The New_New City

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The New, New City

Sze Tsung Leong for The New York Times

NEW SHENZHEN ENCIRCLES OLD: In the center, one of the citys original urbanvillages, with its signature handshake buildings so close together you could reachacross to your neighbor.

ByNICOLAI OUROUSSOFFPublished: June 8, 2008

Dont tell anyone, Rem Koolhaas said to me several years ago as we headed down theF.D.R. Drive in New York, but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new toteach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it. Koolhaass viewpoint is widelyshared by close observers of the evolution of cities. But not even Koolhaas, it seems,was completely prepared for what would come next.

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Sze Tsung Leong for The New York Times

The Frontier: Southwestern Shenzhen under construction.

In both China and the Persian Gulf, cities comparable in size to New York havesprouted up almost overnight. Only 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a small fishing villageof a few thousand people, and Dubai had merely a quarter million people. TodayShenzhen has a population of eight million, and Dubais glittering towers, rising out ofthe desert in disorderly rows, have become playgrounds for wealthy expatriates fromRiyadh and Moscow. Long-established cities like Beijing and Guangzhou have morethan doubled in size in a few decades, their original outlines swallowed by rings of newdevelopment. Built at phenomenal speeds, these generic or instant cities, as they have

been called, have no recognizable center, no single identity. It is sometimes hard tothink of them as cities at all. Dubai, which lays claim to some of the worlds mostexpensive private islands, the tallest building and soon the largest theme park, has beenderided as an urban tomb where the rich live walled off from the poor migrant workerswho serve them. Shenzhen is often criticized as a product of unregulated development,

better suited to the speculators that first spurred its growth than to the workers housed in

huge complexes of factory-run barracks. Yet for architects these cities have also becomevast fields of urban experimentation, on a scale that not even the early Modernists, whofirst envisioned the city as a field of gleaming towers, could have dreamed of.

The old contextual model is not very relevant anymore, Jesse Reiser, an Americanarchitect working in Dubai, told me recently. What context are we talking about in acity thats a few decades old? The problem is that we are only beginning to figure outwhere to go from here.

The sheer number of projects under construction and the corresponding investment incivic infrastructure entire networks of new subway systems, freeways and canals;

gargantuan new airports and public parks can give the impression that anything ispossible in this new world. The scale of these undertakings recalls the early part of thelast century in America, when the country was confidently pointed toward the future.But it would be unimaginable in an American city today, where, in the face of shrinkingstate and city budgets, expanding a single subway line can seem like a heroic act. InAmerica, I could never do work like I do here, Steven Holl, a New York architect withseveral large projects in China, recently told me, referring to his latest complex inBeijing. Weve become too backward-looking. In China, they want to make everythinglook new. This is their moment in time. They want to make the 21st century theircentury. For some reason, our society wants to make everything old. I think wesomehow lost our nerve.
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Holl has reason to be exhilarated. His Beijing project, Linked Hybrid, is one of themost innovative housing complexes anywhere in the world: eight asymmetrical towers

joined by a network of enclosed bridges that create a pedestrian zone in the sky. Yet thisexhilaration also comes at a price: only the wealthiest of Beijings residents can affordto live here. Climbing to the top of one of Holls towers, I looked out through a haze of

smog at the acres of luxury-housing towers that surround his own, the kind of alienatingsubdivisions that are so often cited as a symptom of the citys unbridled, dehumanizingdevelopment. Protected by armed guards, these residential high-rises stood on what wasuntil quite recently a working-class neighborhood, even though the poor quality of theirconstruction makes them seem decades old. Nearby, a new freeway cut through theneighborhood, further disfiguring an area that, however modest, was once bursting withlife.

If you take Venturis ideas about the city, Holl said, referring to Robert Venturisgroundbreaking work, Learning From Las Vegas, which called on architects toreconsider the importance of the everyday (strip malls, billboards, storefronts), and put

them in Beijing or Tokyo, they dont hold any water at all. When you get into this scale,the rules have to be rewritten. The density is so incredible. Because of this density,cities like Beijing have few of the features we associate with a traditional metropolis.They do not radiate from a historic center as Paris and New York do. Instead, their vastsize means that they function primarily as a series of decentralized neighborhoods,something closer in spirit to Los Angeles. The breathtaking speed of their constructionmeans that they usually lack the layers the mix of architectural styles and intricatelyrelated social strata that give a city its complexity and from which architects havetypically drawn inspiration.

In Dubai, for instance, what might once have been the product of 100 years of urbangrowth has been compressed into a decade or so. Given such seismic shifts, even themost talented architects can seem to flounder for new models. No one wants to return tothe deadly homogeneity associated with Modernisms tabula rasa planning strategies.The image ofLe Corbusierhovering godlike above Paris ready to wipe aside entiredistricts and replace them with glass towers remains an emblem of Modernisms attackon the citys historical fabric. Yet the notion of finding authenticity in a sprawlingmetropolitan area that is barely 30 years old also seems absurd. How do you breathe lifeinto a project at such a scale? How do you instill the fine-grained texture of a healthycommunity into one that rose overnight?

Cities like these, built on a colossal scale, seem to absorb any urban model, no matterhow unique, virtually unnoticed. A project that could have a significant impact on thecharacter of, say, New York like the development plans for ground zero can seema mere blip in Beijing, which has embarked on dozens of similarly sized endeavors inthe last decade alone. The irony is that we still dont know if postmodernism was theend of Modernism or just an interruption, Koolhaas told me recently. Was it a briefhiatus, and now we are returning to something that has been going on for a long time, oris it something radically different? We are in a condition we dont understand yet.

For architects faced with building these large urban developments, the difficulty is tocreate something where there was nothing. If much of contemporary architecture

depends on sifting through the cultural and historical layers that a site accumulates over
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time whether neo-Classical monuments or Socialist-era housing what can be doneif there is nothing to sift through but sand?

In a recent design for a six-and-a-half-square-mile development in Dubai calledWaterfront City, Koolhaas proposed creating an urban island inspired by a section of

Midtown Manhattan. The design linked a dense grid of conventional towers to themainland by a system of bridges. A series of stunning iconic buildings a gigantic,hollowed-out Piranesian sphere at the islands edge; a spiraling tower that winds aroundan airy public atrium were intended to give the city a distinct flavor. Koolhaas saidhe hoped, in this way, to infuse this entirely new development with something of thefeeling of an older city. But while the outlines are intriguing, he is still coming to termswith how to create an organic whole. In the early stages of the design, Koolhaasexperimented with somewhat conventional models of public space: a boardwalk alongthe islands perimeter, a narrow park cutting through its center, classical arcades liningthe downtown streets. But the majority of Dubais inhabitants are foreign-born, and thearcaded streets could easily suggest a theme-park version of a traditional Arab city.

Koolhaas is painfully aware of how hard it is to escape the generic.

A city like Dubai is literally built on a desert, Koolhaas conceded when I asked himabout the project. There is a weird alternation between density and emptiness. Yourarely feel that you are designing for people who are actually there but for communitiesthat have yet to be assembled. The vernacular is too faint, too precarious to becomesomething on which you can base an architecture.

Koolhaas says he hopes that the plan will gain in complexity as the buildings functionsare worked out; he says he was thrilled to learn that the government wanted both acourthouse and a mosque on the island. Another option that I personally find veryinteresting, Koolhaas told me, is the modernist vernacular of the 1970s buildingsthat once you put them in Singapore or Dubai take on totally different meanings. Someof the modern typologies work in Asia even though they are totally dysfunctional inAmerica. Typologies weve rejected turn out to be viable in other contexts.

The challenges ofbuilding what amounts to a small-scale city from scratch arecompounded by the realities of working in a global marketplace. An architect ofKoolhaass stature may be grappling simultaneously with the design of a televisionheadquarters complex in Beijing, a stock exchange in Shenzhen and a 20-blockneighborhood in Dubai, as well as a dozen buildings in Europe. The intense competition

for these commissions means that architects are often forced to churn out seductivedesigns in weeks or months, tweaking their models to fit local conditions.

Several years ago, the London-based, Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadidreceived a phonecall from a Chinese developer asking if she might be interested in designing a 500-acreurban development on the outskirts of Singapore. Hadid had never met the developer

before. She was soon working on the master plan for One North, a mixed-usedevelopment with a projected population of about 140,000. Located on what was once amilitary site, Hadids design conjured a high-tech mountainous terrain. Dubbed theurban carpet, it was intended to blend office and residential towers and highways and

public parks into a seamless whole. Against the rigid lines of the traditional street grid,

the sinuous curves of the freeways suggested a more fluid, mobile society. The rooftops,whose heights were subject to stringent regulations, looked as if they were cut from a
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single piece of crumpled fabric, giving the composition a haunting unity. We wanted tocreate a complex order rather than either the monotony of Modernism or the chaos youfind in contemporary cities, Hadid said.

Yet once construction began, the design of the buildings was left to local architects

hired by the developer. As the towers rose in clusters scattered across the site, it wasdifficult to read the formal intent. With more than 20 blocks now complete, parts of thecity look surprisingly conventional.

Hadid revived the concept several years later, when she won a competition to create a1,360-acre business district in a former industrial zone on the outskirts of Istanbul. Thistime, the context was more promising: a hilly landscape at the edge of the sea flanked

by older working-class neighborhoods on either side. To allow the development to growin a more natural way than at One North, it would be built in phases that would begin atthe waterfront and spread inland, eventually connecting to the street grid of the olderneighborhoods. In an effort to preserve the texture of her original concept, Hadid

developed a series of building prototypes, including a star-shaped tower and a housingblock organized around a central court, and staggered the heights of the buildings toreflect the existing terrain.

If Hadids plan is formally inventive, it is still unclear whether it has escaped thehomogeneity that was a hallmark of Modernist urban-renewal projects. Its sheer sizecoupled with the fact that the shapes of the buildings were conceived by a singlearchitect means the result may well be more uniform, and ultimately more rigid, thanHadid intended.

Indeed, contemporary architects urban plans may be less tied to location than theywould like to admit. When a Chinese developer approached the New York-based JesseReiser and Nanako Umemoto to design a 1,235-acre development in Foshan, on thePearl River Delta, they (with a Chinese partner) came up with a system of urban mats:a multilayered network of roads and low-rise commercial spaces, topped by a parksurrounded by residential and commercial buildings. The park followed the contours ofthe roadways below; sunken courtyards allowed light to spill down into theunderground spaces. Last year, the Chinese project fell through, and Reiser andUmemoto reworked the idea for a developer in Dubai. The layout was reconfigured tofit the new waterfront site; souks were added as a nod to local traditions. The result is aremarkably nuanced view of how to knit together the various elements of urban life, but

it also seems as if it could exist anywhere.

The walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods celebrated by Jane Jacobs may seemimpossibly remote, but encouraging signs of a more textured urban reality can still befound. Take Holls Linked Hybrid in Beijing, for example, which has a surprisinglyopen, communal spirit. A series of massive portals lead from the street to an elaborateinternal courtyard garden, a restaurant, a theater and a kindergarten, integrating thecomplex into the surrounding neighborhood. Bridges connect the towers 12 to 19 storiesabove ground and are conceived as a continuous string of public zones, with bars andnightclubs overlooking a glittering view of the city and a suspended swimming pool.The developers openness to ideas was amazing, Holl says. When they first asked

me to do the project, it was just housing. I suggested adding the cinematheque, thekindergarten. I added an 80-room hotel and the swimming pool as well. Anywhere else,
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theyd build it in phases over several years. Its too big. After our meeting, they saidwere building the whole thing all at once. I couldnt believe it. We havent had tocompromise anything.

But what makes it possible is the density. The Modernist idea of the street in the air

that became a place of social interaction never worked in Europe. Beijing is so densethat I can keep all of the shops functioning on the street, and theres still enough energyto activate the bridges as well.

Holl is continuing to explore these ideas in another megaproject, this time on theoutskirts of Shenzhen: a zigzag-shaped office complex propped up on big steel columnsthat make room for a dreamy public garden. The density in much of Shenzhen can makeBeijing look spacious. The imposing skyline of glass-and-steel towers, plastered withelectronic billboards, was built mostly within the last decade, part of the boom thatfollowed foreign investment in the area, when it was declared a special economic zonein the early 80s. The Chinese government initially allowed many of the small villages

that lined the delta to hold on to their land. As land values rose around them, thevillagers remained in their increasingly populated districts, where they built cheap, andoften instantly decrepit, towers that were so close together they were dubbedhandshake buildings: you could literally reach out your window and shake hands withyour neighbor across the street. The villages are poignant testimonies to the hardshipsthat young workers, recently transplanted from the countryside, face in the new China.Many live packed a half dozen or more in one-bedroom apartments. But if Shenzhen isan emblem of what can happen when free-market capitalism is allowed to run amok, itis also an example of the spontaneous creativity that occurs when people are left to fendfor themselves. On a recent visit, the alleyways, dark and claustrophobic, were thickwith shops. Elderly people played mah-jongg on card tables in the street; two youngchildren sat at a small desk doing their homework in a tiny storefront that doubled astheir bedroom.

Wenyi Wu, a young architect working for a Chinese firm called Urbanus, led me aroundthe area. The firm has been studying how people carve a living space out of seeminglyinhospitable environments, hoping to develop an urbanist model more deeply rooted inthe spontaneity of everyday life. He took me to a small museum Urbanus designed onthe outskirts of the city. A series of stepped galleries stand at the base of a hill betweenan urban village and some banal housing complexes above. A series of long ramps

pierce the building, joining the two worlds. More ramps encircle the exterior, so that

you have the impression of moving through a system of loosely connected alleyways.The idea was to transform the unregulated character of the urban village into somethingmore formal and humane to extract the essence of its character without romanticizingthe squalor. The circuitous paths of the ramps echo the surrounding alleyways; thelayout of the galleries suggests the footprint of the migrant workers housing but on amore intimate scale.

Other architects, hoping to build in ways that reflect an emerging vernacular, are takinga similar approach, looking at more modest and more informally constructed urbanneighborhoods for inspiration. Shumon Basar, a London-based critic and independentcurator, recently described a number of small, unplanned settlements in and around

Dubai. The dense and gritty neighborhood of Deira, for instance, has little in commonwith Sheikh Zayed Road and its fortified glass towers. Built mainly in the 1970s,


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Deiras low concrete structures and labyrinthine alleyways are home to a livelypopulation of Southeast Asian workers. Similarly, the thriving, traditionally Muslimmiddle-class neighborhoods of Sharjah, the third-largest city in the United ArabEmirates, were built without the flashiness of more recent developments. Basar wondersif, despite their modesty, these areas could form the basis for a fresh urban strategy

based neither on imported Western models nor on clichs about local souks.

As Holl told me recently in his New York office, working on a large scale doesnt meanthat the particulars of place no longer matter. I dont think of any of my buildings as amodel for something, the way the Modernists did, Holl said. If it works, it works in itsspecific context. You cant just move it somewhere else.

But is site specificity enough? The amount of building becomes obscene without ablueprint, Koolhaas said. Each time you ask yourself, Do you have the right to do thismuch work on this scale if you dont have an opinion about what the world should belike? We really feel that. But is there time for a manifesto? I dont know.

(Nicolai Ouroussoff is the architecture critic of The New York Times.)

1.JuliansMalaysiaJune 9th, 20086:48 amI've only two words - New Mombasa.http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/New_MombasaI'd love to live there!Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers2.

jNYCJune 9th, 20086:48 amdense, hopefully very denseRecommend Recommended by 1 Reader3.

benjaminhart

SingaporeJune 9th, 20089:01 amAs a 10+ year resident of Beijing, I can say without heistation that what the architectsand developers are doing to the landscape there is nothing short of experimental hubris.It is all "Look at Me!" architecture. None of it takes into account the single mostimportant element in design: the human being. In a truly modern context, with a wholehost of social and environmental issues involved in urban planning and development,what is happening in Beijing today will most certainly be seen in the future as a modelof what NOT to do.

Finally, it is an utter falacy to described what is happening in Beijing as a result of"density" related issues, as the entire city is being built OUTWARD, due to the vast
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available spaces surrounding it. The architect Holl clearly has not spent sustained timeassessing development there. Because if he had, he also would have seen that thenumerous "bridging" concepts that have been tried in the city previously haveuniversally failed.Recommend Recommended by 4 Readers

4.ruthazerMontreal, QCJune 9th, 20089:01 amI remember Shenzhen when the first skyscraper went up. It was a huge dirt field thatcould have been an airport runway. It was built because it is the closest point inmainland China to Hong Kong. One day HK and Shenzhen will probably merge intoone massive metropolitan area. Interestingly Shenzhen is filled with transplants from allover China whereas HK is filled with original Cantonese. This will lead to an awkwardcultural clash of new and old.

Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader5.sarathkannurindiaJune 9th, 20089:01 amAs the urban scenario evolves ,the urban context do so to a form of decentralised urbanenvironment rendering the central business district redundant .An office can beanywhere in an non specific agglomeration of working ,living and leisure spaces,seamlessly integrated as the urban land scape. Communications have evolved andreached a point to make proximity to activty a non issue to many business services andthe environment has to evolve to accomaodate that freedom. Dubai can easily fit the billand more cities will reinvent themselves on these lines and crumpling walls of older,dilpidated buildings will be brought down and replced by newer and more responsiveliving and working spaces.The established infrastructure of older cities offer litte scopefor manuevour from a primarly work oriented centre to a more widely defined place ofwork with an emphasis on leisure and social interaction.Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers6.DiscotecaChicago, IL

June 9th, 20089:55 amIt's ugly and suffocating.Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers7.Tuf PakBrooklynJune 9th, 200810:31 amI'm an architect working in Shenzhen presently and what I find fascinating aboutdevelopment in Shenzhen is that its public sphere thrives despite the best efforts of

developers and planners. In the numerous "Urban Villages", there's a depth to the urbancontributions of them that Mr. Ouroussoff only lightly touches on.
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The crazy single-mindedness of current Chinese planning (especially, in my experience,in Shenzhen)puts all of the focus of the development in the expansive center-city onwestern style trappings of upper middle-class living.

New gated residential tower blocks, shopping malls, and massive cross-cityexpressways, at present, seem to absorb all the energy of thought and construction in thecity. At first blush the malls seem busy and successful, but viewed in the context of oneof the worlds largest and most densely populated cities, they're really drawing a tiny,tiny segment of the local population.

Shenzhen (and the zh is pronounced sort of like a hard J, not a soft Z) draws almost allof it's public/social energy from the perimeters of these impossibly lively UrbanVillages. I would abandon the notion that this view is somehow a pretentiousromanticizing of the impoverished state. Where the new districts of tower blocks abutthese engorged traditional villages there is an explosion of life, commercial choice,

street activity and energy, and opportunity. These villages are where 50% of the urbanpopulation lives (mainly because this is where the less well off can afford to live asthere's a dearth of new low-income construction in the city's center, and most internalmigrants are illegal residents of the city, without residential/city services privileges).They're also generators of massive wealth for those original villagers that hold the rightsof residence to those pieces of land.

To me the greatest planning injustice is the systematic isolation of these neighborhoodsfrom the greater city via the present city planning assumptions: primarily giantexpressways, remarkably detached from even the new city, break the city into acheckerboard of almost inaccessible super-blocks, with deeply stupid pedestrian andlocal vehicle interconnections. When these neighborhood types are detached from oneanother, they lose the potency of interactions provided by that boundary and simply

become ghettos of one type or another (either lifeless ghettos of luxury living, or littleislands of the illegal and impoverished). Couple this increasing ghettoization with amyopic focus on a massive, but already overtaxed, automobile-fixated transportationsystem, and the city is designing for itself a crisis.

It's fascinating that the neighborhoods that seem to draw our attention asarchitects/urbanists/developers are those that evolve in the absence of, or despite our

best efforts as architects, planners, and developers.

Shenzhen is growing so fast, from 30,000 or so residents when my partner in businesswas born there, to something approaching 11 million today.Recommend Recommended by 9 Readers8.Maria24Ft. LauderdaleJune 9th, 200811:21 amRecognizing those urban villages as districts and giving them civic importanceregardless of their economic stature is what is going to safeguard them from lowly

categorization and dismiss them as something transient. Human interaction is what
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makes the cities lively, whether rich and not so rich, one has to consider everyone in thescheme of things.Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader

9.Joe

Costa Mesa CAJune 9th, 200811:21 amThe Chinese city planners seem to have gone on too many one-week trips to LA,thinking that this was the model of a successful modern city. Now at nearing $5.00/galfor gas we are finding it doesn't work. But I'll bet Shenzhen even with all itsexpressways will also have a functional subway system far faster than LA.Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers

10.HIGHLIGHT (What's this?)Forest

MassachusettsJune 9th, 200811:48 amLess automobiles and a more extensive and efficient public transportation system andhopefully with more green spaces, especially on the roofs of buildings - how cool wouldit be if the future city transformed itself from a stiffling, concrete jungle to a 21stcentury version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.Recommend Recommended by 14 Readers11.liznew hampshireJune 9th, 200811:55 amhere's hoping it has plenty of space for residents to grow their own food.Recommend Recommended by 7 Readers12.Lark

New OrleansJune 9th, 200811:55 amIf any architects will come to their senses, the New City will look like an Older City;

Boston, London, even poor New Orleans (where I'm from). These cities intersct at thestreet level, are pedestrian friendly, bike friendly, excellent public transportation,neighborhood shopping...And lots and lots of green. Trees, parks, green space. Refreshing to the eye and soul.London has the neighborhood park, a town square gated and locked as a communalgiant back yard for a neighborhood as a social unit. New Orleans is still, in places, a cityof ancient oak trees sheilding it from the glare of a sub tropical sun and making thetwenty minute power walk to a dental appointment head clearing time. Do we have toomuch of that?Boston and San Fransico are super dense, but I always found them very friendly citiesof neighborhoods.

I know this is called New Urbanism, but New Urbanism has tried to be an impositionthat hasn't quite had a roaring success yet has it? It will take a longer, broader view by
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planners to create a dense but friendly city that doesn't demand the horrible expense ofkeeping a car and using it. And neighborhoods that work as social units, not empty

pockets of hermeticly sealed houses. Even a skyscraper could be a village with betterplanning.Recommend Recommended by 5 Readers

13.Matt

New York CityJune 9th, 200811:55 amI remember some twenty years ago, there was an article in New York magazine aboutconstruction in midtown. There was a picture of streets full of buildings so tall thatmirrors had to be installed along their facades in order to direct sunlight to the streets

below. I scoffed at the notion then, but twenty years from now it will be a completereality. Welcome to the future, where our leaders never saw a real estate deal they didn'tlove. Human beings? Quality of life? Who cares?

Recommend Recommended by 4 Readers14.Lark

New OrleansJune 9th, 20081:25 pmOK- something that hadn't sunk in until the second reading of this article is howenormous these buildings are. Beyond my comprehension. And very much the wrong

path to take!A skyscraper for residences should be ten stories- max! And occasional. There's noreason why a larger city footprint with shorter buildings can't be done. Still on themodels of the twentieth century? Yes. Did housing really change so much throughouthistory in the long veiw that those models couldn't work? No.How are you going to fit green tech in a huge skyscaper? Smart wiring and bamboo willdo, but solar panels and whatever is coming next won't have room. Dubai and Chinahave energy to power these behemoths today, but what about ten years from now?I have to wonder if this model of a city won't ultimately be a soul killer. How many Sci-Fi movies use the hermetically sealed environment as a cage to be escaped from? Icouldn't live like that.Recommend Recommended by 4 Readers15.

Marc SalomonSan FranciscoJune 9th, 20081:27 pmDense cities such as New York and San Francisco enjoy active street life with buildingheights of 30-65' (2-6 stories), which are "walk upable."

Proposals for "21st century" urban densification invariably are centered around theproduction of luxury condominium towers, highly profitable structures in which everybuilding system is dependent upon energy and which cannot be sustainable in a climateof energy scarcity.

Rather than build up central cities into forests of high rises, a more ecologically
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appropriate solution would be to decentralize urban opulation centers and link themtogether with reliable, clean rapid transit.

Unsaid in all of this is the need for the human species to get a handle upon its rate ofreproduction, because as energy prices rise, humans will need to cluster together in

cities in a way that is sustainable.

One would think that the prospect of a dystopian future would be sufficient todiscourage the culture of perpetual population growth.

The economy need not grow perpetually if the population does not, and that is the keyto a sustainable planet.Recommend Recommended by 7 Readers16.thomas. parisAtlanta, GA

June 9th, 20082:01 pmThe city of the future will likely look like a healthy forest. Canopies created by a forestof supertall structures will shield sustainable ecosystems below. Weather will becontrolled naturally, coming into the city and being filtered and regulated by organic-

based systems in the towers above. Farm towers will rise next to mixed use structures,providing local produce. Mile-high buildings will be self-contained cities within cities,complete with their own energy supply. Transportation will be wildly varied, withcertain vehicles simply rendered off-limits in specific areas.

From space these supercities may hardly be noticeable, despite housing tens of millionsof inhabitants. The vast majority of power will come from wind, solar or perhaps anuclear source. The only emissions that people will think about is heat, and even thatwill be reused efficiently. Brick and stone will give way to natural composites. Towerswill be woven like the fibers of a tree from the very materials we have piled in landfills.All this wonder comes at a price: Our current cities. Much like cities of Europe todayare built on the ruins of ancient castles and towns, these future eco megalopolis will siton top of our current forests of glass, stone and steel. If we are lucky, and use foresightwe will preserve the absolute best examples of our past and incorporate them seamlesslyinto our future.Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers

17.Charles AlmonBrooklyn NYCJune 9th, 20083:17 pmIt's all about oil AND water.People AND food NOT commuting to where they are needed,

but living/growing near to their workplaces and their consumers.This is WAY into the future, but I believe it is the future. We first worlders have beenvery wasteful in the last half a century.Of course there is always the chance we will find a way to dispose of nuclear waste,

safely, and balance conservation with use of more nuclear power.Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader
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18.jwp-nycNew YorkJune 9th, 20083:23 pm

Green is nice. Plants are lovely. Architects tend to build with their ego's and so donations. Bureaucrats and committees build not to be second-guessed, and to impress.

What all cities need if they are going to succeed and support large populations in highdensity is plentiful, potable water, intelligent and efficient waste removal and strong

public transportation.

Ideally all such major systems should have back up for maintenance and repair.Otherwise, cities are made to fail eventually, no matter how grand or green. The earlycivilizations of Mezzo America, surrounded by ecologically engineered plantingssurvived for hundreds of years, but all of them eventually were seemingly abandoned

most probably when their major systems lost relied upon rainfall, or fell prey to theentropy of maintenance without sufficient back up systems.

NYC has only taken 80 years to get water tunnel #3 almost completed, which willfinally enable it to begin to address figuring out how to shore up, and maintain its firsttwo tunnels where they need it most.

One wonders how Dubai, or the new Beijing will deal with the issue of maintaining theinfrastructures required to support the populations that they pretend to be designed tohouse. Right now, they come off as just a lot of architectural hubris, and public relationsfed media hype.Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader19.LisaBrooklynJune 9th, 20083:40 pmYou can envision, build and rebuild all you want but unless the exploding human

population of the earth is contained, all is for naught.Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers20.

The BrigadierUNIT H.Q.June 9th, 20083:59 pmIf we continue to mismanage our environment and fail to control our population growth,there will not be cities. No city is sustainable. We might get away with another centuryor two of having cities. But in the long run, our vastly diminished descendants will liveshort, miserable lives in filth and squalor--as the majority of the human race does today.

Perhaps the junk the Apollo astronauts left on the moon might look like ruins of avillage to a visiting alien archaeologist. In the vacuum of space, the Apollo ruins and

voyager probe will outlast all terrestrial artifacts. In a few million years, they may be theonly evidence there was ever intelligent life in this solar system.
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Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers21.Jonathan

NYCJune 9th, 2008

4:14 pmI picture it full of tents and small huts made out of debris

Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers22.Adam GigantumWashington, DCJune 9th, 20084:15 pmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Prototype_Community_of_Tomorrow_%28concept%29

How about a new Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow!!!

We can have the central part of the city open to pedestrians and bikers only. We canhave short travel Personal Rapid Transit to connect us from our home to bus or train andlikewise - no one will really need a car during their daily commute!! Let's wish for this!!1Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

23.SrinivasanPort Saint Lucie, FL

June 9th, 20084:26 pmI comment below on my dream city than on any reality I have seen around the world.I see the future city as a collection of small self-contained communities interconnected

by a subterranean transportation system, one for goods and supplies and one forhumans. On the surface there will be only pathways for walking and bicycle riding,gardens, small roads to carry goods home in electric vehicles, and clubs, culturalcenters, and sports facilities for people to meet each other, enjoy and haveentertainment. Of course, also schools, colleges and universities.

The purpose of the city is bring people together in a harmonious environment, wheremost of the locomotion is driven by self-generated biological energy, and there is the

possibility of having communion with nature.

I expect this to happen by the end of this century.

SrinivasanRecommend Recommended by 0 Readers

24.HIGHLIGHT (What's this?)Susan Sullivan

St. LouisJune 9th, 2008
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4:34 pmWhatever we are willing to participate in is the future we will have. The city is a socialconstruction of human interdependence. I used to tell my urban studies students that -there are no cities out there in nature. Purely a human endeavor. The theocentric city,the democratic city, the privatized city, all plans in someone's head. Sustainable? The

city is a sign of surplus. We are here eating surpluses of crops. The city is a permanentplace poured in concrete and steel. It will look a lot like the city of the past, if youconsider Rome, Damascus, Paris, Cairo. The city of the future will reflect the citizens ofthe future. We can imagine them, but we won't be with them, whoever, wherever, andhowever they live.Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers25.RichPennsylvaniaJune 9th, 20084:53 pm

Starchitecture is the most arrogant, superficial, unsustainable, and unlivable possibleform of human development. It's like living out of the pocket of an ego-maniac. Buttoday, it's more than fraudulent, pernicious and imprudent. Such construction robs us ofhuman scale, and relatedness, and context, and beauty, and a proper focus upon a morehumble design use of material and form. That such design is still perpetrated upon the

public, as the ever progressive future, is part of that fraud. As the construction industrymoves toward the zero carbon footprint future, such work...with it's equally fraudulentLEED, energy claims...(Chicago's 2,000 foot glass Chicago Spire...exposed to theChicago winter, as case in point)....has no place in a rational response the the challengesof global warming. I for one, have had enough of these little prima-donna architecttwerps, claiming their work to be the sign of the future. Let's relegate them to thehistory and the comic books, as the rest of us adults insist upon a truly sustainable builtenvironment.Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader

26.acrobat

barcelonaJune 9th, 20084:53 pm@missbike: yes, New Urbanism has actually been more succesful in imposing itselfthan it should actually. mostly within the US. it is mostly irrelevant in most of the

developing (and hence more problematic) world. and i do not agree that it is the rightsolution for the future city. btw one of the best recent books that's quite relevant to thisdiscussion, is "New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities For the Future", here:http://www.amazon.com/dp/0847831116?qid=D1201001899&tag=qct-20, it is veryinterestingly divided between "new urbanist" visions and "beyond", in other words,opens up the discussion to much more exciting visions than just the backward looking

NU.- acrobatRecommend Recommended by 0 Readers27.k

floridaJune 9th, 2008
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5:33 pmI take issue with the author's emphasis on architects in this article and his assumptionthat architects alone shape cities. Why didn't you interview a single urban planner?Architects design buildings, yet planners shape urban form, land use patterns,transportation networks, and develop policy initiatives in an effort to create truly

livable, sustainable cities.Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers28.HIGHLIGHT (What's this?)Tuf PakBrooklynJune 9th, 20086:24 pmWe really need to step away from talking about what buildings look like (as a matter ofarchitectural or urban image) or even their scale in reference to existing cities. Whatdevelopers/planners/architects must focus on in regards to these rapidly growing cities

is performance and change.

Are the buildings designed cheap, flexible, mutable, changeable, "de-constructible",recyclable? Do they allow citizens to engage in and react to ever changing civic and

public needs? These cities change faster than our planning, faster than our design tastes,faster than our assumptions about cities...and they'll continue to change at this pace forthe foreseeable future.

To discuss these cities in relation to our western expectations for metropolises is amistake. These cities are exposed to pressures that are multiples of what London or NewYork experienced during their inflation periods.

Cities in India or Africa or China can not nor should not look like London or NewOrleans or Florence, no matter how beautiful they are to us. What worked forRennaisance Florence, or 1840's New Orleans will not work for 2020's Mumbai,regardless of how much we like it. Soon, Shenzhen will be the largest city in an urbanconglomeration comprising something approaching 50 million people, more than 50x

New Orleans metropolitan population.

Our best hope for these cities might be a new urban invention, a contemporaryequivalent of New York's 1811 Commissioners Plan. A system that facilitates continual

modification, reimagination, redevelopment, and upgrades.

We don't have a sufficient model for theses cities, they'll need to generate their own.

(As for the discussion about "Starchitects"; the buildings by the two dozen or so PopStardesigners of the world amount to something approaching 0% of total worldconstruction. What drives most design is a model of profit and economics. Architecturalspeculation and innovation has value and is not the environmental danger nor the affrontto reason that some are making it out to be.)Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers

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The New_New City

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