstruction of the medieval city. It's just as easy to maintain the contrary position, however. Agriculture was little more than gathering, and was only formalized through pressure (authoritarian) from the urban centers, generally occupied by skillful conquerors who had become protectors, exploiters, and oppressors, that is, administrators, the founders of a state, or the rudiments of a state. The political dty accompanies or closely follows the establishment of organized social life, agriculture, and the village. It goes without saying that such an assumption is meaningless when it involves endless spaces characterized by a seminomadic existence, an impoverished itinerant agriculture. It is obviously based primarily on studies and documents concerning "Asian modes of production," the ancient civilizations that created both urban and agricultural life (Mesopotamia, Egypt, and so on). 1 The general question of the relationship between the city and the countryside is far from being resolved, however. I'm going to take the risk of locating the political city at the point of origin on the space-time axis. The political city was populated primarily by priests, warriors, princes, "nobles," and military leaders, but administrators and scribes were also present. The political city is inconceivable without writing: documents, laws, inventories, tax collection. It is completely given over to orders and decrees, to power. Yet it also implies the existence of exchange to procure the materials essential to warfare and power (metal, leather, and so on), and of artisanship to fashion and maintain them. Thus, such a city also comprises artisans and workers. The political city administers, protects, and exploits a territory that is often From the City to Urban Society II 9 vast. It manages large-scale agricultural projects such as drainage, irrigation, the construction of dams, the dearing of land. It rules over a number of villages. Ownership of the land becomes the eminent right of a monarch, the symbol of order and action. Nonetheless, peasants and communities retain effective possession through the payment of tribute. In such an environment, exchange and trade can only expand. Initially confined to suspicious individuals, to "strangers," they become functionally integrated into the life of the city. Those places given over to exchange and trade are initially strongly marked by the signs of heterotopy. Like the people who are responsible for and inhabit them, these places are at the outset excluded from the political city: cara- vansaries, fairgrounds, suburbs. This process of integrating markets and merchandise (people and things) in the city can last for centuries. Exchange and trade, which are essential to the survival of life, bring wealth and movement. The political city resists this with all the power at its disposal, all its cohesiveness; it feels, knows, that it is threatened by markets, merchandise, and traders, by their form of ownership (money, a form of personal property, being movable by definition). There is ample evidence that Athens, a political city, coexisted with Piraeus, a commercial city, and that attempts to ban the presence of merchandise in the agora, a free space and political meeting place, were unsuccessful. When Christ chased the merchants from the temple, the ban was similar, had the same meaning. In China and Japan, merchants were for years an urban underclass, relegated to a "special" {heterotopic) part of the city. In truth, it is only in the European West, at the end of the Middle Ages, that merchandise, the market, and merchants were able to successfully penetrate the city. Prior to this, itinerant merchants-part warrior, part thief-deliberately chose to remain in the fortified remains of ancient {Roman) cities to facilitate their struggle against the territorial lords. Based on this assumption, the renewed 10 II From the City to Urban Society political city would have served as a frame for the action that was to transform it. During this (class) struggle against the overlords, who were the owners and rulers of the territory, a prodigiously fecund struggle in the West that helped create not only a history but history itself, the marketplace became centralized. It replaced and supplanted the place of assembly (the agora, the forum). Around the market, which had now become an essential part of the city, were grouped the church and town hall (occupied by a merchant oligarchy), with its belfry or campanile, the symbol of liberty. Architecture follows and translates the new conception of the city. Urban space becomes the meeting place for goods and people, for exchange. It bears the signs of this conquered liberty, which is perceived as Liberty-a grandiose but hopeless struggle. In this sense, it is legitimate to assign a symbolic value to the bastides, or walled towns, of southwest France, the first cities to take shape around the local marketplace. History is filled with irony. The fetishism associated with merchandise appeared along with the rise of merchandise. its logic and ideology, its language and world. In the fourteenth century it was believed that it was sufficient to establish a market and build stores, gateways, and galleries around a central square to promote the growth of goods and buyers. In this way, both the nobility and the bourgeoisie built merchant cities in areas that were undeveloped, practically desert, and still crisscrossed by herds and migratory, seminomadic tribes. These cities of the French southwest, although they bear the names of some of our great and wealthy cities (Barcelona, Bologna, Plaisance, Florence, Grenada, and so on), were failures. The merchant city succeeded the political city. At this time (approximately the fourteenth century in western Europe), commercial exchange became an urban function, which was embodied in a form (or forms, both architectural and urban). This in turn gave urban space a new structure. The changes that took place in Paris illustrate this complex From the City to Urban Society II 11 interaction among the three essential aspects of function, form, and structure. Market towns and suburbs, which were initially commercial and artisanal-Beaubourg, Saint-Antoine, Saint-Honore-grew in importance and began to struggle with centers of political power (institutions) for influence, prestige, and space, forcing them to compromise, entering with them in the construction of a powerful urban unity. At one moment in the history of the European West, an event of great importance occurred, but one that remained latent because it went unnoticed. The importance of the city for the social whole became such that the whole seemed to shift. In the relationship between town and country, the emphasis was still on the countryside: real property wealth, the products of the soil, attachment to the land (owners of fiefs or noble titles). Compared with the countryside, the town retained its heterotopic character, marked by its ramparts as well as the transition to suburban areas. At a given moment, these various relationships were reversed; the situation changed. The moment when this shift occurred, this reversal of heterotopy, should be marked along our axis. From this moment on, the city would no longer appear as an urban island in a rural ocean, it would no longer seem a paradox, a monster, a hell or heaven that contrasted sharply with village or country life in a natural environment. It entered people's awareness and understanding as one of the terms in the opposition between town and country. Country? It is now no more than-nothing more than-the town's "environment:' its horizon, its limit. Villagers? As far as they were concerned, they no longer worked for the territorial lords, they produced for the city, for the urban market. And even though they realized that the wheat and wood merchants exploited them, they understood that the path to freedom crossed the marketplace. So what is happening around this crucial moment in history? Thoughtful people no longer see themselves reflected 12 11 From the City to Urban Society in nature, a shadowy world subject to mysterious forces. Between them and nature, between their home (the focal point of thought, existence) and the world, lies the urban reality, an essential mediating factor. From this moment on society no longer coincides with the countryside. It no longer coincides with the city, either. The state encompasses them both, joins them in its hegemony by making use of their rivalry. Yet, at the time, the majesty of the state was veiled to its contemporaries. Of whom or what was Reason an attribute? Royalty? Divine right? The individual? Yet this is what led to the reform of the city after the destruction of Athens and Rome, after the most important products of those civilizations, logic and law, were lost from view. The logos was reborn, but its rebirth was not attributed to the renaissance of the urban world but to transcendent reason. The rationalism that culminated in Descartes accompanied the reversal that replaced the primacy of the peasantry with the priority of urban life. Although the peasantry didn't see it as such. However, during this period, the image of the city came into being. The city had writing; it had secrets and powers, and clarified the opposition between urbanity (cultured) and rusticity (naive and brutal). After a certain point in time, the city .developed its own form of writing: the map or plan, the fscience of planimetry. During the sixteenth and seventeen_th I\_centuries, when this reversal of meaning took of · European cities began to appear, including the first maps of ' the city of Paris. These are not yet abstract maps, projections of urban space onto geometric coordinates. A cross between vision and concept, works of art and science, they displayed the city from top to bottom, in perspective, painted, depicted, and geometrically described. This perspective, simultaneously idealist and realist-the perspective of thought and power-was situated in the vertical dimension, the dimension of knowledge and reason, and dominated and consti- ffiaPs From the City to Urban Society II 13 tuted a totality: the city. This shift of social reality toward the urban, this (relative) discontinuity, can be easily indicated on a space-time axis, whose continuity can be used to situate and date any (relative) breaks. All that is needed is to draw a line between the zero point and the terminal point (which I'll assume to be one hundred). This reversal of meaning can't be dissociated from the growth of commercial capital and the existence of the mar-\ ket. It was the rise of the mercantile city, which was grafted/ onto the political city but promoted its own ascendancy, that was primarily responsible. This was soon followed by the appearance of industrial capital and, consequently, the industrial city. This requires further explanation. Was industry as- sociated with the city? One would assume it to be associated with the non-city, the absence or rupture of urban reality. We know that industry initially developed near the sources of energy (coal and water), raw materials (metals, textiles), and manpower reserves. Industry gradually made its way into the city in search of capital and capitalists, markets, and an abundant supply oflow-cost labor. It could locate itself anywhere, therefore, but sooner or later made its way into existing cities or created new cities, although it was prepared to move elsewhere if there was an economic advantage in doing so. Just as the political city resisted the conquest-half-pacific, half-violent-of the merchants, exchange, and money, similarly the political and mercantile city defended itself from being taken over by a nascent industry, industrial capital, and capital itself. But how did it do this? Through corporatism, by establishing relationships. Historical continuity and evolution mask the effects and ruptures associated with such transitions. Yet something strange and wonderful was also taking place, which helped renew_dialectical thought: the non-city and the anti-city would conquer the city, penetrate it, break it apart, and in so doing extend it immeasurably, bringing about the urbanization of society a11d the growth of 14 II From the City to Urban Society ( the urban fabric that covered what was left of the city prior to the arrival of industry. This extraordinary movement has escaped our attention and has been described in piecemeal fashion because ideologues have tried to eliminate dialectical thought and the analysis of contradictions in favor of logical thought-that is, the identification of coherence and nothing but coherence. Urban reality, simultaneously amplified and exploded, thus loses the features it inherited from the previous period: organic totality, belonging, an uplifting image, a sense of space that was measured and dominated by monumental splendor. It was populated the urban within the dissolutioD._gf it became stipulative, repressive, for circulation (routes), and signage. It read rough draft, sometime.s (lS an message: it was imperious. But none of these descriptive terms completely describes the historical process of implosion-explosion (a metaphor borrowed from nuclear physics) that occurred: the tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs; homes, satellite towns) into space. The industrial city (often a shapeless town, a barely urban agglomeration, a conglomerate, or conurbation like the Ruhr Valley) serves as a prelude to a critical zone. At this moment, the effects of implosion-explosion are most fully felt. The increase in industrial production is superimposed on the growth of commercial exchange and multiplies the number of such exchanges. This growth extends from simple barter to the global market, from the simple exchange between two individuals all the way to the exchange of products, works of art, ideas, and human beings. Buying and selling, merchandise and market, money and capital appear to sweep away all obstacles. During this period of generalization, the effect of From the City to Urban Society II 15 the process-namely the urban reality-becomes both cause and reason. Induced factors become dominant (inductors). The urban problematic becomes a global phenomenon. Can urban reality be defined as a "superstructure" on the surface of the economic structure, whether capitalist or socialist? The simple result of growth and productive forces? Simply a modest marginal reality compared with production? Not at all. Urban reality modifies the relations of production without being sufficient to transform them. It becomes a productive force, like science. Space and the politics of space "express" social relationships but react against them. Obviously, if an urban reality manifests itself and becomes dominant, it does so only through the urban problematic. What can be done to change this? How can we build cities or "something" that replaces what was formerly the City? How can we reconceptualize the urban phenomenon? How can we formulate, classify, and order the innumerable questions that arise, questions that move, although not without considerable resistance, to the forefront of our awareness? Can we achieve significant progress in theory and practice so that our consciousness can comprehend a reality that overflows it and a possible that flees before its grasp? We can represent this process as follows: Political city _____. Mercantile city Industrial city _____. Critical zone 0 - - - - - - - - - - + - - - - - - - - - · 100% transition from agrarian to urban l implosion-explosion (urban concentration, rural exodus, extension of the urban fabric, complete subordination of the agrarian to the urban) 16 II From the City to Urban Society What occurs during the critical phase? This book is an attempt to answer that question, which situates the urban problematic within the overall process. Are the theoretical assumptions that enable us to draw an axis such as the one shown above, introduce directed time, and make sense of the critical zone sufficient to help us understand what is taking place? Possibly. In any event, there are several assumptions we can make now. Lacking any proof to the contrary, we can postulate that a second transition occurs, a second reversal of direction and situation. Industrialization, the dominant power and limiting factor, becomes a dominated reality during periods of profound crisis. This results in tremendous confusion, during which the past and the possible, the best and the worst, become intertwined. In spite of this theoretical hypothesis concerning the possible and its relation to the actual (the "real"), we should not overlook the fact that the onset of urban society and the modalities of urbanization depend on the characteristics of society as it existed during the course of industrialization (neocapitalist or socialist, full economic growth or intense a\:ltomation). The onset of urban society at different times, the implications and consequences of these initial differences, are part of the problematic associated with the urban phenomenon, or simply the "urban." These terms are preferable to the word "city," which appears to designate a clearly defined, definitive object, a scientific object and the immediate goal of action, whereas the theoretical approach requires a critique of this "object" and a more complex notion of the virtual or possible object. Within this perspective there is no science of the city (such as urban sociology or urban economy), but an emerging understanding of the overall process, as well as its term (goal and direction). The urban (an abbreviated form of urban society) can therefore be defined not as an accomplished reality, situated behind the actual in time, but, on the contrary, as a horizon, From the C1ty to Urban Society II 17 (.an illuminating virtuality. It is the possible, defined by a direction, that moves toward the urban as the culmination of its journey. To reach it-in other words, to realize it-we must first overcome or break through the obstacles that currently make it impossible. Can theoretical knowledge treat this virtual object, the goal of action, as an abstraction? No. From this point on, it is abstract only in the sense that it is a scientific, and therefore legitimate, abstraction. Theoretical knowledge can and must reveal the terrain, the foundation on which it resides: an ongoing social practice, an urban practice in the process of formation. It is an aspect of the critical phase that this practice is currently veiled and disjointed, that it possesses only fragments of a reality and a science that are still in the future. It is our job to demonstrate that such an approach has an outcome, that there are solutions to the current problematic. The virtual object is nothing but planetary society and the "global city:' and it stands outside the global and planetary crisis of reality and thought, outside the old borders that had been drawn when agriculture was dominant and that were maintained during the growth of exchange and industrial production. Nevertheless, the urban problematic can't absorb every problem. There are problems that are unique to agriculture and industry, even though the urban reality modifies them. Moreover, the urban problematic requires that we exercise considerable caution when exploring the realm of the possible. It is the analyst's responsibility to identify and describe the various forms of urbanization and explain what happens to the forms, functions, and urban structures that are transformed by the breakup of the ancient and the process of generalized urbanization. Until now the critical phase was perceived as a kind of black box. We know what enters the box, and sometimes we see what comes out, but we don't know what goes on inside. This makes conventional procedures of forecasting and projection useless, since they extrapolate from 18 II From the City to Urban Society the actual, from a set of facts. Projections and forecasts have a determined basis only in the fragmentary sciences: demography, for example, or political economy. But what is at stake here, "objectively;' is a totality. To illustrate the depth of the crisis, the uncertainty and perplexity that accompany the critical phase, an element of contrast may be useful. Is this merely a question of style? Yes, but not entirely. Here, I would like to introduce the pros and cons of streets and monuments. I'll leave other issuesnature, the city, urbanism, the urban-for later. For the street. The street is more than just a place for movement and circulation. The invasion of the automobile and the pressure of the automobile lobby have turned the car into a key object, parking into an obsession, traffic into a priority, harmful to urban and social life. The day is approaching when we will be forced to limit the rights and powers of the automobile. Naturally, this won't be easy, and the fallout will be considerable. What about the street, however? It serves as a meeting place (topos), for without it no other designated encounters are possible (cafes, theaters, halls). These places animate the street and are served by its animation, or they cease to exist. In the street, a form of spontaneous theater, I become spectacle and spectator, and sometimes an actor. The street is where movement takes place, the interaction without which urban life would not exist, leaving only separation, a forced and fixed segregation. And there are consequences to eliminating the street (ever since Le Corbusier and his nouveaux ensembles): the extinction of life, the reduction of the city to a dormitory, the aberrant functionalization of existence. The street contains functions that were overlooked by Le Corbusier: the informative function, the symbolic function, the ludic function. The street is a place to play and learn. The street is disorder. All the elements of urban life, which are fixed and redundant elsewhere, are free to fill the streets and through the streets flow From the City to Urban Society II 19 to the centers, where they meet and interact, torn from their fixed abode. This disorder is alive. It informs. It surprises. The work of Jane Jacobs has shown that, in the United States, the street (highly trafficked, busy) provides the only security possible against criminal violence (theft, rape, aggression). Wherever streets disappeared, criminality increased, became organized. In the street and through the space it offered, a group (the city itself) took shape, appeared, appropriated places, realized an appropriated space-time. This appropria-\ tion demonstrates that use and use value can dominate ex- i change and exchange value. Revolutionary events generally take place in the street. Doesn't this show that the disorder of the street engenders another kind of order? The urban space of the street is a place for talk, given over as much to the exchange of words and signs as it is to the exchange of things. A place where speech becomes writing. A place where speech can become .' ' "savage" and, by escaping rules and institutions, inscribe it;/ self on walls. Against the street. A meeting place? Maybe, but such meetings are superficial. In the street, we merely brush shoulders with others, we don't interact with them. It's the "we" that is important. The street prevents the constitution of a group, a subject; it is populated by a congeries of people in search of ... of what exactly? The world of merchandise is deployed in the street. The merchandise that didn't make it into specialized locales or markets (marketplaces, halls) has invaded the entire city. In antiquity the streets were merely extensions of places with specialized functions: the temple, the stadium, the agora, the garden. During the Middle Ages, artisans occupied the streets. The artisan was both producer and seller. The artisans were followed by merchants, who, although only merchants, soon became masters. The street became a display, a corridor flanked by stores of various kinds. Merchandise became spectacle (provocative, attractive) and 1 j 20 II From the·City to Urban Society transformed the individual into a spectacle for others. Here, more than elsewhere, exchange and exchange value take precedence over use, reducing it to a residue. Therefore, the critique of the street must be more incisive: the street becomes the focus of a form of repression that was made possible by the "real"-that is, weak, alienated, and alienating-character of the relationships that are formed there. Movement in the street, a communications space, is both obligatory and repressed. Whenever threatened, the first thing power restricts is the ability to linger or assemble in the street. Although the street may have once had the meaning of a meeting place, it has since lost it, and could only have lost it, by reducing itself, through a process of necessary reduction, to nothing more than a passageway, by splitting itself into a place for the passage of pedestrians (hunted) and automobiles (privileged). The street became a network organized for and by consumption. The rate of pedestrian circulation, although still tolerated, was determined and measured by the ability to perceive store windows and buy the objects displayed in them. Time became "merchandise time" (time for buying and selling, time bought and sold). The street regulated time outside of work; it subjected it to the same system, the system of yield and profit. It was nothing more than the necessary transition between forced labor, programmed leisure, and habitation as a place of consumption. In the street, the neocapitalist organization of consumption is demonstrated by its power, which is not restricted to political power or repression (overt or covert). The street, a series of displays, an exhibition of objects for sale, illustrates just how the logic of merchandise is accompanied by a form of (passive) contemplation that assumes the appearance and significance of an aesthetics and an ethics. The accumulation of objects accompanies the growth of population and capital; it is transformed into an ideology, which, dissimulated beneath the traits of the legible and visible, comes to seem From the City to Urban Society II 21 self-evident. In this sense we can speak of a colonization of the urban space, which takes place in the street through the image, through publicity, through the spectacle of objectsa "system of objects" that has become symbol and spectacle. Through the uniformization of the grid, visible in the mod-·· ernization of old streets, objects (merchandise) take on the effects of color and form that make them attractive. The parades, masquerades, balls, and folklore festivals authorized by a power structure caricaturize the appropriation and reappropriation of space. The true appropriation characteristic of effective "demonstrations" is challenged by the forces of repression, which demand silence and forgetfulness. Against the monument. The monument is essentially repressive. It is the seat of an institution (the church, the state, the university). Any space that is organized around the monument is colonized and oppressed. The great monuments have been raised to glorify conquerors and the powerful. Occasionally they glorify the dead or the beauty of death (the Taj Mahal) in palaces and tombs. The misfortune of architecture is that it wanted to construct monuments, but the idea of habiting them was either conceived in terms of those monuments or neglected entirely. 2 The extension of monumental space to habiting is always catastrophic, and for the most part hidden from those who are subject to it. Monumental splendor is formal. And although the monument is always laden with symbols, it presents them to social awareness and contemplation (passive) just when those symbols, already outdated, are beginning to lose their meaning, such as the symbols of the revolution on the Napoleonic Arc de'friomphe. For the monument. It is the only conceivable or imaginable site of collective (social) life. It controls people, yes, but does so to bring them together. Beauty and monumentality go hand in hand. The great monuments were transfunctional (cathedrals) and even transcultural (tombs). This is what 22 II From the City to Urban Society gave them their ethical and aesthetic power. Monuments project onto the land a conception of the world, whereas the city projected (and continues to project) social life (globality). In their very essence, and sometimes at the very heart of a space in which the characteristics of a society are most recognizable and commonplace, monuments embody a sense of transcendence, a sense of being elsewhere. They have always been u-topic. Throughout their height and depth, along a dimension that was alien to urban trajectories, they proclaimed duty, power, knowledge, joy, hope. 36 Introduction: Metropolis, Megalopolis and Metacity Brian McGrath and Grahame Shane INTRODUCTION With much fanfare, the urban century has arrived at the very moment that the definitions and meanings of the terms city, metropolis and territory seem to be exhausted. Manuel Castells (1999) pinpointed the dilemma when he said that more and more we live in an urban society without cities. Even within this Handbook’s brief thirtyyear time frame, architectural theories of the city have continually readjusted the meaning of these terms in response to huge shifts in the geopolitical landscape: the first oil shock and challenge to American hegemony in the 1970s, the rise of deregulated neo-liberal globalization and the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, the emergence of the internet’s irrational exuberance and the promise of a transnational global village in the 1990s, and the shattering of this utopian moment on 9/11 with the resulting endless US War on Terror dominating the first decade of the twentyfirst century. And now, the very metabolism of urbanization needs to be fundamentally transformed to ensure the survival of life on this planet and equitable access to its limited resources. We have witnessed the complete reversal of fortunes of cities – once seen as shrinking, dead, shattered or bursting at the 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 641 seams, cities now can be seen as the crucial spaces of hope for the majority of the world’s poor and the place in which the environmental and social crises of our times must be immediately addressed. For us, the greatest evidence of the dramatic changes over the last thirty years has been the proliferation of competing models of urban form, each with its own formal order, metabolism and role for architecture in shaping the city. The imperial metropolis, symbolic centre of a controlled colonial world order at the beginning of the twentieth century gave way to the sprawling global megalopolis and its result the imploding megacity (see Chapter 38), the monstrous twin products of the ‘open’ neo-liberal world (dis)order at the beginning of the twentyfirst. In this chapter, we will present this extraordinary and unprecedented reversal of the city/territory as a context for the necessary changes which lie ahead for architectural theory and practice. Therefore, we put forward a third city model as a synthesis of the dialectical opposition and social stratification of the metropolis, megalopolis and megacity: the networked multi-form metacity. This third urban model will lay the foundation for a theorization of architecture to take on a more expansive and less hierarchical 12/14/2011 2:29:58 PM 642 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY role of critical participation in imagining the vast structural, social and metabolic urban transformations required in the decades ahead. These three simultaneous and overlapping city models – metropolis, megalopolis and metacity – will be examined as competing theories of symbolic form, social order and environmental metabolism, each with a specific role for architecture to imagine, represent and shape. At the mid point of the twentieth century, following the collapse of the colonial world order, the imperial European metropole gave way to a dominant new urban form and way of life – the American Cold War megalopolis. The collapse of the colonial world system also resulted in the unexpected and uncontrolled growth of the informal implosion of the megacity as the flip side of the sprawling megalopolis. The three theoretical models coexist concurrently in the contemporary world, even as they emerged during three distinct historical periods and constitute distinct arenas for architectural practice and cultural theory. To illustrate the three models, Figures 36.1–36.3 represent their simultaneous coincidence in contemporary Bangkok. We argue here that a more recent shift, which began with innovations in electronic communication and financial liberalizations in the 1980s, produced a radical reassembling of both the fragmented metropolis, the sprawling megalopolis and the imploding megacity. This has led to an unprecedented increase in the scale and interconnection of urbanization worldwide, a miniaturization of its metabolism, as well as a geopolitical shift away from European and North American hegemony. The metropolis, megalopolis and megacity are currently being shattered, dismantled, removed and reassembled at this moment of crisis following the end of the oil-based American century. Our last urban model – the metacity – calls for a re-assemblage of the social and natural ordering of metropolis, megalopolis and megacity in the new symbolic form and metabolic processes through new close-up and remote 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 642 technologies and sensibilities (McGrath and Shane 2005). Our three city theories represent very different formal, symbolic and social models of the city. While the metropolis is legible, controlled, contained, centralized and radiates out to zoned residential suburbs, satellite cities, agricultural land and forests, the megalopolis reverses the codes of the metropolis and is an unbounded, multi-nodal network of centres for work, living and pleasure interspersed with patches of farms and wilderness, strung together by landscaped highways. The megacity prefigures the emerging synthetic model of the metacity as it freely mixes urban and rural types in archipelagos of strange clusters through which people, information and materials constantly flow. These forms and flows are continually monitored by remote satellites and embedded sensors on the ground, and interlinked by the social and logistical webs of mobile phones and the internet. All three of our urban models currently coexist and interact in the contemporary urban landscape but rarely in the designer’s imagination, as they become distinct territories of both theory and practice. The emergence of the metropolitan and megalopolitan model both represented radical shifts in the metabolism of the city, as the biomass feudal city was supplanted by the coal, steam and railroad based industrial metropolis, which in turn has transformed into the decentralized oil-based automobile city linked by telephone lines and television broadcasting. While the rural migrants to the megacity frugally conserve, recycle and reuse, the necessary metabolic shift to the metacity can only occur now with the advent of internet and wireless technologies, which provide the monitoring, communication, social network and feedback tools to facilitate the creations of a global city based on equitable access to renewable natural resources and energy, sun, wind and geothermal power. These three urban models also represent distinct arenas for architects in the shaping, imagining, representing and modelling of 12/14/2011 2:29:58 PM INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY the city. The metropolitan architect alone commands the symbolic spatial ordering of the imperial capital, while the org-man, the corporate architecture firm of the Cold War megalopolis collaborates with large teams of landscape architects, planners and multiple consultants at the new scale and complexity of global practice while the megacity and its slums have attracted widespread attention from social scientists, non-governmental organizations and global institutions. While both the metropolitan figure of the signature architect and the anonymous corporate firm continue to dominate the practice of architecture, the architect-imagineer, tasked with branding the thematic identity of a city through spectacular formal expression, has also recently emerged (see also Chapter 14). Meanwhile, the vast majority of city building is without the help of professionals. Rarely does the self-built megacity or the anonymous sprawl of the ‘junk space’ of contemporary building production pass through the professional gaze of the architect. More recently, the symbolic order of the emerging metacity is continually inputted, updated and commented on by millions of digital citizens through blogs, tweets, text messages and web cams, creating a collectively imagined and constantly changing urban image. The vast scalar disparities between the close-up and remote systems of sensing, information gathering, mapping, representation and communication within the contemporary metacity brings into question the rich archive of representational forms architects have brought to the metropolis, megalopolis and megacity: the figure-ground and typomorphological mapping systems that attend to the historical continuities of urban form versus the cubist layering of transparent space that attests to urban mobility, transformation and change. The role of modelling and design has shifted again in the metacity, now that embedded information from mobile phones and internet activity leaves traces of climatic, social and biotic activity that can be mapped in real time through geographical information systems. These maps borrow 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 643 643 from choreographic notation or Situationist maps that chart the movement of matter, individuals or crowds and which register the flow of life and events within particular sectors of the city. Cinemetric digital video analyses enrich morphological conditions with on-the-ground visual information (McGrath and Gardner 2007), while temporal diagrams add another dimension to 3D modelling simultaneously providing time formations: the confluence of spatial and temporal information (McGrath 2008). Such representations underpin the speculative tradition in architecture that seeks to imagine, model and project alternative – utopian, dystopian, heterotopian, simultopian – futures for cities. They are further enriched by representations developed in other fields, such as ethnography, biology and economics. The conclusion of this chapter seeks to investigate how these different perspectives might be combined in order to better understand, imagine and remake the metacity everywhere here and now. THE METROPOLIS The metropolis as a model, symbol and rule for ordering the city was surprisingly revived thirty years ago with the publication of Delirious New York (1978) by architect Rem Koolhaas and the founding of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) with Madelon Vriesendorp, Elia and Zoe Zhengelis (1978). During the economic crisis which followed the first oil shock in the 1970s, Delirious New York provided epic tales of a vibrant pre-World-War-II metropolitan architecture reviving the architect’s deflated urban imagination. Koolhaas’ ‘retroactive manifesto’ was crystallized in OMA’s (including Zaha Hadid) winning proposal for the new Parliament building in The Hague. Although unbuilt, this project proposed a radically modernist post-ColdWar building – a hybrid of Russian revolutionary constructivism and Manhattan’s 12/14/2011 2:29:58 PM 644 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY Figure 36.1 (Above) MahaNakhon, under construction, will be the tallest building in Bangkok when completed, designed by Ole Scheeren, partner of OMA, Beijing. The promotional material for the building mistranslated mahanakhon, part of the royal name for Bangkok, as ‘metropolis’. In fact the term signifies the capital of Siam as an exalted space within a Buddhist cosmology. Scheeren describes the tower as a modernist slab which is cracked to allow the messy vibrancy of the Asian megacity to spiral up from the crowded streets. metropolitan congestion – in the heart of a historical European city. This project can be seen as a continuation of the reconstructivist impulse of inserting strikingly modern 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 644 buildings within older metropolitan centres, which had declined in importance relative to the Cold War suburban sprawl. This impulse was especially acute, where state reinvestment in older metropolitan centres was seen as a front against the assault of American popular cultural intrusions. A symbolically renewed metropolis revitalized through new heroic architectural icons has become ubiquitous through the world, reaching an ironic culmination in OMA’s monument for China’s state broadcast company, the CCTV Tower in Beijing. Here, state planners have remodelled the centre of the city as in Paris’ Grand Projects of the 1970s through to the 1990s or Barcelona’s Olympic transformation in the 1980s. The Imperial city of the Ming Dynasty, transformed by Mao to a socialist industrial city, has been reborn as a monstrous mutation of Ebenezer Howard’s metropolitan ideal, the Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902). Spectacular architectural icons like CCTV, the 2008 Beijing National Stadium and the new Opera House give legibility to a vast metropolis with six ring roads, green belts and numerous satellite cities, planned to house a population capped at eighteen million people. This section will examine the political, social and environmental dimensions of the revival of the metropolis at this particular moment in time. While the nineteenth century metropolis emerged as a way to make spatially coherent the hierarchical colonial world system, the peculiarly postmodern phenomenon of its revival through the agency of architecture represents a new era. As Foucault has shown, disciplinary authority is dispersed in the micro-politics of desire and the technologies of the self (see Chapter 39). At the end of the twentieth century, the architect was revived as the image maker, with multiple tools of print and digital communication, who can make the promise of the metropolis spectacularly seductive again. Francoise Choay in The Rule and the Model (1997) sees the nineteenth century metropolitan order of Ildefons Cerdà’s 12/14/2011 2:29:58 PM INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY Barcelona and Baron Haussmann’s Paris, as combining two architectural theories of the city: first utopian texts that proscribe an ideal fixed model and second, general systems of rules that describe a relatively open generative system for urban design, analogous to an urban language. A new hybrid between model and rule forms the legible ‘Rationalist’ system of the nineteenth century European metropolis, clearly ordered yet dynamic and open to change. Choay traces these two theoretical approaches from Plato and Aristotle through to the Italian Renaissance, contrasting Alberti’s generative system to Thomas More’s perfect, frozen model of Utopia. The metropolitan order is a clear social diagram of power relations, and Haussmann’s radiating boulevards connecting national monuments, cultural institutions and rail gateways continue to fix the image of Paris. The balance between rule and model can temper the stasis or dynamism of metropolitan order. For example, the 1811 grid plan of Manhattan is a generative pattern whose rules are constantly readjusted through new building technologies, corporate demands, zoning and community input as well as new forms of social life. The nineteenth-century metropolitan hybrid model overlaid a progressive ideal of efficient, hygienic and easy to police urban streets with generative rules to create a diverse array of housing blocks and economic activities masked behind uniform façades. Le Corbusier transformed this ideal by reversing the building fabric/street code, creating his Ville Radieuse of free-standing slab blocks set in an idealized parkland in the 1930s (Rowe and Koetter 1978). While in Good City Form (1981), Kevin Lynch admires the legibility of the Baroque urban model favoured in the European metropolis, James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State forcefully demonstrates how an authoritative state’s attempt to use spatial legibility and simplification for authoritative control undermines city life (1998). This becomes especially relevant in the postcolonial world of new nations asserting state control in the absence 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 645 645 of European metropolitan order. Scott mentions Chandigarh and Brasilia in particular, but he also names the countless internationally funded ‘schemes to improve the human condition’ that have routinely failed. Architectural theorists like Le Corbusier and Koolhaas favoured the metropolitan model because of its top-down structure which gave the architect the illusion of control as the advisor to powerful urban actors, whether military dictators or freedom fighters devoted to modernizing their country. The work of the new metropolitan architects must be situated in the re-articulation of the social context of architecture that emerged in the Venice, Berlin, London, New York theoretical axis which existed in the 1970s – a period of much architectural theorization and ‘paper architecture’ as building production itself collapsed in the shadow of the first oil shock (see Chapter 37). Aldo Rossi’s L’architettura della Città (1982 [1966]) was translated and widely distributed through the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), a think tank directed by Peter Eisenman. The IAUS served as the clearing house for European architects in New York, and Koolhaas was able to conduct his research on the fantastic metropolitan architecture of Coney Island and Rockefeller Center at the Institute. Rossi sought collective, psychological archetypes to remain constant in the flux of urban change. He highlighted large urban institutions that acted as communal mnemonic devices and large fragments that constituted the collective imagination of the city, while the smaller scale urban fabric around these cities-within-cities changed within coded, typo-morphologic parameters. German Rationalists, like O.M. Ungers and the Krier brothers in the 1970s also adopted this binary pattern of fabric and icon and adapted early American grid plans to their purposes. In the US, Colin Rowe and the Contextualist School at Cornell in the 1960s pursued a parallel generative and figure-ground pattern research, leading to built projects such as Cooper and Eckstadt’s Battery Park City design. 12/14/2011 2:29:58 PM 646 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY However, New York in the 1970s was a fragmented metropolis in deep distress, with much of the regional economic activity dispersed to the edge cities along the Boston– Washington corridor that Jean Gottman identified as the megalopolis (1961). William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1992) challenged this presumption of generative autonomy. Cronon radically shifts the understanding of the metropolis as a rational and centralized artefact to a regional-global system which exploits natural resources according to economic and transportation logics at a continental scale. Chicago, a nineteenth century boom town on the frontier of America, is situated where the farms of the Midwest and the forests of the north meet the junction of the shipping infrastructure of the Great Lakes at the hub of the continental railway system. This confluence of history and geography produced an agglomeration of resources and demand at this pivotal hub between the resources of the west and the industrial urban east. In the case of Chicago, the opening up of the Great Plains by the railway companies and mechanized farming created a new breadbasket for the continent and world. This cornucopia was funnelled through Chicago and the Great Lakes, rapidly creating enormous wealth and a new boom town metropolis. Cronon’s portrait of Nature’s Metropolis can be extrapolated at a global scale as the world, according to World Systems Theory, was divided into centres, semi-peripheries and peripheries (Wallerstein 2004). At the centre of the metropolitan system there are relatively few large ‘mother cities’ like London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, New York and Tokyo. On the periphery are millions of peasants, tied to the land, whether under a rigid regime of passes, like the former apartheid regime in South Africa, or under similar Stalinist pass-book systems in Russia or under Mao’s strict huoku system of residency permits. In all these cases the majority of the population was detained as labour on the land away from the cities, as it was also in the colonial 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 646 regimes of the European powers. Within the metropolitan and colonial system, rulers wanted to keep people on the land to supply the cities and industries with the raw material they required. These imperial capitals or global trading centres stood at the heart of large colonial networks which fed down through a tree-like hierarchy of colonial towns, Canberra, New Delhi, Ottawa, Johannesburg, Hong Kong and Singapore, etc., in the case of the British Empire, to colonial territories and plantations. Earlier trading networks, like the Silk and Spice Routes from China to Europe, were subsumed within this system, with its classic ‘choke points’ of vulnerability, the Dardanelles at Istanbul, Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Homuz, the straits of malacca and the Panama Canal. Metropolitan theorists highlighted the railways, electricity and coal-fired plants that still provided the bulk of the energy and transport in the 1950s. The metabolism of the metropolis propelled the West to temporarily dominate the globe and provide a top-down rationalist social order to the streets. However, a century of carbon emissions, two world wars, and countless examples of social strife, revolution and unrest have demonstrated how vulnerable and unsustainable this urban model is as a global system. It can only support a relatively few urban centres in a world relegated to subsistence farming, low wages, and the exportation of natural resources to support the fortunate few metropolitan elite. In the next section, the social and spatial dimensions of the metropolis will be seen as reversed in the emergence of the post-war megalopolis, which reduced much of the social conflict of the top-down metropolis with its open, individualized social system, yet worsened the environmental impacts on the city, created fragmented social factions within the city and created new dimensions of class segregation. As we shall see, the megalopolis also produced a crisis for the role of the architect as the controller of the symbolic order and design imagination of the city. 12/14/2011 2:29:58 PM INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY THE MEGALOPOLIS In Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (1961) French geographer Jean Gottmann exhaustively maps the string of cities from Boston to Washington not as distinct metropolitan centres, but as a linked urban system. Gottmann, whose research ended just before the American civil unrest in the 1960s, celebrated the wealth and productivity of this new urban system, which housed the most prosperous, well educated and serviced social group – a population of over thirty million – that the world had ever seen. Gottmann asked his readers to ‘abandon the idea of the city as a tightly settled and organized unit in which people, activities, and riches are crowded into a very small area clearly separated form its non-urban surroundings’ – in other words, Gottmann asks us to abandon the limited image and anachronistic idea of the traditional metropolis, but unwittingly he also asks us to ignore the emerging underclass trapped in the soon to disappear industrial city. Gottmann took the term megalopolis from Spengler, the author of The Decline of the West (1937), who like Georg Simmel saw psychological and social dangers in the giant metropolis of his time (1903). For Gottmann, Americans appeared to have solved these problems and moved on to another level of spatial organization based on an image of freedom, mobility and interconnectivity through broadcast media and telephone communication. Entire city systems appeared as megalopolitan constellations in this analysis, whose low-rise landscape built on Geddes’ ‘Biopolis’ concept with its healthy ‘Valley Section’ described in his Cities in Evolution (1915). Reyner Banham saw Los Angeles as a geographically differentiated open ended urban megaform stretching across a huge agricultural basin between mountains and seaside in his Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). Banham also acknowledged ‘The Art of the Enclave’ in the creation of attractors in this new 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 647 647 symbolic landscape, like Disneyland or the many malls which constitute his citieswithin-city. He drew on Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969) that provided a method for handling huge regional landscapes through a layered geographical mapping analysis. Landscape and highway design provided the green veil as a new symbolic order for the sprawling megalopolis. In Megalopolis Revisited: 25 Years Later, Gottmann points to Japan as the location of the earliest and most enthusiastic adaptation of the concept (1987). Tokaido, the Tokyo-Osaka megalopolis, led the way in the 1960s, connected primarily by highspeed bullet trains. Similar interest was shown in the Benelux region and more recently in Italy (see Chapter 37). However, the metropolitan imagination emanating from Paris prevented the French from agreeing to politically re-centring the European Community around megalopolitan systems. The megalopolis also seemed logical to corporate architects working in fast-growing Asian cities, fuelled by Middle Eastern oil in the 1960s, who speculated that urban growth might also take on a new, spectacular, megaform. Gottmann’s recognition of a new urban model that emerged following the end of World War II was embraced by both architectural theorists and new forms of corporate practice. The Metabolist Group following Tange and his megastructural Tokyo Bay project of 1960 created a new urban language for the megalopolis. Fumihiko Maki introduced the term megaform and megastructure in his 1965 article ‘Some thoughts on collective form’, which showed his scheme for a new urban node at Shinjuku. Paul Rudolph had similar megastructural fantasies for Robert Moses’ New York. Reyner Banham’s 1976 Megastructures: Urban Futures of the Recent Past featured Rudolph’s scheme for a giant, mixed-use, housing A-frame over a sunken highway cutting across Soho and Tribeca in New York, leading to the twin octagonal towers of his World Trade Center with a huge, multi-storied mall in the base. 12/14/2011 2:29:58 PM 648 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY Theorists imagined such dense megaform structures as liberating the individual and providing freedom within new vast interior rather than traditional urban landscapes. Megaform theory also draws inspiration from the selfgenerative patterns and fine grained scale of the traditional city. In avant-garde circles this ideal combined with more libertarian social agendas as in the work of Dutch Situationist Constant Nieuwenhuys in his New Babylon project (1957–1974). Here a huge megaform structure on pilotis housed a network of small self-created social spaces floating over the bourgeois Benelux landscape. Cedric Price’s Fun Palace (1962–1963) was also a social utopia that imagined a megaform performance space for self-made cultural events, constantly readjusted to new social desires. Archigram’s work in London such as Peter Cook’s Plug-in City (1964) dreamt of permanent cranes moving housing capsules, all over a buried highway network. Piano and Rogers’ scheme for the Pompidou Centre in the old Marais district of Paris together with the demolition of the old markets to make way of the Forum Les Halles created a state sponsored high-tech, megastructural style for contemporary cultural and leisure space. 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 648 Such visions became reality as new commercial consumer paradises in oil-rich locations such as Los Angeles or Houston. Banham’s 1976 Megastructures book also contained Guy Obata of HOK’s design for the first American mega-mall with office towers and a hotel attached, above an Olympic size skating rink in the Galleria Houston (1967) five miles from the centre of town. Around 1990, a new round of cheap oil sponsored a megastructural revival in such schemes as Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center (1986–1988) in New York, SOM’s Canary Wharf in London (1988–1991), Piano’s Potsdam Platz (1990 onwards) in Berlin and Foster’s Al Faisaliah Tower complex in Riyadh (1994–2000), all containing both malls and towers. Later, high oil prices brought a new crop of megastructures in oil rich locations, like the $12 billion Moscow City new CBD Figure 36.2 (Below) This large expressway interchange constitutes the pulsing heart of contemporary Bangkok. It was designed by King Rama 9, in order to alleviate the chronic traffic congestion of the sprawling megalopolis. 12/14/2011 2:29:58 PM INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY with its Federation Tower outside central Moscow, or SOM’s design for the Burj Tower Dubai (2008). Other examples include Foster’s spectacular, pyramidal Palace of Peace and Reconciliation (2004–2006) and conical Khan Shatyry Entertainment Centre in Astana, Kazakhstan (2006–2008). Gottmann in his 1961 study of the megalopolis had noted the sprawling nature of the new city, referring to its ‘nebulous’ urban form. Urban theorists such as David Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John Myer in their View from the Road (1963) stressed the visual impact and cognitive mapping of the new highway networks in the megalopolis, giving rise to a new inner city and suburban mental geography. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas (1972) found new urban patterns and symbolic language in the autobased environment of parking lots, casinos and signage. These new patterns keyed the break down of the metropolis to the peripheral visual explosion of the megalopolis experienced at new scales and speeds. Joel Garreau’s Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (1991) highlighted the unplanned conglomerations of retail, commercial and office uses in emerging peripheral centres on orbital highways, like Tysons Corners outside Washington, DC. While the new political reality of the Cold War world system unleashed megalopolitan edge cities in the cities of the North, much of the post-colonial world experienced an implosion of uncontrolled urbanization in the global South. The first recognition of the vast self-built Latin American favelas was by Janice Perlman, author of The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (1976), who coined the term ‘megacity’ and later founded the Mega City Institute to study these urban conglomerations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The United Nations recognized these bottom-up new towns for the first time at the 1976 Habitat I in Vancouver, when self-help NGOs found an advocate in the work of the architect-theorist John Turner, author of 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 649 649 Housing By People (1977). In Mexico City, for instance, the government laid out the main infrastructural grid for the vast informal settlement of Chalco or Nezahualcoyotl (1990) but then left associations and individuals to build the dwellings as best they could. The World Bank in this period also encouraged ‘Sites and Services’ developments of local infrastructure, like B.V. Dhoshi’s self-build Aranya housing in Indore, India (1989), where families built their own houses within a service grid. Such housing projects designed by architects often quickly became gentrified and middle class, and represent only a tiny fraction of the enormous migrations to cities which accompanied the collapse of the European empires. For every new megaform construction in the developing world (like the Parque Central complex, Caracas), there was a shadow group form construction of selfbuilt and temporary accommodations for the workers (the barrios climbing the mountains in the planned Caracas green belt.) The partition of the British Raj produced a huge displaced population in India and both east and west Pakistan, while the European power’s creation of Israel fed Gaza and refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, intended as temporary but now sixty years old. Even in oil-rich states like Mexico and Venezuela, cities like Caracas and Mexico City quickly fell into housing crises despite the best efforts of modernist architects, sometimes working for military dictatorships, like Carlos Villaneuva in Caracas. Peasants moving to the city had to build their own houses as best they could in the 1950s, resulting in the emergence of huge informal barrios and favellas beside the formal city. Dharavi, in Mumbai is reputedly Asia’s largest self-built settlement. In a long established, previously peripheral informal village, a high-density, low-rise, mixed-use, highly productive downtown cottage industry enclave now sits across from the new financial district on some of Mumbai’s most valuable real estate. The UN adopted the term ‘megacity’ in 1986 and used it to refer to any city with over 12/14/2011 2:30:00 PM 650 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY ten million people rather than in the specific sense of overcrowded self-built group form extensions of fast-growing developing cities as coined by Perlman. This tends to conflate Tokyo and Cairo rather than see them as extremely different conurbations which have emerged coincidentally in the developed and developing world. While emerging in tandem, the megalopolis and megacity have considerably different ecological footprints. Dhavari recycles much of the city’s solid waste and despite appearances is much ‘greener’ than the oil-based megalopolis with its lush maintained foliage. The megalopolis, while an Eden of opportunity for corporate architecture, for the most part remained a dilemma for independent architects outside of corporate practice, as they no longer could command the formal order of the city as they did in the metropolis. The affluence and prosperity of the sprawling edge cities across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand can never be replicated worldwide, as it exhausts resources at a global rather than regional scale. The unchecked growth of the megalopolis with its design megastructures around the world is also shadowed by the sprawling group form of the megacities, which have grown exponentially with the loosening of the metropolitan colonial order. In the last section of this chapter, we will introduce the metacity as a new urban model, which represents the necessary transformation of the metropolis, megalopolis and megacity in the coming decades. The metacity radically shifts the role architects must take in creating the city of the future, based on a design imagination enriched by new methods and technologies of collaboration and communication. THE METACITY In his book Manhattan Transcripts (1981) architect Bernard Tschumi presented a radically different view the-twentieth-century 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 650 metropolis than Koolhaas’ Delirious New York. While Koolhaas nostalgically looked back to the spectacular architecture of the first half of the twentieth century in his retroactive manifesto, Tschumi closely examines the fragmented, crime-ridden and unrestricted hedonism of New York City at the moment of its deep economic distress, social unravelling and crisis of image. Following the Situationist’s psychogeographic dérives which critiqued and undermined the Hausmanian metropolitan order of Paris, Tschumi transcribes fictional events in Manhattan’s grid, Central Park and Times Square at the same time as Robert Moses’ great megalopolitan infrastructure is beginning to fall apart. One example of New York City’s state of deterioration is the partial collapse of Manhattan’s elevated West Side Highway in 1973. After its closure, the elevated structure, which ran parallel with the abandoned shipping warehouses which lined the Hudson River, became an informal linear elevated park. Pioneer plant species took root, the homeless camped out and adventurous joggers and dog walkers learned to enjoy the harbour breezes and river views from the top of the abandoned highway. While the West Side Highway and much of the pier buildings were demolished to make way for the emphatically megastructural, and unbuilt Westway project, a small parallel fragment of an elevated rail-line has been reborn as a park – the celebrated Highline design (selected September 2004) by Field Operations with Diller, Scofidio and Renfro. The collapse of the West Side Highway coincided with the rise of community activism in response to Moses’ ambitious plans for a regionally interconnected Greater New York. In the 1960s, Jane Jacobs, the author of Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) famously contributed to halting the Lower Manhattan Expressway which was planned to run through Soho and the ethnic neighbourhood of the South Village. In the 1980s, environmental activists stopped the massive Westway project in court based on 12/14/2011 2:30:00 PM INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY evidence of fish spawning in the pilings of the old piers and set in motion the building of the Hudson River Park. The metacity was born in the exhaustion of metropolitan and megalopolitan urban models, the rise of the demands of activism in civil rights and environmentalism and the emergence of new sensing, communication and imaging technologies. The revival of metropolitan architecture appealed to tourist circuits of global elites and for staging spectacular events such as the Beijing Olympics, but the controlled world order and legibility of the metropolis could never be fully resurrected. The megalopolis as well came to a severe crisis with the growing scarcity of oil, and the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels finally acknowledged at the Kyoto Accords of 1998. The term ‘metacity’ appeared in a millennial anxiety about overpopulation and renewed fears of the limits of growth, and for UN-HABITAT it refers to cities with a population over twenty million (2006). But the size of a few extra large cities is not the important question of the metacity, and population predictions have been consistently overestimated. For us the metacity does not refer to an extra-large conurbation, but an urbanization of the entire planet – including 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 651 651 what was thought of as ‘village’, ‘rural’ or ‘remote’ – through new models of mobility and communication. The metacity implies that which exists above and beyond the traditionally defined city, metropolis and territory, when urban form becomes unbounded, uncontrolled and at once urban and rural, and everywhere is both centre and periphery. If the megalopolis and megacity were created by the political unbounding of the colonial world system, the metacity emerged according to the logic of late global capital and the new information and communication technology tools which allowed for new forms of both concentration and dispersal. Recent development has been led by aggressive speculation and profit-seeking during a time of deregulation of global financial systems. This new global city based on the Figure 36.3 (Below) Modern Bangkok has engulfed hundreds of agricultural villages in its uncontained growth. Ban Krua, shown here, was given to the Muslim Cham community outside the walls of the royal city, but today stands in the way of a planned expressway to connect to the spectacular malls of the Siam Central Shopping District. 12/14/2011 2:30:00 PM 652 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY dynamic generation of urban form through credit, risk and capital speculation has occurred at a moment where nature itself has been reconceived in a more dynamic way. Contemporary theories of disturbance ecology give us an understanding of nature neither in balance nor equilibrium, but in a constant state of flux. The ecology of the metacity should be understood as a complex adaptive system in disequilibrium, and the social actors of the city are seen as an integral part rather than separated from nature. Following on Saskia Sassen’s work on global cities (2001 [1991]) and Peter J. Taylor’s studies of the global networks, relationships, ranking and hierarchies of cities (1995), architects became aware of the differentiation of functions between cities and within cities. Urban geographers like Ed Soja, studying Los Angeles initially (1989), and later more global systems in Postmetropolis (2000), emphasized both the multiple nodes of the global system with its linked networks, and the differentiation of patches within cities, as each patch linked in to different urban systems that had different global links. Patch dynamics is an urban ecological framework that emerged at the same time for modelling urban ecosystems (McGrath et al. 2007). Architectural theorists of the city were slow to spot the emergence of this new hybrid world because of their preoccupation with built form in contrast to nature and natural processes. The interval between two international competitions for the old slaughterhouse district of La Villette in Paris marks a turning point in the professional design imagination. The first competition was explicitly metropolitan in conception, and the scheme by Leon Krier, which received a special prize, imagines a reconstitution of the legible residential quarter of the nineteenth-century metropolis. His plan for housing development was never developed, and instead a new competition for a ‘park of the twenty-first century’ was commissioned. In both Bernard Tschumi’s and OMA’s projects there is evidence of a new form of 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 652 architectural practice based in the open space of the city as a field of unpredictable events which radically undermined the carefully constructed nature of Paris’ metropolitan parks. These projects linked back to Unger’s City Archipelago projects (1977) for Berlin that set high density urban fragments into Berlin’s low rise archipelago of islands, lakes and forests. In the data rich social democracy of the Netherlands, architect Winny Maas together with MVRDV developed an exhibition and catalogue Meta City/Data Town (1999) and became the first architects to theorize the metacity. Meta City/Data Town examines the three-dimensional consequences of the increased urbanization at global, national and meta scales. Their data town is site-less, and is modelled directly from statistics on population trends, needs of water, food and natural resources, as well as social experimentation. MRDV used the ‘metacity’ term to describe a city that was primarily only a pile of statistics and data, recording the presence of hidden patterns inside a huge urban conurbation, housing masses of people. Their idea was that from a properly organized analysis of these data a cellular, fractal structure of flows would emerge, which could be tweaked just a little by the architect to create a new urban architecture of flows. But the metacity thrives in all corners of the world where data, indoor plumbing and architectural statements are rare, but electricity, televisions and mobile phones are ubiquitous. Urban environmentalists were quick to question the megalopolitan cult of bigness, and had their own cult of ‘small is beautiful’ (Schumacher 1973), justified in part by the rapid miniaturization of electronic devices that altered energy supply possibilities (making miniaturized solar power and wind generation possible), beside facilitating communications between individuals in social networks (aiding bottom-up organization and NGOs). Environmentalists were also much more aware of the differentiation of patches in the city, as in John Seymour and Herbert 12/14/2011 2:30:01 PM INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY Giradet’s Blueprint for a Green Planet (1987) that rigorously explored urban systems, their energy sources, their enclaves of production and consumption, their flow systems, intakes and exhausts. They emphasized the limits of the earth’s carrying capacity and measured urban impacts on ecological systems in an open, visual and accessible way. Girardet’s Cities, People, Planet (2004) places a big emphasis on urban agriculture and shows how this emerging hybrid morphology extends from Beijing to Cuba to Russia, Europe and even North America. Informal economic systems, farmers’ markets and cooperatives also are acknowledged, as are self-organizing NGO groups in barrios, favellas and ranchos in South America that both provide food and education and seek to improve housing. Terry G. McGee coined the term desakota (desa=village + kota=city) studies in the Indonesian archipelago, showing how different urban actors chose different mixes of urban and rural activities, responding to both local and global conditions, changing quickly and never well regulated by the authorities (McGee and Yeung 1977; McGee 1991). Stephen Cairns (2003) writes that this hybrid Indonesian archipelago functioned as an international entrepot based on indigenous cultural practices, mixing agriculture, urbanization and international trade without central regulation, creating a powerful, localglobal ‘sorting machine’. This desakota/rur-urban mixture ranges from Japan’s rice production areas to China’s SEZs in the fertile Pearl River and Yangtze Deltas or Bangkok’s industrialized Eastern seaboard, forming the fabric of many Asian megacities. The UN-HABITAT programme studied design approaches to this hybrid situation in a variety of Asian cities in its Urban Trialogues, undertaken with KU Leuven’s Post Graduate Centre for Human Settlements (Loeckx et al. 2004). David Sattherthwaite at the IIES together with Shanty Dwellers International (SDI) has also attempted to publicize bottom-up strategies that can help in this rur-urban fabric in an 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 653 653 up-grading approach, without destroying their hybrid and mixed nature. While the European and North American metropolis ages, sprawls, fragments or shrinks, Asian, Latin American and African cities now dominate the urbanizing world. Only immigrants and their children are responsible for the continued population growth of New York, Toronto, Los Angeles or Vancouver. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are at the cusp of a demographic decline similar to Europe. The global corporate trading system is currently being restructured to reflect this demographic shift, with a redistribution of functions from command and control systems and centres (London, New York, Tokyo, etc.) to a new fractal system of secondary cities and out-sourcing back offices (see also Chapter 22). Problems with the scarcity and environmental impact of oil demand new energy and natural resource management models that will greatly impact city life and form. New modes of distribution mean restructuring highways, trucking, container ports and airports. Our theory of the metacity is qualitatively different than just an extra-large city or big architecture. It is not just a question of hybridity and heterogeneity, mixture versus mono-functional zoning. The difference is the agency and reflexivity empowered by new media. Distant people can measure the differences between mixtures in patches or islands of the archipelago and make informed choices about their desires, goals and movement paths. Bottom-up participants play an increased role in this new city archipelago, evaluating and trying new mixtures. The metropolis, megalopolis and megacity are reconfigured in the metacity as is the role of architecture in this new multi-form rather than mega-form environment. Architects find themselves now designing the relations between urban islands and monitoring new mixtures in the reverse archipelago rather than just focusing on the architecture of the fragments themselves as Rossi and Rowe advocated. Most of our metacity is locally generated or reorganized through bottom-up 12/14/2011 2:30:01 PM 654 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY social organization, and it is the relations and management of these fragments and hybrid mixtures in heterotopias that is the new horizon for architecture (Foucault 2007 [1967]; Shane 2005; Dehaene and De Cauter 2008). New media and communications systems – both close-up and remote – provide tools for offering architectural services to a wider range of actors than the current client-based system of the metropolitan architect or the corporate designer of the megalopolis. Representation takes on a new role of persuasion and of altering cognitive images of the city, rather than in articulating specialized units of construction. CONCLUSION The metropolis, megalopolis and metacity models each constitute specific theories, representations, and speculations about the city 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 654 as well as distinct ways of theorizing the role of the architect in shaping embodied urban experiences and imagination. Our three models represent world views as well as attempts to maintain cities as respectively controlled (metropolis), open (megalopolis), or complex adaptive systems (metacity). The metropolis was a primary instrument of modernization and the uneven redistribution of resources at a world scale. It emerged at the height of the European colonial world system and its metabolism was based on coal, steam and resource extrapolation based on a peasantry bound to the periphery. Figure 36.4 (Below left and right) Photo collage of the raised plaza in front of Siam Paragon, one of the largest shopping centres in Southeast Asia. The mall fronts the central exchange station of the Bangkok Transit Systems Skytrain, and contains a giant aquarium in the lower levels. 12/14/2011 2:30:01 PM INTRODUCTION: METROPOLIS, MEGALOPOLIS AND METACITY It culminated in the architectural splendour of world capitals – London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, as well as major trading and industrial centres – New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, São Paolo, and Barcelona, but collapsed in the totalitarian military fascisms centred on Berlin, Rome and Tokyo. The spatial imagination of designers in the metropolis, the symbolic centre for civic order, was restricted and controlled. While the old walls that defined the traditional city came down in Paris and Beijing during the construction of the modern metropolis, it is still a conceptually and legally bounded entity, whose form is strictly maintained by centralized planning and land use control. Zoning dictates where the city ends and the countryside begins, and regulates the relative importance of institutions and individuals in a strictly hierarchical social order. Residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural uses are ideally separated and coded according to 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 655 655 status, and the city’s growth is controlled by incremental change in the land use. The metropolis is top-down and modernist, a product of enlightenment thinking. It forms a legible and rational tree structure at a global scale, a centralized hierarchical colonial world system. The architect is both the master planner and master builder of the metropolis, and contemporary urban theorists and practitioners nostalgically embrace this patriarchal and heroic role. However, social theories of the metropolis after Simmel (1903) point to the psycho-social diversity which emerges within this hierarchical, closed system, that continually put its ordering systems in crisis and risk. Heterotopias remain the masked, cloaked or hyper spaces of change for those people and activities which are excluded, the metropolitan other. Designers in the megalopolis sought to house the complex organizational spaces of the new socio-economic order of the network city, with its deregulation, capital accumulation, 12/14/2011 2:30:03 PM 656 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY individual freedom and mobility. But its metabolism is powered by burning oil and its Cold War politics are based on the continuous supply of natural resources, consumer products and credit. Both flows of oil and capital require strict global military management at great expense. Gottmann’s brilliant re-conception of the metropolis as a city network imagined the northeast seaboard of the US as a new spatial model, the megalopolis, even before the interstate highway system legislated by President Eisenhower in 1956 had its imprint. Gottmann recognized Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC – BosWash – as a polynucleated network rather than a centralized system, linked by telephone communication and television broadcast. The most successful practising architects of the megalopolis became the org-men who can command the corporate architectural firms that serve the commercial and institutional megastructures of the megalopolis, from Victor Gruen, Eliel Saarinen to Wallace Harrison and today’s faceless alphabet soup of global mega-firms: SOM, HOK, NBBJ, etc. Large fragmentary heterotopias that had been the basis of change in the periphery of the megalopolis, malls, office parks and theme parks, began to mutate, proliferating everywhere across the city network, empowered by hand-held and desk-top informational devices. The megacity grew in parallel with the megalopolis, its implosion of growth from deregulated rural migrations in the global South reversed the explosion of suburban sprawl in the global North. The fragmentation of metropolitan order and rise of the massive scale and logics of the networked megalopolis led to a new wired spatial imagination and theories of architectural resistance – from the PR savvy, radical neighbourhood movement and micro-economics of Jane Jacobs to the self-reflexive anarchitecture of Gordon Matta Clark. The metacity grows out of the limits of the fossil fuel logics of the metropolis and the megalopolis as well as their structural fragmentation and unbounding. The new figure of the metacity 5633-Crysler-Ch36.indd 656 architect is the designer and communicator of the relationships between the anarchy of the fragments, adept at complex urban ecosystem thinking through new close-up and remote technologies. Now designers’ skills must also include navigating the ecologies of our urban dreams and desires, and articulating these dreams as powerful images back in the collective mediated realm of the city as desirable public goals. The following chapters address particular issues within the tension between these three concurrent city models. Paola Viganò describes in Chapter 37 the fragmentation and dispersal of the new megalopolitan archipelagos around the unbounded European metropolis; she articulates the morphological change from metropolis to megalopolis at the territorial scale which represents new relationships between city, power and nature that constitute the important urban project for contemporary architects in Europe. Vyjayanthi Rao in Chapter 38 critiques the discourse of the megacity slum as theory and instead points to the megacity as an archipelago of self generated local systems and sites of design research and practice. Deborah Natsios in Chapter 39 looks at the fragmented and dispersed metacity in a post-9/11 geopolitical context. She cautions on the psychological realm of the political landscape of security that accompanies the reorganization of the Cold War megalopolis in a period of America’s endless War on Terror. She argues for a new ‘open city’ and a new civic commons aided by the same technologies that seek to reassert national sovereignty and municipal order. Together, these three chapters fill in our sketch of the co-situational emergence of the metropolis, megalopolis and metacity as a layered psycho-socio-natural system and provide both detailed substantiation and caution to the limitations of our models. 12/14/2011 2:30:05 PM
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Running head: REFLECTION AND QUESTIONS ON ARTICLES

Reflection and Questions on Articles
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REFLECTION AND QUESTIONS ON ARTICLES

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Reflection and Questions on Articles
Article One: From the City to the Urban Society
Reflection
In the article “From the City to the Urban Society,” the author investigates whether or not the
society has been completely urbanized. He argues that the process of urbanization resulted in the
development of large cities that were characterized by suburbs, satellite towns, residential areas,
and massive industrial zones. He views the concept of urban society to have far reaching impact
on both the environment and socio-cultural lif...


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