[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

A tool to make cities
from Domus 861 July/August 2003

Winy Maas talks to John Thackara about new ways to understand the city.

Sustainable, working cities are necessarily complex, heavily linked and diverse. As the British writer Will Hutton has commented, just as local knowledge and information was crucial 150 years ago, when there were 80 different steps in the button-making industry, so, too, complex local knowledge and linkages are key today if you are a software, media, care or educational enterprise. The ideal city must contain a rich mixture of craft-based workshops, consultants, law firms, accountants, distribution and logistics companies, advertising agencies, universities, research labs, database publishers and local or regional government offices. Unique skills, clusters of specialized suppliers, local roots and a variety of human skills that are unique to a region – all of these are powerful advantages for local cities and regions on today’s economic stage. This picture poses a dilemma to smaller cities, which cannot realistically offer the same density and complexity of knowledge skills as a large metropolis. The metropolitan centres have their own problems, it is true, but they will always win on diversity, which is a key to evolutionary success. So how are the smaller ones to compete?

According to Winy Maas, a principal of the Dutch bureau MVRDV, the answer lies in webs, chains networks and ‘archipelagos’ of cities and smaller regions. By aggregating their hard and soft assets, collective cities – multi-centred cities – can match the array of functions and resources of bigger centres while delivering superior social quality. The ability of small cities to offer a context that supports intimacy and encounter – what the French call la vie associative – is where small-city webs will win out over the big centres. City alliances are not a completely new idea. City networks date back to the 13th century, when the Hansa League, an alliance of more than 70 merchant cities, collaborated effectively for the common good to control exports and imports over a wide swathe of Europe.

Today’s urban and regional networks can be traced back to the formation of the International Union of Cities in 1913. The 1957 Treaty of Rome accelerated the emergence of networks of cities and regions as supra-nation state actors in Europe. Increased globalization has put considerable pressure on cities to network among themselves – sharing, partnering and learning. Globalization has also driven smaller cities to rediscover Hansa-style alliances and to market them using new business techniques.

According to Philip Kotler, a marketing professor in the United States, some 10 per cent of business-to-business advertising – a vast sum – is now spent on marketing places, regions and nations. Kotler has identified 80,000 communities within the EU that, in one way or another, need to differentiate themselves from one another. Place marketing – or, more properly, place and regional design – aggregates and networks complementary functions and core competencies of a region.

In Europe the concept of ‘territorial capital’ is increasingly used to describe the synthesis of a region’s hard and soft assets. The hard assets include natural beauty, shopping facilities, cultural attractions, buildings, museums, monuments and so on. Soft assets are all about people and culture: skills, traditions, festivals, events and occasions, situations, settings, social ties, civic loyalty, memories and learning capacity.

For networked, multi-centred cities to succeed, these different kinds of territorial, social and intellectual capital need to be linked together by a combination of physical and informational networks. The hubs, links and physical and informational flows of a region need to be proactively designed in ways that help a working culture flourish. Most cities’ biggest pressure to collaborate is environmental. Bigger cities guzzle more energy and resources per head than smaller ones. Smaller cities, which are located closer to resources and in which people and goods don’t need to move as much, are lighter. Cities also guzzle land. In 1997 the German Federal Statistical Office predicted that Germany would turn into a 100 per cent settled landmass within 82 years if 3 per cent economic growth persisted.

Mobile communications are already transforming time-space relations in favour of smaller towns working together. Where I live, in the Netherlands, planners hope that transport telematics will make it possible for me to think more and drive less. They expect to reduce so-called vehicle hours by an ambitious 25 per cent. A key concept in Dutch policy is the multimodal or ‘chain approach’. The idea is that information systems will help me work out the best combination of walking, bicycle, private car, train, bus, plane or boat before I set off. Right now, individual transport information systems are pretty good. But they don’t work together. The next step is so to connect systems so that I can enter the beginning and endpoints of a journey (place and time) and be offered a menu of ways to complete it. With ‘user-generated location-specific services’, as Nokia future-gazer Marko Athisaari explained at a recent Doors of Perception conference, mobile phones can enhance proximity and reduce the allure of ‘far’. Although mobility and mobile telephony seem very much to do with being apart, in fact the evidence is quite to the contrary: a lot of telecommunications behaviour is aimed at getting together physically. While we talk about devices being connected, and everything being connected in a technological sense, social interaction will be a prime driver in the future as well, even in technologically enhanced social interaction.

Architects and spatial planners started thinking about clusters in the 1960s. In 1963 Christopher Alexander and Serge Chermayeff wrote that, in designing on a large scale, ‘we must look at the links, the interactions and the patterns’. After that initial insight, architecture and planning evolved rather slowly, but in recent years the sustainability agenda has given the networked approach new impetus. According to Winy Maas, ‘The magnitude of information concerning a region is overwhelming: complex and constantly changing. This multi-scale approach is new for design.

It is nearly impossible to represent all of the relationships, and the webs of interdependencies, of a region. The integration of hard and soft factors is complex enough, but planners, policymakers and designers now also have to deal with a new dimension of complexity: a variety of new actors. Privatized network industries, such as railway companies, airports, electricity suppliers, and telecommunications operators, are influential actors. So, too, are citizens who, with growing confidence, are demanding that social agendas are factored into planning processes.

‘As the speed of spatial, economic and political developments and processes accelerates, we need a more dynamic approach and tools for planning’, says Maas. ‘Such tools turn massive volumes of raw data into visualizations. This is not about broad-brush visions of the idealized future. We keep getting asked to make “visions” for cities and regions’, Maas explains, ‘but I want to make planning, design and thinking tools that people can really use. We are measuring an increasing variety of things and collecting vast quantities of data.

The question is how to use it. How are we to perceive and connect all this information in ways that add value and meaning to the raw data? Increasingly, that means how do we represent the data visually in order to work on and with it. We also need to make these tools more accessible and usable by non-specialized actors and stakeholders’. Maas and his colleagues have therefore become toolmakers. MVRDV has developed a family of software tools known as ‘The Regionmaker’, which was first created for a project called RhineRuhrCity. The Kommunalverband Ruhrgebiet (KVR), a union of cities in the region, has invested in a series of initiatives to improve its post-industrial situation, and today fewer than 6 per cent of the population works in coal and steel. But perceptions remain that this is the Detroit of Europe, a landscape dotted with ghost towns, overgrown industries and polluted areas. ‘The region is very well connected logistically’, says Maas. ‘It has incredible water resources, a dense university system and successful media and computer industries. But these assets are fragmented. As you find in so many places in Europe, it’s a mosaic of competing municipalities rather than one entity’. Hence the project to reposition the area as one place, one city: RhineRuhrCity.

‘The Regionmaker’, which combines the function of search engine, browser and graphic interface, brings together a variety of existing information sources and flows, including demographic data and outputs from Geographic Information Systems (GIS), or ‘geomatics’, as they are now called. ‘In a nutshell’, says Maas, ‘the idea is that within the context of a globalizing world, international databanks, advanced computers, Internet and intranet systems, game technology, global monitoring and information systems can be integrated in ways that convincingly represent regions. With “The Regionmaker”, there is no limit to visualization.

You can look at maps, study charts, access databases, export images, import video feeds from helicopters or satellites, connect to the Internet, use CAD drawings and so on’. Maas anticipates that ‘The Regionmaker’ will evolve as a tree structure of sub-machines and routines. MVRDV has plans to add representations of the movement of people, goods and information. A housing sub-routine could develop scenarios for optimal housing designs. A light calculator could optimize the need for and control of natural light in built spaces. A ‘function mixer’ would propose optimal mixtures of activities according to economic, social or cultural criteria. Maas speculates that systems such as ‘The Regionmaker’ could become decision-support systems in a more proactive and critical sense. ‘We could add an Evaluator or an Evolver that can suggest criticism of the input we make’, he speculates. But there will never be a single programme for everything – and ‘The Regionmaker’ will never be finished. ‘We think of it not as all-in-one Big Brother software, but as an intricate network of different software programmes operating in different spatial dimensions’.

MVRDV propose a new model for planning, taking the variables that create cities (from density to useage to form) and testing the results through a sequence of software simulations

Most cities’ biggest pressure to collaborate is environmental

MVRDV has developed a family of software tools known as ‘The Regionmaker’, which was first created for a project called RhineRuhrCity

Maas anticipates that ‘The Regionmaker’ will evolve as a tree structure of sub-machines and routines

The cities of the Ruhr conceived by MVRDV as the basis for a network that taken together creates genuinely metropolitan qualities. The image is from MVRDV’s book The Regionmaker, published by Hatje Cantz, 2002