Article

• The Question of Metropolitan Form: Introduction

  Posing the concept of ‘metropolitan form’ as a question, as in the call for papers for this issue of Footprint, is an absolute necessity at this stage of development of urbanised areas. Many of the papers in this issue begin with the straw-man notion of a formless agglomeration of activities and spaces, the – for lack of a better phrase – postmodern urban experience.[1] There is a persistent theme in the related literatures of architecture, urban design and urban and regional planning that the physical form of the contemporary metropolis is un-describable. Soja’s six metaphors (post-Fordist industrial, cosmopolis, expolis, fractal city, carceral archipelago, simcities) are being indicative of the wide range of possible images.[2] The eight papers in this issue of Footprint take an opposite approach. They begin to trace the contours of the debate around how the noun ‘metropolitan form’ might be understood, how it might be studied, and how it might be possible to move from an empirical understanding of its structure to more intuitive design solutions.

  Posing the concept of ‘metropolitan form’ as a question, as in the call for papers for this issue of Footprint, is an absolute necessity at this stage of development of urbanised areas. Many of the papers in this issue begin with the straw-man notion of a formless agglomeration of activities and spaces, the – for lack of a better phrase – postmodern urban experience.[1] There is a persistent theme in the related literatures of architecture, urban design and urban and regional planning that the physical form of the contemporary metropolis is un-describable. Soja’s six metaphors (post-Fordist industrial, cosmopolis, expolis, fractal city, carceral archipelago, simcities) are being indicative of the wide range of possible images.[2] The eight papers in this issue of Footprint take an opposite approach. They begin to trace the contours of the debate around how the noun ‘metropolitan form’ might be understood, how it might be studied, and how it might be possible to move...

  Posing the concept of ‘metropolitan form’ as a question, as in the call for papers for this issue of Footprint, is an absolute necessity at this stage of development of urbanised areas. Many of the papers in this issue begin with the straw-man notion of a formless agglomeration of...

  David Prosperi; Anne Vernez Moudon, François Claessens

  1-4

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• Another Form: From the ‘Informational’ to the ‘Infrastructural’ City

  The city is at once material and medium, substantial and enduring on the one hand but mobile, changeable and different things to different people on the other. So to speak of its form has never been straightforward. In the last fifty years the city has become enmeshed in momentous processes transforming our societies and our senses of our place in the world. We have seen urban places become drawn into ever more integrated circuits with other places across the boundaries of nations and continents. This leaves us with question marks about the places we inhabit today and has generated problems of place and coherence in the contemporary city.

  Without offering solutions to problems of sprawl and fragmentation, I propose here a way of understanding the city and its growth as ordered. To do this I extend Castells’s idea of the ‘technological paradigm’ to spaces of places as well as those of flows and outline an urban form comprising limited technical systems, both high and low tech, establishing coherent and bounded infrastructures of objects, subjects and practices. These infrastructures are internally ordered as total technical systems or paradigms while they are also externally related to other infrastructures in backward and forward articulations that are capable of being generative and place-forming.

  I argue that we need to understand complex processes of boundary and centre formation in these articulations and use this knowledge to deliver a ‘dappled world’ of varying niches or inhabitable places from the very large to the very small. We need to find alternatives to the macrophysics and smooth pervasive power of the space of flows by maintaining, inventing and reinventing microphysical architectures of enabling places offering us multiple ways of being and living in our contemporary city.

  The city is at once material and medium, substantial and enduring on the one hand but mobile, changeable and different things to different people on the other. So to speak of its form has never been straightforward. In the last fifty years the city has become enmeshed in momentous processes transforming our societies and our senses of our place in the world. We have seen urban places become drawn into ever more integrated circuits with other places across the boundaries of nations and continents. This leaves us with question marks about the places we inhabit today and has generated problems of place and coherence in the contemporary city.

  Without offering solutions to problems of sprawl and fragmentation, I propose here a way of understanding the city and its growth as ordered. To do this I extend Castells’s idea of the ‘technological paradigm’ to spaces of places as well as those of flows and outline an urban form comprising limited technical systems, both high and...

  The city is at once material and medium, substantial and enduring on the one hand but mobile, changeable and different things to different people on the other. So to speak of its form has never been straightforward. In the last fifty years the city has become enmeshed in momentous processes...

  Stephen Read

  5-22

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• Changing Perspectives on the Planning of Ankara (1924-2007) and Lessons for a New Master-Planning Approach to Developing Cities

  As one of the newly planned capitals in the 20th century – like Islamabad, Canberra and Brazil –, Ankara represents an original case in planning history: from shaping a new town under the influence of early European urbanism to the control of a dynamic metropolitan form by structural planning approaches. Forming its urban core according to the initial planning perspectives between the beginning of 1930s and the mid-1970s, the city has entered a rapid phase of space production in its extensions for about the last thirty years.

  In the current period of development, highly fragmented urban peripheral formation has being occurred in Ankara. Since the existing trend on the dispersion of urban form lacking spatial coherence at different scale-levels causes the dominance of the private domain and a loss of urbanity, this trend might at first glance be considered as a break with the European tradition and the emergence of Anglo-Americanization in Turkish planning system in terms of looser development control approach on urban form.

  Before, coming to such a critical end-point, the paper prefers a closer look into the changing dynamics of master plans of the city. It is aimed to reveal the developmental logic of the city by means of master plan analysis. The comprehensive outlook – called plan matrix – is integrated into each master plan schema by correlating the basic components like main policy directions, depth of control, settlement typology, and city structure and form. Such a framework has a potential to be utilized for any kind of plan analysis at metropolitan scale for different cases. At the end of the analysis, the paper tends to address an alternative master planning approach for the similar types of developing cities striving for keeping its urban character within a fragmented urban body.

  As one of the newly planned capitals in the 20th century – like Islamabad, Canberra and Brazil –, Ankara represents an original case in planning history: from shaping a new town under the influence of early European urbanism to the control of a dynamic metropolitan form by structural planning approaches. Forming its urban core according to the initial planning perspectives between the beginning of 1930s and the mid-1970s, the city has entered a rapid phase of space production in its extensions for about the last thirty years.

  In the current period of development, highly fragmented urban peripheral formation has being occurred in Ankara. Since the existing trend on the dispersion of urban form lacking spatial coherence at different scale-levels causes the dominance of the private domain and a loss of urbanity, this trend might at first glance be considered as a break with the European tradition and the emergence of Anglo-Americanization in Turkish planning system in...

  As one of the newly planned capitals in the 20th century – like Islamabad, Canberra and Brazil –, Ankara represents an original case in planning history: from shaping a new town under the influence of early European urbanism to the control of a dynamic metropolitan form by structural...

  Olgu Çalişkan

  23-54

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• The Landscape Form of the Metropolis

  When the city disintegrates into an archipelago of fragments a new role is imposed on the landscape as a carrier of topographical characterizations, cohesion and continuity. Patterns such as transportation corridors, settlement areas and landscape voids can be regarded as latent macro-landscape forms of the metropolitan territory. In the staging of the metropolis these forms need to be embedded in a compositional structure that addresses fragmentation and disorientation, without relapsing into utopian forms of the traditional city that have proven inadequate for the metropolitan condition.

  The potential basis to inform this structure is the landscape itself: permanent, neutral and ubiquitous. The underlying landscape also contains an annotated catalogue of situations, in which the genius loci is recorded and secured. These latent compositional elements are transformed into landscape architectural ‘narratives’ within the topography of the emerging metropolis. The enlargement and distortion of specific topographies result in a field of new topologies, drawn from the genius loci and from local cultures and customs. The question is not so much if metropolitan form is determined by landscape, but how we can use it to structure and give meaning to dispersed territories. This involves a delicate choreography of macro-landscape forms and the micro-topography of landscape places. 

  When the city disintegrates into an archipelago of fragments a new role is imposed on the landscape as a carrier of topographical characterizations, cohesion and continuity. Patterns such as transportation corridors, settlement areas and landscape voids can be regarded as latent macro-landscape forms of the metropolitan territory. In the staging of the metropolis these forms need to be embedded in a compositional structure that addresses fragmentation and disorientation, without relapsing into utopian forms of the traditional city that have proven inadequate for the metropolitan condition.

  The potential basis to inform this structure is the landscape itself: permanent, neutral and ubiquitous. The underlying landscape also contains an annotated catalogue of situations, in which the genius loci is recorded and secured. These latent compositional elements are transformed into landscape architectural ‘narratives’ within the topography of the emerging...

  When the city disintegrates into an archipelago of fragments a new role is imposed on the landscape as a carrier of topographical characterizations, cohesion and continuity. Patterns such as transportation corridors, settlement areas and landscape voids can be regarded as latent...

  René van der Velde, Saskia de Wit

  55-80

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• Movement Technologies, Scale Structure and Metropolitan Life – an Empirical Research on the Effects of the Transportation System on the Metropolitan Process in Beijing

  This paper is a morphological study on Beijing’s metropolitanisation process based on the development of its transportation networks. By extracting the ‘scale structure’ embedded in them, we construct a movement network model for Beijing and use it to analyse changing metropolitan centralities as shopping areas and market places in 1924, 1987 and 2006. Following Taylor’s proposal of Central Flow as a complementary model to Central Place, our study focuses on how the spatial distribution of metropolitan centralities has been affected by the rapid modernisation of transportation networks.

  This paper is a morphological study on Beijing’s metropolitanisation process based on the development of its transportation networks. By extracting the ‘scale structure’ embedded in them, we construct a movement network model for Beijing and use it to analyse changing metropolitan centralities as shopping areas and market places in 1924, 1987 and 2006. Following Taylor’s proposal of Central Flow as a complementary model to Central Place, our study focuses on how the spatial distribution of metropolitan centralities has been affected by the rapid modernisation of transportation networks.

  This paper is a morphological study on Beijing’s metropolitanisation process based on the development of its transportation networks. By extracting the ‘scale structure’ embedded in them, we construct a movement network model for Beijing and use it to analyse changing metropolitan...

  Qiang Sheng, Linfei Han

  81-104

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• Peripheral Cluster versus New Town: A Comparative Study on Two Types of Peripheral Developments in the Beijing Metropolitan Region

  Spatial decentralisation has been a planning goal for Beijing city since 1950s. It had not been fully activated until the mid-1990s, when the suburbanisation process started to accelerate rapidly. Under the influence of joint forces of top-down intervention and market-driven development, several large-scale peripheral clusters and new towns have been built in both near and far suburbs. However, the spatial structure of the city remains to be rather mono-centric, which causes severe urban and environmental problems. In the latest Beijing Master Plan, the metropolitan region is considered as a whole. A polycentric spatial structure is proposed with the aim to consolidate the existing regional centralities as stronger counter-weights to central city.

  The aim of this paper is to investigate the spatial social and economic conditions of the existing large-scale peripheral clusters and new towns, to understand their strengths and weaknesses, in order to give concrete spatial recommendations for future transformation of Beijing metropolitan region. The paper is organized as follows. The first part presents a review of morphological transformation process of Beijing metropolis since 1950s till now. Then in-depth analysis and comparative study will be given to two representative cases of – Tiantongyuan and Tonzhou – peripheral residential district and satellite town. Finally useful lessons and spatial recommendations for realizing poly-nuclear regional structure will be elaborated.

  Spatial decentralisation has been a planning goal for Beijing city since 1950s. It had not been fully activated until the mid-1990s, when the suburbanisation process started to accelerate rapidly. Under the influence of joint forces of top-down intervention and market-driven development, several large-scale peripheral clusters and new towns have been built in both near and far suburbs. However, the spatial structure of the city remains to be rather mono-centric, which causes severe urban and environmental problems. In the latest Beijing Master Plan, the metropolitan region is considered as a whole. A polycentric spatial structure is proposed with the aim to consolidate the existing regional centralities as stronger counter-weights to central city.

  The aim of this paper is to investigate the spatial social and economic conditions of the existing large-scale peripheral clusters and new towns, to understand their strengths and weaknesses, in order to give concrete spatial...

  Spatial decentralisation has been a planning goal for Beijing city since 1950s. It had not been fully activated until the mid-1990s, when the suburbanisation process started to accelerate rapidly. Under the influence of joint forces of top-down intervention and market-driven development,...

  Jing Zhou, Lei Qu

  105-126

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• Polycentric Metropolitan Form: Application of a ‘Northern’ Concept in Latin America

  Since the mid 20th century, large urban areas in advanced economies have experienced a fundamental transformation from relatively compact monocentric cities towards more extended polycentric metropolitan areas. By now, it is being commented repeatedly, but not investigated systematically that the concept of polycentricity is also adequate to characterise recent metropolitan dynamics in Latin-America.

  This paper aims to present a few key-issues for a future research agenda into polycentricity in Latin-American metropolitan areas. These elements are identified from a review of existing literature. Since no clear-cut definition and operationalisation of polycentricity exist yet, we distinguish some key-elements of this phenomenon in North America as a frame of reference for this review. It reveals that ‘polycentricity U.S. style’ is at best dawning in Latin-America. In order to achieve a more appropriate picture of polycentricity of Latin American metropolitan areas, our ideas for a research agenda take into account these areas typical economic, social and spatial conditions.

  Since the mid 20th century, large urban areas in advanced economies have experienced a fundamental transformation from relatively compact monocentric cities towards more extended polycentric metropolitan areas. By now, it is being commented repeatedly, but not investigated systematically that the concept of polycentricity is also adequate to characterise recent metropolitan dynamics in Latin-America.

  This paper aims to present a few key-issues for a future research agenda into polycentricity in Latin-American metropolitan areas. These elements are identified from a review of existing literature. Since no clear-cut definition and operationalisation of polycentricity exist yet, we distinguish some key-elements of this phenomenon in North America as a frame of reference for this review. It reveals that ‘polycentricity U.S. style’ is at best dawning in Latin-America. In order to achieve a more appropriate picture of polycentricity of Latin American metropolitan areas, our...

  Since the mid 20th century, large urban areas in advanced economies have experienced a fundamental transformation from relatively compact monocentric cities towards more extended polycentric metropolitan areas. By now, it is being commented repeatedly, but not investigated systematically that...

  Arie Romein, Otto Verkoren, Ana María Fernandez

  127-146

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• The Vague, the Viral, the Parasitic: Piranesi’s Metropolis

  In mid-18th century Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings systematically document the old and new monuments, decrepit buildings and broken down infrastructures of a Rome that continues to inhabit and reinvent its past. His views of Rome offer a devastating account of the blurring of distinctions and articulations that time, use and neglect have imposed on the old differentiations of the urban and the rural, the public and the private, the monumental and the domestic in the 18th century city. Rome becomes for Piranesi the laboratory for a questioning of architecture that places his work well beyond the debate on style and on the origin that dominated the architectural discourse of his time. This paper suggests that Piranesi’s images anticipate the dispersion and sprawl of the city of today, in which the ‘vague’, the ‘viral’ and the ‘parasitic’ become modes of inhabitation and of transient negotiated definition.

  In the Antichità di Roma, ancient buildings are represented not only in their large scale and magnificence, but also in their decay and reversal to a state of naturalness. These works, together with the acute observations of the Vedute di Roma, provide the materials that are then dislocated, manipulated, cloned and endlessly mutated by Piranesi in the synthesis of the Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma, in which the historical city is almost entirely dissolved and replaced by an extraordinary congestion of fragments. When they are re-examined on the grounds of contemporary architectural and urban theory, the sites of Piranesi's views reveal anticipations of phenomena that affect the metropolis of today. Political, social and economic conditions have changed dramatically, but the questions asked of architecture in and by these sites challenge the definition of an architecture of style, forms and boundaries – in the 18th century as well as in the 21st – in favour of an architecture of change.

  In mid-18th century Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings systematically document the old and new monuments, decrepit buildings and broken down infrastructures of a Rome that continues to inhabit and reinvent its past. His views of Rome offer a devastating account of the blurring of distinctions and articulations that time, use and neglect have imposed on the old differentiations of the urban and the rural, the public and the private, the monumental and the domestic in the 18th century city. Rome becomes for Piranesi the laboratory for a questioning of architecture that places his work well beyond the debate on style and on the origin that dominated the architectural discourse of his time. This paper suggests that Piranesi’s images anticipate the dispersion and sprawl of the city of today, in which the ‘vague’, the ‘viral’ and the ‘parasitic’ become modes of inhabitation and of transient negotiated definition.

  In the Antichità di Roma,...

  In mid-18th century Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings systematically document the old and new monuments, decrepit buildings and broken down infrastructures of a Rome that continues to inhabit and reinvent its past. His views of Rome offer a devastating account of the blurring of...

  Teresa Stoppani

  147-160

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• Interpreting the Contemporary Metropolis: Notes on the Urban Debate and on Ignasi Solà-Morales

  The theory of urbanism faces the difficult task of struggling to make acknowledgeable the complexity of the metropolitan form. In this sense, the legacy of the recently diseased history researcher and architecture theorist Ignási Sola-Morales arises as a sharp, generous and open perspective. Besides an apparent sense of enigma, his work has the genuine capacity of describing the cartography the metropolis and its form in its contemporary complexity. Being a teacher at the COAC (Cataluña’s college of architects) allowed him to draw one of the most remarkable and sharp theoretical cartographies of the contemporaneous condition of the metropolitan architecture. A complex line of thought towards architecture being born from a cross from artistic and philosophical ideas, capable of causing breaches on the architectural culture.

  His writings correspond, in a certain way, to a selection of “categories” on which to lay the provisory interpretations of a contemporary metropolis and its form that is, in his own words, multiple, non convergent and of an instable shape arising from the crystallization of various forces. From all that, the outcome is a complex system united, as far as I’m concerned, by the permanent generosity of proposing to romantically rise above the bizarreness of a late-capitalism, post-historical world. In this paper we intend to show how the work of Ignási Sola Morales presents, in a generous, sharp and open way besides all the apparent enigma, the genuine capacity of cartographing the city and its form in all its contemporaneous complexity.

  The theory of urbanism faces the difficult task of struggling to make acknowledgeable the complexity of the metropolitan form. In this sense, the legacy of the recently diseased history researcher and architecture theorist Ignási Sola-Morales arises as a sharp, generous and open perspective. Besides an apparent sense of enigma, his work has the genuine capacity of describing the cartography the metropolis and its form in its contemporary complexity. Being a teacher at the COAC (Cataluña’s college of architects) allowed him to draw one of the most remarkable and sharp theoretical cartographies of the contemporaneous condition of the metropolitan architecture. A complex line of thought towards architecture being born from a cross from artistic and philosophical ideas, capable of causing breaches on the architectural culture.

  His writings correspond, in a certain way, to a selection of “categories” on which to lay the provisory interpretations of a contemporary...

  The theory of urbanism faces the difficult task of struggling to make acknowledgeable the complexity of the metropolitan form. In this sense, the legacy of the recently diseased history researcher and architecture theorist Ignási Sola-Morales arises as a sharp, generous and open perspective....

  Gonçalo Furtado

  161-172

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