INTRODUCTION

JOHN DE MONCHAUX Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The ability to design for growth and change is an essential one for those responsible for the invention, making and replacing of human artifacts at every scale, from nano-tubes to nations. In current city planning documents, urban research reports and planning practice the imperative to design or plan for growth and change is mentioned much less often than other sought-after performance outcomes such as efciency, convenience, equity, justice, elegance, t and others. And rarely is there data about signicant changes in the setting over time or any monitoring of change in the demands that the intervention was designed to serve. Recent annual editions of this journal have focused on some of these more familiar aspects of performance such as Justice, Equity and Sustainability (Projections 8, 9), and have examined how these performance outcomes are dened, detected and attached to the next generation of designs, plans and policy changes. In the spring of 2010, Andres Sevtsuk, the editor for this edition of Projections, suggested that we investigate current thinking about design for growth and change. Our interest would be on whether and how contemporary design interventions in the landscape, infrastructure and other elements of the city and their companion processes, plans and policy changes, are being congured so as to underwrite their continuing performance in a future when conditions in the settings where they were introduced will have been subject to signicant growth and change. Our interest has been to present speculative, theory-based ideas as much as it has been to show examples from practice. We distributed the call for papers in March 2010. With the generous help of our Editorial Board, the willing cooperation and patience of our authors, and the clear-headed energy of our Editor, MITs Department of Urban Studies and Planning is pleased to present seven papers on designing for growth and change. In the paper that opens this journal, William Fawcett rst reminds us that there has been very little systematic evaluation of the ow, magnitude and incidence of benets and burdens that might arise from the explicit provision of exibility in the design of buildings and cities to accommodate growth and change. But, he goes on to tell us that there is no such thing as a universally exible environment. These somewhat contradictory realities lead him to suggest and demonstrate the use of the nancial device of lifecycle options to derive a pattern of benets and costs and how these are distributed.

de Monchaux 9

From a close reading of the Team 10 discussions in the 50s and 60s and with the benet of more recent reections by Alison and Peter Smithson, Jaime J Ferrer Fors builds a description of the designs for the Free University of Berlin by Candelis-JosicWoods and other approaches to the making of city parts of well connected low-rise mat-buildings. Of additional interest is Ferrer Fors recognition that the MIT campus itself constitutes a good example of mat urbanism. (See this journals cover illustrations of MITs growth very kindly made available to us from her thesis by Maria Zefeiriadou, SMArchS 2006). Alexander DHooghe also presents the issues surrounding design for growth and change through an art/architectural history lens. He offers an account of the three formal properties successively displayed in the major infrastructure elements of the 20th century city. He suggests that the future city landscape will be enhanced by designs for new highway, drainage and open space elements of the city that meet the tests of a good system, offer their users, in the case of highways, intelligible and rewarding views of the city, and are also conceived and executed as works of art in their own right. The re-building of existing urban areas is often a radical and frequently disruptive path to meet the demands of growth and change in the city. Once committed to that path, those responsible need to be able to summon thoughtful criteria, evidence and good judgment as to what buildings, public spaces, roads and infrastructure to preserve as working parts of the renewed urban area in order that those same facilities should serve the rebuilt area. Using a methodology derived from the renewal of the Sham Shui Po district in Hong Kong, the nal paper in this journal, by Pui Leng Woo and Ka Man Hui, presents a systematic approach to the determination of what to keep, given the contribution such physical elements will make to the functions and memories of the renewed district. Of special interest is the case they make for keeping intact certain planes, points and lines embedded in the form of the existing district and able in the future, as they have been in the past, to be drawn upon to help shape the yet unknown and unknowable changes that the district will experience in the more distant future. The remaining three papers in the journal each present a case or proposition about designing for growth and change in America. But their applicability and/or their outcome, adapted only slightly to respond to local cultural and political structures, is universal. Grace Catenaccio shows us the workings and weaknesses of growth boundaries legislated in the 1980s to restrain perimeter development of Portland, Oregon and Las Vegas, Nevada. Stephen Cassell and Anne Barrett demonstrate an approach to the programming and design of the Greenwich South Area of Lower Manhattan that is based on de-

10 Projections

vising and sharing with all parties in the process congurations of built form that will respond to the current goals while keeping open genuine and varied options for change and design in the future. Sam Bass Warner conveys the seriousness and scale of the disruption to cities and their suburbs that would ow from global warming and new economic conditions. In such circumstances he suggests that the considered densication of existing suburbs offers the best remedy to the burdens of over extended cities and their infrastructure. To provide a pool of professional skills to underwrite the design and planning of suburban inll in elegant and sensitive ways he advocates the organization of local cadres of volunteer architects and planners as an urgent supplement to existing public sector staff. All the essays, papers and proposals received in response to the call for ideas about designing for growth and change revealed two underlying issues. First, they convey the enormous strength and reach of our abilities to gather and manipulate information about city change and the potential to apply these strengths to better understand the serious and complex issues that arise from such change. Secondly, and perhaps more critically, they remind us that attention to issues of growth and change lies at the root of the broad human concern for an enlargement of the freedoms and choices that can be made available in the future, and of the conviction that informed planning and design can make worthy contribution to that expansion of those choices.

de Monchaux 11