The New, New City

Sze Tsung Leong for The New York Times NEW SHENZHEN ENCIRCLES OLD: In the center, one of the citys original urban villages, with its signature handshake buildings so close together you could reach across to your neighbor. By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF Published: June 8, 2008 Dont tell anyone, Rem Koolhaas said to me several years ago as we headed down the F.D.R. Drive in New York, but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it. Koolhaass viewpoint is widely shared by close observers of the evolution of cities. But not even Koolhaas, it seems, was completely prepared for what would come next. Multimedia

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Shenzhen, Then and Now

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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 have sprouted up almost overnight. Only 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a small fishing village of a few thousand people, and Dubai had merely a quarter million people. Today Shenzhen has a population of eight million, and Dubais glittering towers, rising out of the desert in disorderly rows, have become playgrounds for wealthy expatriates from Riyadh and Moscow. Long-established cities like Beijing and Guangzhou have more than doubled in size in a few decades, their original outlines swallowed by rings of new development. 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 to think of them as cities at all. Dubai, which lays claim to some of the worlds most expensive private islands, the tallest building and soon the largest theme park, has been derided as an urban tomb where the rich live walled off from the poor migrant workers who 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 become vast fields of urban experimentation, on a scale that not even the early Modernists, who first 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 American architect working in Dubai, told me recently. What context are we talking about in a city thats a few decades old? The problem is that we are only beginning to figure out where to go from here. The sheer number of projects under construction and the corresponding investment in civic infrastructure entire networks of new subway systems, freeways and canals; gargantuan new airports and public parks can give the impression that anything is possible in this new world. The scale of these undertakings recalls the early part of the last 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 shrinking state and city budgets, expanding a single subway line can seem like a heroic act. In America, I could never do work like I do here, Steven Holl, a New York architect with several large projects in China, recently told me, referring to his latest complex in Beijing. Weve become too backward-looking. In China, they want to make everything look new. This is their moment in time. They want to make the 21st century their century. For some reason, our society wants to make everything old. I think we somehow lost our nerve.

Holl has reason to be exhilarated. His Beijing project, Linked Hybrid, is one of the most 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 this exhilaration also comes at a price: only the wealthiest of Beijings residents can afford to 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 alienating subdivisions that are so often cited as a symptom of the citys unbridled, dehumanizing development. Protected by armed guards, these residential high-rises stood on what was until quite recently a working-class neighborhood, even though the poor quality of their construction makes them seem decades old. Nearby, a new freeway cut through the neighborhood, further disfiguring an area that, however modest, was once bursting with life. If you take Venturis ideas about the city, Holl said, referring to Robert Venturis groundbreaking work, Learning From Las Vegas, which called on architects to reconsider 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 vast size means that they function primarily as a series of decentralized neighborhoods, something closer in spirit to Los Angeles. The breathtaking speed of their construction means that they usually lack the layers the mix of architectural styles and intricately related social strata that give a city its complexity and from which architects have typically drawn inspiration. In Dubai, for instance, what might once have been the product of 100 years of urban growth has been compressed into a decade or so. Given such seismic shifts, even the most talented architects can seem to flounder for new models. No one wants to return to the deadly homogeneity associated with Modernisms tabula rasa planning strategies. The image of Le Corbusier hovering godlike above Paris ready to wipe aside entire districts and replace them with glass towers remains an emblem of Modernisms attack on the citys historical fabric. Yet the notion of finding authenticity in a sprawling metropolitan area that is barely 30 years old also seems absurd. How do you breathe life into a project at such a scale? How do you instill the fine-grained texture of a healthy community into one that rose overnight? Cities like these, built on a colossal scale, seem to absorb any urban model, no matter how unique, virtually unnoticed. A project that could have a significant impact on the character of, say, New York like the development plans for ground zero can seem a mere blip in Beijing, which has embarked on dozens of similarly sized endeavors in the last decade alone. The irony is that we still dont know if postmodernism was the end of Modernism or just an interruption, Koolhaas told me recently. Was it a brief hiatus, and now we are returning to something that has been going on for a long time, or is 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 to create something where there was nothing. If much of contemporary architecture depends on sifting through the cultural and historical layers that a site accumulates over

time whether neo-Classical monuments or Socialist-era housing what can be done if there is nothing to sift through but sand? In a recent design for a six-and-a-half-square-mile development in Dubai called Waterfront City, Koolhaas proposed creating an urban island inspired by a section of Midtown Manhattan. The design linked a dense grid of conventional towers to the mainland 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 around an airy public atrium were intended to give the city a distinct flavor. Koolhaas said he hoped, in this way, to infuse this entirely new development with something of the feeling of an older city. But while the outlines are intriguing, he is still coming to terms with how to create an organic whole. In the early stages of the design, Koolhaas experimented with somewhat conventional models of public space: a boardwalk along the islands perimeter, a narrow park cutting through its center, classical arcades lining the downtown streets. But the majority of Dubais inhabitants are foreign-born, and the arcaded 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 him about the project. There is a weird alternation between density and emptiness. You rarely feel that you are designing for people who are actually there but for communities that have yet to be assembled. The vernacular is too faint, too precarious to become something on which you can base an architecture. Koolhaas says he hopes that the plan will gain in complexity as the buildings functions are worked out; he says he was thrilled to learn that the government wanted both a courthouse and a mosque on the island. Another option that I personally find very interesting, Koolhaas told me, is the modernist vernacular of the 1970s buildings that once you put them in Singapore or Dubai take on totally different meanings. Some of the modern typologies work in Asia even though they are totally dysfunctional in America. Typologies weve rejected turn out to be viable in other contexts. The challenges of building what amounts to a small-scale city from scratch are compounded by the realities of working in a global marketplace. An architect of Koolhaass stature may be grappling simultaneously with the design of a television headquarters complex in Beijing, a stock exchange in Shenzhen and a 20-block neighborhood 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 seductive designs in weeks or months, tweaking their models to fit local conditions. Several years ago, the London-based, Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid received a phone call from a Chinese developer asking if she might be interested in designing a 500-acre urban 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-use development with a projected population of about 140,000. Located on what was once a military site, Hadids design conjured a high-tech mountainous terrain. Dubbed the urban 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

single piece of crumpled fabric, giving the composition a haunting unity. We wanted to create a complex order rather than either the monotony of Modernism or the chaos you find 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 was difficult to read the formal intent. With more than 20 blocks now complete, parts of the city look surprisingly conventional. Hadid revived the concept several years later, when she won a competition to create a 1,360-acre business district in a former industrial zone on the outskirts of Istanbul. This time, 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 grow in a more natural way than at One North, it would be built in phases that would begin at the waterfront and spread inland, eventually connecting to the street grid of the older neighborhoods. 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 housing block organized around a central court, and staggered the heights of the buildings to reflect the existing terrain. If Hadids plan is formally inventive, it is still unclear whether it has escaped the homogeneity that was a hallmark of Modernist urban-renewal projects. Its sheer size coupled with the fact that the shapes of the buildings were conceived by a single architect means the result may well be more uniform, and ultimately more rigid, than Hadid intended. Indeed, contemporary architects urban plans may be less tied to location than they would like to admit. When a Chinese developer approached the New York-based Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto to design a 1,235-acre development in Foshan, on the Pearl 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 park surrounded by residential and commercial buildings. The park followed the contours of the roadways below; sunken courtyards allowed light to spill down into the underground spaces. Last year, the Chinese project fell through, and Reiser and Umemoto reworked the idea for a developer in Dubai. The layout was reconfigured to fit the new waterfront site; souks were added as a nod to local traditions. The result is a remarkably 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 seem impossibly remote, but encouraging signs of a more textured urban reality can still be found. Take Holls Linked Hybrid in Beijing, for example, which has a surprisingly open, communal spirit. A series of massive portals lead from the street to an elaborate internal courtyard garden, a restaurant, a theater and a kindergarten, integrating the complex into the surrounding neighborhood. Bridges connect the towers 12 to 19 stories above ground and are conceived as a continuous string of public zones, with bars and nightclubs 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, the kindergarten. I added an 80-room hotel and the swimming pool as well. Anywhere else,

theyd build it in phases over several years. Its too big. After our meeting, they said were building the whole thing all at once. I couldnt believe it. We havent had to compromise 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 dense that I can keep all of the shops functioning on the street, and theres still enough energy to activate the bridges as well. Holl is continuing to explore these ideas in another megaproject, this time on the outskirts of Shenzhen: a zigzag-shaped office complex propped up on big steel columns that make room for a dreamy public garden. The density in much of Shenzhen can make Beijing look spacious. The imposing skyline of glass-and-steel towers, plastered with electronic billboards, was built mostly within the last decade, part of the boom that followed foreign investment in the area, when it was declared a special economic zone in 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, the villagers remained in their increasingly populated districts, where they built cheap, and often instantly decrepit, towers that were so close together they were dubbed handshake buildings: you could literally reach out your window and shake hands with your neighbor across the street. The villages are poignant testimonies to the hardships that 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 is an emblem of what can happen when free-market capitalism is allowed to run amok, it is also an example of the spontaneous creativity that occurs when people are left to fend for themselves. On a recent visit, the alleyways, dark and claustrophobic, were thick with shops. Elderly people played mah-jongg on card tables in the street; two young children sat at a small desk doing their homework in a tiny storefront that doubled as their bedroom. Wenyi Wu, a young architect working for a Chinese firm called Urbanus, led me around the area. The firm has been studying how people carve a living space out of seemingly inhospitable environments, hoping to develop an urbanist model more deeply rooted in the spontaneity of everyday life. He took me to a small museum Urbanus designed on the outskirts of the city. A series of stepped galleries stand at the base of a hill between an 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 something more formal and humane to extract the essence of its character without romanticizing the squalor. The circuitous paths of the ramps echo the surrounding alleyways; the layout of the galleries suggests the footprint of the migrant workers housing but on a more intimate scale. Other architects, hoping to build in ways that reflect an emerging vernacular, are taking a similar approach, looking at more modest and more informally constructed urban neighborhoods for inspiration. Shumon Basar, a London-based critic and independent curator, recently described a number of small, unplanned settlements in and around Dubai. The dense and gritty neighborhood of Deira, for instance, has little in common with Sheikh Zayed Road and its fortified glass towers. Built mainly in the 1970s,

Deiras low concrete structures and labyrinthine alleyways are home to a lively population of Southeast Asian workers. Similarly, the thriving, traditionally Muslim middle-class neighborhoods of Sharjah, the third-largest city in the United Arab Emirates, were built without the flashiness of more recent developments. Basar wonders if, 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 mean that the particulars of place no longer matter. I dont think of any of my buildings as a model for something, the way the Modernists did, Holl said. If it works, it works in its specific context. You cant just move it somewhere else. But is site specificity enough? The amount of building becomes obscene without a blueprint, Koolhaas said. Each time you ask yourself, Do you have the right to do this much work on this scale if you dont have an opinion about what the world should be like? 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. Julians Malaysia June 9th, 2008 6:48 am I've only two words - New Mombasa. http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/New_Mombasa I'd love to live there! Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers 2. j NYC June 9th, 2008 6:48 am dense, hopefully very dense Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader 3. benjaminhart Singapore June 9th, 2008 9:01 am As a 10+ year resident of Beijing, I can say without heistation that what the architects and 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 most important element in design: the human being. In a truly modern context, with a whole host 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 model of 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

available spaces surrounding it. The architect Holl clearly has not spent sustained time assessing development there. Because if he had, he also would have seen that the numerous "bridging" concepts that have been tried in the city previously have universally failed. Recommend Recommended by 4 Readers 4. ruthazer Montreal, QC June 9th, 2008 9:01 am I remember Shenzhen when the first skyscraper went up. It was a huge dirt field that could have been an airport runway. It was built because it is the closest point in mainland China to Hong Kong. One day HK and Shenzhen will probably merge into one massive metropolitan area. Interestingly Shenzhen is filled with transplants from all over China whereas HK is filled with original Cantonese. This will lead to an awkward cultural clash of new and old. Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader 5. sarathkannur india June 9th, 2008 9:01 am As the urban scenario evolves ,the urban context do so to a form of decentralised urban environment rendering the central business district redundant .An office can be anywhere in an non specific agglomeration of working ,living and leisure spaces, seamlessly integrated as the urban land scape. Communications have evolved and reached a point to make proximity to activty a non issue to many business services and the environment has to evolve to accomaodate that freedom. Dubai can easily fit the bill and 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 responsive living and working spaces.The established infrastructure of older cities offer litte scope for manuevour from a primarly work oriented centre to a more widely defined place of work with an emphasis on leisure and social interaction. Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 6. Discoteca Chicago, IL June 9th, 2008 9:55 am It's ugly and suffocating. Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 7. Tuf Pak Brooklyn June 9th, 2008 10:31 am I'm an architect working in Shenzhen presently and what I find fascinating about development 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 urban contributions of them that Mr. Ouroussoff only lightly touches on.

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 on western style trappings of upper middle-class living. New gated residential tower blocks, shopping malls, and massive cross-city expressways, at present, seem to absorb all the energy of thought and construction in the city. At first blush the malls seem busy and successful, but viewed in the context of one of 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 all of it's public/social energy from the perimeters of these impossibly lively Urban Villages. I would abandon the notion that this view is somehow a pretentious romanticizing of the impoverished state. Where the new districts of tower blocks abut these engorged traditional villages there is an explosion of life, commercial choice, street activity and energy, and opportunity. These villages are where 50% of the urban population lives (mainly because this is where the less well off can afford to live as there's a dearth of new low-income construction in the city's center, and most internal migrants 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 rights of residence to those pieces of land. To me the greatest planning injustice is the systematic isolation of these neighborhoods from the greater city via the present city planning assumptions: primarily giant expressways, remarkably detached from even the new city, break the city into a checkerboard of almost inaccessible super-blocks, with deeply stupid pedestrian and local vehicle interconnections. When these neighborhood types are detached from one another, 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 little islands of the illegal and impoverished). Couple this increasing ghettoization with a myopic focus on a massive, but already overtaxed, automobile-fixated transportation system, and the city is designing for itself a crisis. It's fascinating that the neighborhoods that seem to draw our attention as architects/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 business was born there, to something approaching 11 million today. Recommend Recommended by 9 Readers 8. Maria24 Ft. Lauderdale June 9th, 2008 11:21 am Recognizing those urban villages as districts and giving them civic importance regardless of their economic stature is what is going to safeguard them from lowly categorization and dismiss them as something transient. Human interaction is what

makes the cities lively, whether rich and not so rich, one has to consider everyone in the scheme of things. Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader 9. Joe Costa Mesa CA June 9th, 2008 11:21 am The 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/gal for gas we are finding it doesn't work. But I'll bet Shenzhen even with all its expressways will also have a functional subway system far faster than LA. Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers 10. HIGHLIGHT (What's this?) Forest Massachusetts June 9th, 2008 11:48 am Less automobiles and a more extensive and efficient public transportation system and hopefully with more green spaces, especially on the roofs of buildings - how cool would it be if the future city transformed itself from a stiffling, concrete jungle to a 21st century version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Recommend Recommended by 14 Readers 11. liz new hampshire June 9th, 2008 11:55 am here's hoping it has plenty of space for residents to grow their own food. Recommend Recommended by 7 Readers 12. Lark New Orleans June 9th, 2008 11:55 am If 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 the street 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 communal giant back yard for a neighborhood as a social unit. New Orleans is still, in places, a city of ancient oak trees sheilding it from the glare of a sub tropical sun and making the twenty minute power walk to a dental appointment head clearing time. Do we have too much of that? Boston and San Fransico are super dense, but I always found them very friendly cities of neighborhoods. I know this is called New Urbanism, but New Urbanism has tried to be an imposition that hasn't quite had a roaring success yet has it? It will take a longer, broader view by

planners to create a dense but friendly city that doesn't demand the horrible expense of keeping 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 better planning. Recommend Recommended by 5 Readers 13. Matt New York City June 9th, 2008 11:55 am I remember some twenty years ago, there was an article in New York magazine about construction in midtown. There was a picture of streets full of buildings so tall that mirrors 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 complete reality. Welcome to the future, where our leaders never saw a real estate deal they didn't love. Human beings? Quality of life? Who cares? Recommend Recommended by 4 Readers 14. Lark New Orleans June 9th, 2008 1:25 pm OK- something that hadn't sunk in until the second reading of this article is how enormous 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 no reason why a larger city footprint with shorter buildings can't be done. Still on the models of the twentieth century? Yes. Did housing really change so much throughout history 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 will do, but solar panels and whatever is coming next won't have room. Dubai and China have 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 SciFi movies use the hermetically sealed environment as a cage to be escaped from? I couldn't live like that. Recommend Recommended by 4 Readers 15. Marc Salomon San Francisco June 9th, 2008 1:27 pm Dense cities such as New York and San Francisco enjoy active street life with building heights of 30-65' (2-6 stories), which are "walk upable." Proposals for "21st century" urban densification invariably are centered around the production of luxury condominium towers, highly profitable structures in which every building system is dependent upon energy and which cannot be sustainable in a climate of energy scarcity. Rather than build up central cities into forests of high rises, a more ecologically

appropriate solution would be to decentralize urban opulation centers and link them together with reliable, clean rapid transit. Unsaid in all of this is the need for the human species to get a handle upon its rate of reproduction, 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 to discourage the culture of perpetual population growth. The economy need not grow perpetually if the population does not, and that is the key to a sustainable planet. Recommend Recommended by 7 Readers 16. thomas. paris Atlanta, GA June 9th, 2008 2:01 pm The city of the future will likely look like a healthy forest. Canopies created by a forest of supertall structures will shield sustainable ecosystems below. Weather will be controlled naturally, coming into the city and being filtered and regulated by organicbased 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, with certain vehicles simply rendered off-limits in specific areas. From space these supercities may hardly be noticeable, despite housing tens of millions of inhabitants. The vast majority of power will come from wind, solar or perhaps a nuclear source. The only emissions that people will think about is heat, and even that will be reused efficiently. Brick and stone will give way to natural composites. Towers will 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 today are built on the ruins of ancient castles and towns, these future eco megalopolis will sit on top of our current forests of glass, stone and steel. If we are lucky, and use foresight we will preserve the absolute best examples of our past and incorporate them seamlessly into our future. Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers 17. Charles Almon Brooklyn NYC June 9th, 2008 3:17 pm It'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 been very 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

18. jwp-nyc New York June 9th, 2008 3:23 pm Green is nice. Plants are lovely. Architects tend to build with their ego's and so do nations. 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 high density 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 early civilizations of Mezzo America, surrounded by ecologically engineered plantings survived 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 the entropy of maintenance without sufficient back up systems. NYC has only taken 80 years to get water tunnel #3 almost completed, which will finally enable it to begin to address figuring out how to shore up, and maintain its first two tunnels where they need it most. One wonders how Dubai, or the new Beijing will deal with the issue of maintaining the infrastructures required to support the populations that they pretend to be designed to house. Right now, they come off as just a lot of architectural hubris, and public relations fed media hype. Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader 19. Lisa Brooklyn June 9th, 2008 3:40 pm You 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 Readers 20. The Brigadier UNIT H.Q. June 9th, 2008 3:59 pm If 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 century or two of having cities. But in the long run, our vastly diminished descendants will live short, 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 a village 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 the only evidence there was ever intelligent life in this solar system.

Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 21. Jonathan NYC June 9th, 2008 4:14 pm I picture it full of tents and small huts made out of debris Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 22. Adam Gigantum Washington, DC June 9th, 2008 4:15 pm http://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 can have short travel Personal Rapid Transit to connect us from our home to bus or train and likewise - no one will really need a car during their daily commute!! Let's wish for this!! 1 Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 23. Srinivasan Port Saint Lucie, FL June 9th, 2008 4:26 pm I 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 for humans. 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, cultural centers, and sports facilities for people to meet each other, enjoy and have entertainment. Of course, also schools, colleges and universities. The purpose of the city is bring people together in a harmonious environment, where most 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. Srinivasan Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 24. HIGHLIGHT (What's this?) Susan Sullivan St. Louis June 9th, 2008

4:34 pm Whatever we are willing to participate in is the future we will have. The city is a social construction 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 permanent place poured in concrete and steel. It will look a lot like the city of the past, if you consider Rome, Damascus, Paris, Cairo. The city of the future will reflect the citizens of the future. We can imagine them, but we won't be with them, whoever, wherever, and however they live. Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 25. Rich Pennsylvania June 9th, 2008 4:53 pm Starchitecture is the most arrogant, superficial, unsustainable, and unlivable possible form of human development. It's like living out of the pocket of an ego-maniac. But today, it's more than fraudulent, pernicious and imprudent. Such construction robs us of human scale, and relatedness, and context, and beauty, and a proper focus upon a more humble 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 industry moves toward the zero carbon footprint future, such work...with it's equally fraudulent LEED, energy claims...(Chicago's 2,000 foot glass Chicago Spire...exposed to the Chicago winter, as case in point)....has no place in a rational response the the challenges of global warming. I for one, have had enough of these little prima-donna architect twerps, claiming their work to be the sign of the future. Let's relegate them to the history and the comic books, as the rest of us adults insist upon a truly sustainable built environment. Recommend Recommended by 1 Reader 26. acrobat barcelona June 9th, 2008 4:53 pm @missbike: yes, New Urbanism has actually been more succesful in imposing itself than 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 right solution for the future city. btw one of the best recent books that's quite relevant to this discussion, is "New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities For the Future", here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0847831116?qid=D1201001899&tag=qct-20, it is very interestingly 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. - acrobat Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 27. k florida June 9th, 2008

5:33 pm I take issue with the author's emphasis on architects in this article and his assumption that 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 Readers 28. HIGHLIGHT (What's this?) Tuf Pak Brooklyn June 9th, 2008 6:24 pm We really need to step away from talking about what buildings look like (as a matter of architectural or urban image) or even their scale in reference to existing cities. What developers/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 for the foreseeable future. To discuss these cities in relation to our western expectations for metropolises is a mistake. These cities are exposed to pressures that are multiples of what London or New York experienced during their inflation periods. Cities in India or Africa or China can not nor should not look like London or New Orleans or Florence, no matter how beautiful they are to us. What worked for Rennaisance 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 urban conglomeration 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 contemporary equivalent 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 PopStar designers of the world amount to something approaching 0% of total world construction. What drives most design is a model of profit and economics. Architectural speculation and innovation has value and is not the environmental danger nor the affront to reason that some are making it out to be.) Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/magazine/08s henzhen-t.html?sort=oldest&offset=2