How do you Design an Evolving City? Pt. I
Project CONDENCITY: Uncovering urbanisms evolutionary potential
CONDENCITY is a three-part series investigating the capitalist city through an evolutionary lens, identifying the dominant forces that shape their development and revealing their fragilizing properties. In an attempt to begin to address the embedded issues, I argue for an antifragile approach to urban thinking and introduce the idea of condensity (part I). As a means of testing out my contentions, a set of rules and spatial framework is created for Sandridge, a new suburb located in Fisherman’s bend, Melbourne (part II). Whilst the formulation of this response is somewhat site specific, the general principles are applicable to any capitalist city. Finally, I speculate on the architectural and urban outcomes of this framework and compare the projection to the conventional planning model (Part III).
The premise of this project is simple: any population with a free market and tradeable private property as foundational elements will be continually subjected to three dominant forces: growth, mass production and the division of labour. It is fair to say that these forces shape both the social and physical structures of our modern societies, but here my focus is on the latter. Their effects on our built environment are palpable, growth if unbridled, drives bigness, big buildings, big roads, big bridges. Mass production if unfettered optimises and repeats, producing homogeneity in method, material, and outcome. The division of labour creates specialised work, which in combination with mass production creates specialised buildings, cities, and regions. These three driving economic imperatives acting in concert make the capitalist city what it is today.
Mind you, these forces do not appear to be exclusive to capitalism. Whilst different in character, one can see big, homogeneous, and specialised urban outcomes from the Eastern Bloc era and in present day China (Magnitogorsk and Shenzhen for example), emerging less from market dynamics and more from state ambition. Perhaps this observation points to the presence of a fourth ingredient: the consolidation of wealth and power; perhaps without it these urban characteristics would not manifest. Growth cannot drive bigness without the pooling of land and resources; mass production is not as homogenising when numerous and diverse actors control the means of production; specialised regions and urban centres cannot remain as such long-term without their externalities being supported by a higher power. And yet, the history of both of these forms of human organisation suggest that its presence cannot be avoided: thus far consolidated power has been the precondition for a socialist state, and an emergent property of a capitalist one.
So, the question is: do the properties of bigness, homogeneity and specialisation impair a city’s evolutionary capacity? Let me discuss why I think this is an important question to be asking. On a basic level, cities, as the physical substrate of human civilisation, must be able to evolve to firstly support the changing needs of their inhabitants and secondly respond to consequential changes in the broader environment, if they are to continue to exist. If their inhabitants and surrounding environment are stable and predictably so, their required evolutionary capacity is low. Of course, if the inverse is true, then they must be adaptable enough to respond to the changing circumstances. In our current world of global supply chains (high level of dependencies), centralised nation states (top-down abstract decision making), exponential tech and open-loop economies (increased existential risk), and a fractured information ecology (little to no collective sense-making), one can safely assume that the future demands of a given city are unpredictable and — perhaps to a great extent — uncontrollable. And so, without labouring the point, and letting the current pandemic speak for itself, I would argue that it is critical, now more than ever, that our cities be Highly Evolutionarily Capable Systems (HECS).
What then, makes a city a HECS? Well, if we take the non-living fabric of a city to be a continuously changing population of built elements, supported by a network of infrastructure, then we can think about it this way: the larger and more diverse the population of elements, the greater the optionality and therefore the higher the probability of there existing fit solutions to environmental circumstances. Here you can see, we are beginning to answer our initial question. What will enable a city to evolve is its capacity to search the solution space of multi-dimensional urban problems, via broad and high-volume testing. This also embeds a necessary level of redundancy — an element ever-present in nature but often neglected in design processes — as what might seem an ordinary solution today may end up being tomorrow’s saving grace. The size of the building population will be inversely proportional to the size of the buildings, provided the city is limited in its overall area. I will note here that self-imposed city boundaries are self-evidently necessary for all cities given they exist on a planet with finite habitable land. Thus, it is smallness over bigness and heterogeneity over homogeneity that appear to be vital for a HECS.
Finally, we arrive at our third characteristic, specialisation, whose presence is felt at the level of the building, suburb, city, and even nation. Specialisation in urban terms could perhaps be thought of as the clustering of homogeneity, in terms of building use or economic activity, and therefore antithetical to self-sufficiency. Driven by economic efficiency, this trait necessarily involves external dependencies: a business district relies upon surrounding suburbs to house its workers; a city relies on the countryside for food production; a mining town relies on a continuous supply of mineable earth. The problem with external dependencies is rather obvious, they create points of failure. If suddenly, workers are prevented from entering the business district, both the business district and the workers will suffer, and that urban fabric cannot properly function. Thus, a city that is overly specialised, or made up of overly specialised districts can only support change in degree, not in kind; a HECS by contrast must de-specialise and decentralise.
The arguments put forward above suggest that bigness, homogeneity and specialisation are fragilizing forces, impairing a cities evolutionary capacity, and that if a city is to be highly evolutionarily capable, it must exhibit smallness, heterogeneity and decentralisation, or what I call condensity. Their combination in the face of change create an urbanism that is at minimum resilient, and at best antifragile. As a closing note for part I, I will say that whilst I would argue that condensity is necessary, it is not sufficient to ensure the long-term success of a city, and is dependent upon the prevailing societal structures, economic frameworks, and culture. Part II will look at how condensity might be achieved via a rather unconventional master planning framework.
