The Adaptive City: Urban Change, Resilience and the Trajectory Towards a Distinctive Urbanism

Abstract

This essay interrogates two questions related to urbanization in the twenty-first century: The need for designers to engage with methods to embrace urban change and to surrender to complex dynamics of the city, while paradoxically, to strive for a resilient, enduring urbanism. In addition, this essay charts an approach with which to pursue greater spatial di?erentiation between and within any given city. For this second aim, the implication is to address the legacy of standardized, repetitive modes of production, in favour of more specific material assemblages. This asks questions concerning the potential of computational design and fabrication methods to be applied at the scale of urbanism, which remain largely untested.

本文審視了有關21世紀城市化的兩個問題:我們需要設計師使用各種方法來接納城市變化并服從城市其復雜的動態,與此同時,矛盾而又統一地力求締造一個有彈性經久不衰的城市主義。此外,本文描繪了一種于任何給定城市之中或其間創造更大空間差異的方法。為了這一第二目標,當務之急便是要應對那些標準化且重復生產的建筑遺存,以落實到更具體的原料裝配。這便引出了如下問題:如何發揮數字設計和建造方法的潛力以應用于仍在很大程度上未經測試的城市化。