Chapter 8.1: Metropolis, Megalopolis and MetacityBrian McGrath and Grahame Shane.

Introduction

With much fanfare, the urban century has arrived at the very moment that the definitions and meanings of the terms city, metropolis and territory seem to be exhausted. Manuel Castells (1999) pinpointed the dilemma when he said that more and more we live in an urban society without cities. Even within this handbooks brief thirty year time frame, architectur-al theories of the city have continually readjusted the meaning of these terms in response to huge shifts in the geopolitical landscape: the first oil shock and challenge to American hegemony in the 1970s, the rise of deregulated neoliberal globalization and the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, the emergence of the internets irrational exuberance and the prom-ise of a transnational global village in the 1990s, and the shattering of this utopian moment on 9/11 with the resulting endless US war on terror dominating the first decade of the twenty-first century. And now, the very metabolism of urbanization needs to be fun-damentally transformed to insure to the survival of life on this planet and equitable access to its limited resources. We have witnessed the complete reversal of fortunes of cities -- once seen as shrinking, dead, shattered or bursting at the seams, cities now can be seen as the crucial spaces of hope for the majority of the worlds poor and the place in which the environ-mental and social crises of our times must be imme-diately addressed.

For us, the greatest evidence of the dramatic chang-es over the last thirty years has been the prolif-eration of competing models of urban form, each with its own formal order, metabolism and role for architecture in shaping the city. The imperial me-tropolis, symbolic center of a controlled colonial world order at the beginning of the twentieth century gave way to the sprawling global megalopolis and its result the imploding mega-city (see chapter 8_3), the monstrous twin products of the open neoliberal world (dis)order at the beginning of the twenty-first. In this chapter, we will present this extraordinary and unprecedented reversal of the city/territory as a context for the necessary changes which lay ahead for architectural theory and practice. Therefore, we

put forward a third city model as a synthesis of the dialectical opposition and social stratification of the metropolis, megalopolis and megacity: the net-worked multi-form metacity. This third urban model will lay the foundation for a theorization of architec-ture to take on a more expansive and less hierarchi-cal role of critical participation in imagining the vast structural, social and metabolic urban transforma-tions required in the decades ahead.

These three simultaneous and overlapping city models metropolis, megalopolis and metacity - will be examined as competing theories of symbolic form, social order and environmental metabolism, each with a specific role for architecture to imagine, represent and shape. At the mid point of the twen-tieth century, following the collapse of the colonial world order, the imperial European metropole gave way to a dominant new urban form and way of life - the American Cold War megalopolis. The collapse of the colonial world system also resulted in the unexpected and uncontrolled growth of the informal implosion of the megacity as the flip side of sprawl-ing megalopolis. The three theoretical models coex-ist concurrently in the contemporary world, even as they emerged during three distinct historical peri-ods and constitute distinct arenas for architectural practice and cultural theory. To illustrate the three models, illustrations 1, 2 and 3 represent their simul-taneous coincidence in contemporary Bangkok.

We argue here that a more recent shift, which began with innovations in electronic communication and financial liberalizations in the 1980s, produced a radical reassembling of both the fragmented metrop-olis, the sprawling megalopolis and the imploding megacity. This has led to an unprecedented increase in the scale and interconnection of urbanization world-wide, a miniaturization of its metabolism, as well as a geopolitical shift away from European and North American hegemony. The metropolis, megalopolis and megacity are currently being shat-tered, dismantled, removed and reassembled at this moment of crisis following the end of the oil-based American century. Our last urban model -- the metacity -- calls for a re-assemblage of the social and natural ordering of metropolis, megalopolis and megacity in the new symbolic form and metabolic processes through new close-up and remote technol-ogies and sensibilities (McGrath and Shane 2005).

Our three city theories represent very different for-mal, symbolic and social models of the city. While the metropolis is legible, controlled, contained, centralized and radiates out to zoned residential suburbs, satellite cities, agricultural land and forests, the megalopolis reverses the codes of the metropolis and is an unbounded, multi-nodal network of cen-ters for work, living and pleasure interspersed with patches of farms and wilderness, strung together by landscaped highways. The megacity prefigures the emerging synthetic model of the metacity as it freely mixes urban and rural types in archipelagos of strange clusters through which people, informa-tion and materials constantly flow. These forms and flows are continually monitored by remote satellites and embedded sensors on the ground, and interlinked by the social and logistical webs of cell phones and the internet. All three of our urban models currently coexist and interact in the contem-porary urban landscape but rarely in the designers imagination, as they become distinct territories of both theory and practice.

The emergence of the metropolitan and megalo-politan model both represented radical shifts in the metabolism of the city, as the biomass feudal city was supplanted by the coal, steam and railroad based industrial metropolis, which in turn has trans-formed into the decentralized oil-based automobile city linked by telephone lines and television broad-casting. While the rural migrants to the megacity frugally conserve, recycle and reuse, the necessary metabolic shift to the metacity can only occur now with the advent of internet and wireless technolo-gies, which provide the monitoring, communication, social network and feedback tools to facilitate the creations of a global city based on equitable access to renewable natural resources and energy, sun, wind and geothermal power.

These three urban models also represent distinct arenas for architects in the shaping, imagining, rep-resenting and modelling of the city. The metropoli-tan architect alone commands the symbolic spatial ordering of the imperial capital, while the org-man, the corporate architecture firm of the cold war megalopolis collaborates with large teams of land-scape architects, planners and multiple consultants at the new scale and complexity of global practice

while the megacity and its slums have attracted widespread attention from social scientists, non-government organizations and global institutions. While both the metropolitan figure of the signature architect and the anonymous corporate firm continue to dominate the practice of architecture, the archi-tect-imagineer, tasked with branding the thematic identity of a city through spectacular formal expres-sion has also recently emerged (see also chapter 3_3). Meanwhile, the vast majority of city building is without the help of professionals. Rarely does the self-built megacity or the anonymous sprawl of the junk space of contemporary building production pass through the professional gaze of the architect. More recently, the symbolic order of the emerging metacity is continually inputted, updated and com-mented on by millions of digital citizens through blogs, twitters, text messages and web cams, creat-ing a collectively imagined and constantly changing urban image.

The vast scalar disparities between the close-up and remote systems of sensing, information gathering, mapping, representation and communication within the contemporary metacity brings to question the rich archive of representational forms architects have brought to the metropolis, megalopolis and megacity: the figure-ground and typo-morphological mapping systems that attend to the historical con-tinuities of urban form versus the cubist layering of transparent space that attests to urban mobility, transformation and change. The role of modelling and design has shifted again in the metacity, now that embedded information from cell phones and internet activity leaves traces of climatic, social and biotic activity that can be mapped in real time through geographical information systems. These maps borrow from choreographic notation or Situ-ationist maps that chart the movement of matter, individuals, or crowds and which register the flow of life and events within particular sectors of the city.

Cinemetric digital video analyses enrich mor-phological conditions with on-the-ground visual information (McGrath and Gardner 2007), while temporal diagrams add another dimension to 3D modelling simultaneously providing timeformations: the confluence of spatial and temporal information (McGrath 2008). Such representations underpin the speculative tradition in architecture that seeks to

The Metropolis

The metropolis as a model, symbol and rule for ordering the city was surprisingly revived thirty years ago with the publication of Delirious New York by architect Rem Koolhaas and the founding of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) with Madelon Vriesendorp, Elia and Zoe Zhengelis (1978). During the economic crisis which followed the first oil shock in the 1970s, Delirious New York provided epic tales of a vibrant pre World War II metropolitan architecture reviving the architects deflated urban imagination. Koolhaas retroactive manifesto was crystallized in OMAs (including Zaha Hadid) winning proposal for the new Parlia-ment building in The Hague. Although unbuilt, this project proposed a radically modernist post-Cold War building a hybrid of Russian revolutionary constructivism and Manhattans metropolitan con-gestion in the heart of a historical European city. This project can be seen as a continuation of the re-constructivist impulse of inserting strikingly modern buildings within older metropolitan centers, which had declined in importance relative to the Cold War suburban sprawl. This impulse was especially acute, where state reinvestment in older metropolitan cen-ters was seen as a front against the assault of Ameri-can popular cultural intrusions.

A symbolically renewed metropolis revitalized through new heroic architectural icons has become ubiquitous through the world, reaching an ironic culmination in OMAs monument for Chinas state broadcast company, the CCTV Tower in Beijing. Here, state planners have remodelled the center of the city as in Paris Grand Projects of the 1970s through 90s or Barcelonas Olympic transforma-tion in the 1980s. The Imperial city of the Ming Dynasty, transformed by Mao to a socialist industri-al city, has been reborn as a monstrous mutation of Ebenezer Howards metropolitan ideal, the Garden City of Tomorrow. Spectacular architectural icons like CCTV, the 2008 Olympic birds nest stadium and the new Opera House give legibility to a vast metropolis with six ring roads, green belts and nu-merous satellite cities, planned to house a population capped at 18 million people.

imagine, model and project alternative utopian, dystopian, heterotopian, simultopian futures for cities. They are further enriched by representations developed in other fields, such as ethnography, biol-ogy and economics. The conclusion of this chapter seeks to investigate how these different perspectives might be combined in order to better understand and imagine and remake the metacity everywhere here and now.

This section will examine the political, social and environmental dimensions of the revival of the me-tropolis at this particular moment in time. While the 19th century metropolis emerged as a way to make spatially coherent the hierarchical colonial world system, the peculiarly post-modern phenomenon of its revival through the agency of architecture repre-sents a new era. As Foucault has shown, disciplinary authority is dispersed in the micro-politics of desire and the technologies of the self (see chapter 8_4). At the end of the 20th century the architect was revived as the image maker, with multiple tools of print and digital communication, who can make the promise of metropolis spectacularly seductive again.

Francoise Choay in Rule and the Model (1997) sees the nineteenth century metropolitan order of Ilde-fonso Cerdas Barcelona and Baron Haussmanns Paris, as combining two architectural theories of the city: first utopian texts that proscribe an ideal fixed model and second, general systems of rules that describe a relatively open generative system for ur-ban design, analogous to an urban language. A new hybrid between model and rule forms the legible Rationalist system of the nineteenth century Eu-ropean metropolis, clearly ordered yet dynamic and open to change. Choay traces these two theoretical approaches from Plato and Aristotle through to the Italian Renaissance, contrasting Albertis generative system to Thomas Moores perfect, frozen model of Utopia. The metropolitan order is a clear social dia-gram of power relations, and Haussmanns radiating boulevards connecting national monuments, cultural institutions, and rail gateways continue to fix the image of Paris. The balance between rule and model can temper the stasis or dynamism of metropolitan order. For example, the 1811 grid plan of Manhattan is a generative pattern whose rules are constantly re-adjusted through new building technologies, corpo-rate demands, zoning and community input as well as new forms of social life.

The nineteenth century metropolitan hybrid model overlaid a progressive ideal of efficient, hygienic and easy to police urban streets with generative rules to create a diverse array of housing blocks and economic activities masked behind uniform facades. Le Corbusier transformed this ideal by reversing the building fabric/street code, creating his Ville Radieuse of free standing slab blocks set in an

idealized parkland in the 1930s (Rowe and Koet-ter 1978). While in Good City Form (1981), Kevin Lynch admires the legibility of the Baroque urban model favoured in the European metropolis, James C. Scott in Seeing like a State forcefully demon-strates how an authoritative states attempt to use spatial legibility and simplification for authoritative control undermines city life (1998). This becomes especially relevant in the post-colonial world of new nations asserting state control in the absence of European metropolitan order. Scott mentions Chan-digarh and Brasilia in particular, but he also names the countless internationally funded schemes to improve the human condition that have routinely failed. Architectural theorists like Le Corbusier and Koolhaas favoured the metropolitan model because of its top-down structure which gave the architect the illusion of control as the advisor to powerful urban actors, whether military dictators or freedom fighters devoted to modernizing their country.

The work of the new metropolitan architects must be situated in the re-articulation of the social context of architecture that emerged in the Venice, Berlin, Lon-don, New York theoretical axis which existed in the 1970s -- a period of much architectural theorization and paper architecture as building production itself collapsed in the shadow of the first oil shock (see chapter 8_2). Aldo Rossis Larchitettura della Citt [1966] was translated and widely distributed through the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), a think tank directed by Peter Eisenman. The IAUS served as the clearing house for European architects in New York, and Koolhaas was able to conduct his research on the fantastic metropolitan architecture of Coney Island and Rockefeller Center at the Institute.

Rossi sought collective, psychological archetypes to remain constant in the flux of urban change. He highlighted large urban institutions that acted as communal mnemonic devices and large fragments that constituted the collective imagination of the city, while the smaller scale urban fabric around these cities-within-cities changed within coded, typo-morphologic parameters. German Rational-ists, like O.M. Ungers and the Krier Brothers in the 1970s also adopted this binary pattern of fabric and icon and adapted early American grid plans to their purposes. In the US, Colin Rowe and the Contex-

tualist School at Cornell in the 1960s pursued a parallel generative and figure-ground pattern re-search, leading to built projects such as Cooper and Eckstadts Battery Park City design. However, New York in the 1970s was a fragmented metropolis in deep distress, with much of the regional economic activity dispersed to the edge cities along the Bos-ton-Washington corridor that Jean Gottman identi-fied as the megalopolis (1961).

William Cronons Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1992) challenged this presump-tion of generative autonomy. Cronon radically shifts the understanding of the metropolis as a rational and centralized artefact to a regional-global sys-tem which exploits natural resources according to economic and transportation logics at a continental scale. Chicago, a nineteenth century boom town on the frontier of America, is situated where the farms of the Midwest and the forests of the north meet the junction of the shipping infrastructure of the Great Lakes at the hub of the continental railway system. This confluence of history and geography produced an agglomeration of resources and demand at this pivotal hub between the resources of the west and the industrial urban east. In the case of Chicago, the opening up of the Great Plains by the railway companies and mechanized farming created a new bread-basket for the continent and world. This cornucopia was funnelled through Chicago and the Great Lakes, rapidly creating enormous wealth and a new boom town metropolis.

Cronons portrait of Natures Metropolis can be ex-trapolated at a global scale as the world, according to World Systems Theory, was divided into centers, semi-peripheries and peripheries (Wallerstein 2004). At the center of the metropolitan system there are relatively few large mother cities like London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, New York, and Tokyo. On the periphery are millions of peas-ants, tied to the land, whether under a rigid regime of passes, like the former Apartheid regime in South Africa, or under similar Stalinist pass-books sys-tems in Russia or under Maos strict huoku system of residency permits. In all these cases the majority of the population was detained as labour on the land away from the cities, as it was also in the colonial regimes of the European powers. Within the metro-politan and colonial system rulers wanted to keep

people on the land to supply the cities and industries with the raw material they required.

These imperial capitals or global trading centers stood at the heart of large colonial networks which fed down through a tree-like hierarchy of colonial towns, Canberra, New Delhi, Ottawa, Johannesburg, Hong Kong and Singapore etc in the case of the British Empire, to colonial territories and planta-tions. Earlier trading networks, like the Silk and Spice Routes from China to Europe, were subsumed within this system, with its classic choke points of vulnerability, the Dardanelles at Istanbul, Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Homuz, the straits by Singapore and the Panama Canal. Metropolitan theorists highlighted the railways, electricity and coal fired plants that still provided the bulk of the energy and transport in the 1950s.

The metabolism of the metropolis propelled the West to temporarily dominate the globe and provide a top-down rationalist social order to the streets. However, a century of carbon emissions, two world wars, and countless examples of social strife, revo-lution and unrest have demonstrated how vulnerable and unsustainable this urban model is as a global system. It can only support a relatively few urban centers in a world relegated to subsistence farming, low wages, and the exportation of natural resources to support the fortunate few metropolitan elite. In the next section the social and spatial dimensions of the metropolis will be seen as reversed in the emer-gence of the post-war megalopolis, which reduced much of the social conflict of the top-down me-tropolis with its open, individualized social system, yet worsened the environmental impacts on the city, created fragmented social factions within the city and created new dimensions of class segregation. As we shall see, the megalopolis also produced a crisis for the role of the architect as the controller of the symbolic order and design imagination of the city.

For Gottmann, Americans appeared to have solved these problems and moved on to another level of spatial organization based on an image of freedom, mobility and interconnectivity through broadcast media and telephone communication. Entire city systems appeared as megalopolitan constellations in this analysis, whose low-rise landscape side built on Geddes Biopolis concept with its healthy Valley Section described in his Cities in Evolution (1915). Reyner Banham saw Los Angels as a geographi-cally differentiated open ended urban megaform stretching across a huge agricultural basin between mountains and seaside in his Los Angeles, the Ar-chitecture of Four Ecologies (1971). Banham also acknowledged The Art of the Enclave in the cre-ation of attractors in this new symbolic landscape, like Disneyland or the many malls which constitute his cities-within-cities. He drew on Ian McHargs Design with Nature (1969) that provided a method for handling huge regional landscapes through a layered landscape mapping analysis. Landscape and highway design provided the green veil as a new symbolic order for the sprawling megalopolis.

In Megalopolis Revisited: 25 Years Later, Gottmann points to Japan as the location of the earliest and most enthusiastic adaptation of the concept (1987).

The Megalopolis

In Megalopolis: the Urbanized North-Eastern Sea-board of the United States (1961) French geographer Jean Gottmann exhaustively maps the string of cities from Boston to Washington not as distinct metro-politan centers, but as a linked urban system. Gott-mann, whose research ended just before the Ameri-can civil unrest in the 1960s, celebrated the wealth and productivity of this new urban system, which housed the most prosperous, well educated and serviced social group - a population of over thirty million that the world had every seen. Gottmann asked his readers to abandon the idea of the city as a tightly settled and organized unit in which people, activities, and riches are crowded into a very small area clearly separated form its non-urban surround-ings in other words, Gottmann asks us to abandon the limited image and anachronistic idea of the tradi-tional metropolis, but unwittingly he also asks us to ignore the emerging underclass trapped in the soon to disappear industrial city.

Gottmann took the term Megalopolis from Spengler, the author of the Decline of the West (1937), who like Georg Simmel saw psychological and social dangers in the giant metropolis of his time [1903].

in London such as Peter Cooks Plug-in City (1964) dreamt of permanent cranes moving housing cap-sules, all over a buried highway network. Piano and Rogers scheme for the Pompidou Center in the old Marais district together with the demolition of the old markets to make way of the Forum Les Halles created a state sponsored Hi-Tech, megastructural style for contemporary cultural and leisure space.

Such visions became reality as new commercial consumer paradises in oil rich locations such as Los Angeles or Houston. Banhams 1976 Megastructures book also contained Guy Obata of HOKs design for the first American mega-mall with office towers and a hotel attached, above an Olympic size skat-ing rink in the Galleria Houston (1967) five miles from the center of town. Around 1990 a new round of cheap oil sponsored a megastructural revival in such schemes as Cesar Pellis World Financial Center (1986-88 New York), SOMs Canary Wharf in London (1988-91), Pianos Potsdam Platz (1990 on) in Berlin and Fosters Al Faisaliah Tower com-plex, Riyadh (1994-2000), all containing both malls and towers. Later, high oil prices brought a new crop of megastructures in oil rich locations, like the $12 billion Moscow City new CBD with its Federation Tower outside central Moscow, or SOMs design for the Burj Tower Dubai (2008). Other examples include Fosters spectacular, pyramidal Palace of Peace and Reconciliation (2004-06) and conical Khan Shatyry Entertainment Centre in Astana, Ka-zakhstan (2006-2008).

Gottmann in his 1961 study of the Megalopolis had noted the sprawling nature of the new city, referring to its nebulous urban form. Urban theorists such as David Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and Jordon Myer in their View from the Road (1963) stressed the visual impact and cognitive mapping of the new highway networks in the megalopolis, giving rise to a new inner city and suburban mental geography. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour found new urban patterns and symbolic language in the auto-based environment of parking lots, casinos and signage in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), keying the break down of the metropolis to the peripheral visual explosion of the megalopolis ex-perienced at new scales and speeds. Joel Garreaus Edge Cities (1992) highlighted the unplanned con-glomerations of retail, commercial and office uses

Tokaido, the Tokyo-Osaka megalopolis, led the way in the 1960s, connected primarily by high-speed bullet trains. Similar interest was shown in Hol-land and the Benelux region and more recently in Italy (see chapter 8_2). However, the metropolitan imagination emanating from Paris prevented the French from agreeing to politically re-centering of the European Community around megalopolitan systems. The Megalopolis also seemed logical to corporate architects working in fast growing Asian cities, fuelled by Middle Eastern oil in 1960s, who speculated that urban growth might also take on a new, spectacular, megaform.

Gottmanns recognition of a new urban model that emerged following the end of World War II was embraced by both architectural theorists and new forms of corporate practice. The Metabolist Group following Tange and his megastructural Tokyo Bay project of 1960 created a new urban language for the megalopolis. Fumihiko Maki introduced the term megaform and megastructure in his 1965 article Some thoughts on Collective Form, which showed his scheme for a new urban node at Shinjuku. Paul Rudolph had similar megastructural fantasies for Robert Moses New York. Reyner Banhams 1976 Megastructures; Urban Futures of the Recent Past featured Rudolphs scheme for a giant, mixed-use, housing A-frame over a sunken highway cutting across Soho and Tribeca in New York, leading to the twin octagonal towers of his World Trade Center with a huge, multi-storied mall in the base.

Theorists imagined such dense megaform structures as liberating the individual and providing freedom within new vast interior rather than traditional urban landscapes. Megaform theory also draws inspira-tion from the self-generative patterns and fine grained scale of the traditional city. In avant-garde circles this ideal combined with more libertarian social agendas as in the work of Dutch Situationist Constant Nieuwenhuys in his New Babylon proj-ect (1957-74). Here a huge megaform structure on pilotis housed a network of small self-created social spaces floating over the bourgeois Benelux land-scape. Cedric Prices Fun Palace (1962-3) was also a social utopia that imagined a megaform performance space for self-made cultural events, constantly readjusted to new social desires. Archigrams work

in emerging peripheral centers on orbital highways, like Tysons Corners outside Washington DC.

While the new political reality of the Cold War world system unleashed megalopolitan edge cities in the cities of the North, much of the post-colonial world experienced an explosion of uncontrolled urbanization in the global South. The first recogni-tion of the vast self-built Latin American favelas was by Janice Perlman, who in 1976 coined the term megacity and later founded the Mega City institute to study these urban conglomerations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The United Nations recognized these bottom-up new towns for the first time at the 1976 Habitat I in Vancouver, when self-help NGOs found an advocate in the work of the architect-theorist John Turner, author of Housing By People (1977). In Mexico City, for instance, the government laid out the main infrastructural grid for the vast informal settlement of Chalco or Nezahualcoyotl (1990) but then left associations and individuals to build the dwellings as best they could. The World Bank in this period also encouraged Sites and Ser-vices developments of local infrastructure, like B.V. Dhoshis self-build Aranya housing in Indore, India (1989), where families built their own houses within a service grid.

Such housing projects designed by architects of-ten quickly became gentrified and middle class, and represent only a tiny fraction of the enormous migrations to cities which accompanied the collapse of the European empires. For every new mega-form construction in the developing world (like the Parque Central complex, Caracas), there was a shadow group form construction of self built and temporary accommodations for the workers (the bar-rios climbing the mountains in the planned Caracas green belt.) The partition of the British Raj produced a huge displaced population India and both East and West Pakistan, while the European powers creation of Israel fed Gaza and refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, intended as temporary but now sixty years old. Even in oil rich states like Mexico and Venezuela, cities like Caracas and Mexico City quickly fell into housing crises despite the best ef-forts of modernist architects, sometimes working for military dictatorships, like Carlos Villaneuva in Ca-racas. Peasants moving to the city had to build their own houses as best they could in the 1950s, result-

ing in the emergence of huge informal barrios and favellas beside the formal city. Dharavi, in Mumbai is reputedly Asias largest self-built settlement. In a long established, previously peripheral informal village, a high-density, low-rise, mixed-use, highly productive downtown cottage industry enclave now sits across from the new financial district on some of Mumbais most valuable real estate.

The UN adopted the term Megacity in 1986 and used it to refer to any city over ten million people rather than in the specific sense of overcrowded self-built group form extensions of fast growing de-veloping cities as coined by Perlman. This tends to conflate Tokyo and Cairo rather than see them as ex-tremely different conurbations which have emerged coincidentally in the developed and developing world. While emerging in tandem, the megalopolis and megacity have considerably different ecological footprints. Dhavari recycles much of the citys solid waste and despite appearances is much greener than the oil-based megalopolis with its lush main-tained foliage.

The megalopolis, while an Eden of opportunity for corporate architecture, for the most part remained a dilemma for independent architects outside of corporate practice, as they no longer could com-mand the formal order of the city as they did in the metropolis. The affluence and prosperity of the sprawling edge cities across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand can never be replicated world-wide, as it exhausts resources at a global rather than regional scale. The unchecked growth of the megalopolis with its design megastructures around the world is also shadowed by the sprawling group form of the megacities, which have grown ex-ponentially with the unloosening of the metropolitan colonial order. In the last section of this chapter, we will introduce the Metacity as a new urban model, which represents the necessary transformation of the metropolis, megalopolis and megacity in the coming decades. The metacity radically shifts the role architects must take in creating the city of the future, based on a design imagination enriched by new methods and technologies of collaboration and communication.

camped out and adventurous joggers and dog walk-ers learned to enjoy the harbour breezes and river views from the top of the abandoned highway. While the Miller Highway and much of the pier buildings were demolished to make way for the emphatically megastructural, and unbuilt Westway project, a small parallel fragment of an elevated rail-line has been reborn as a park the celebrated High-line design by Field Operations with Diller, Scofidio and Renfro. The collapse of the Miller Highway coincided with the rise of community activism in response to Moses ambitious plans for a regionally interconnected Greater New York. In the 1960s, Jane Jacobs famously contributied to halting the Lower Manhattan Expressway which was planned to run through Soho and the ethnic neighbourhood of the South Village. In the 1980s, environmental ac-tivists stopped the massive Westway project in court based on evidence of fish spawning in the pilings of the old piers and set in motion the building of the Hudson River Park.

The Metacity was born in the exhaustion of metro-politan and megalopolitan urban models, the rise of the demands of activism in civil rights and environ-mentalism and the emergence of new sensing, com-munication and imaging technologies. The revival of

The Metacity

In his book Manhattan Transcripts (1981) architect Bernard Tschumi presented a radically different view of late 20th century metropolis than Koolhaas Delirious New York. While Koolhaas nostalgi-cally looked back to the spectacular architecture of the first half of the 20th century in his retroactive manifesto, Tschumi closely examines the frag-mented, crime-ridden and unrestricted hedonism of New York City at the moment of its deep economic distress, social unravelling and crisis of image. Fol-lowing the Situationists psychogeographic derives which critiqued and undermined the Hausmanian metropolitan order of Paris, Tschumi transcribes fictional events in Manhattans grid, Central Park and Times Square at the same time Robert Moses great megalopolitan infrastructure is beginning to fall apart.

One example of New York Citys state of deteriora-tion is the partial collapse of Manhattans elevated West Side Miller Highway in 1973. After its closure, the elevated structure, which ran parallel with the abandoned shipping warehouses which lined the Hudson River, became an informal linear elevated park. Pioneer plant species took root, homeless

metropolitan architecture appealed to tourist circuits of global elites and to stage spectacular events such as the Beijing Olympics, but the controlled world order and legibility of the metropolis could never be fully resurrected. The megalopolis as well came to a severe crisis with the growing scarcity of oil, and the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels finally acknowledged at the Kyoto Accords of 1998. The term Meta City appeared in a millennial anxiety about overpopulation and renewed fears of the limits of growth, and for the UN Habitat it refers to cities with a population over 20 million (2006). But the size of a few extra large cities is not the important question of the metacity, and population predictions have been consistently overestimated. For us the metacity does not refer to an extra-large conurbation, but an urbanization of the entire planet including what was thought of as village, rural or remote -- through new models of mobility and communication. The metacity implies that which ex-ists above and beyond the traditionally defined city, metropolis and territory, when urban form becomes unbounded, uncontrolled and at once urban and ru-ral, and everywhere is both center and periphery.

If the megalopolis and megacity were created by the political unbounding of the colonial world system, the metacity emerged according to the logic of late global capital and the new information and com-munication technology tools which allowed for new forms of both concentration and dispersal. Recent development has been led by aggressive speculation and profit seeking during a time of deregulation of global financial systems. This new global city based on the dynamic generation of urban form through credit, risk and capital speculation has occurred at a moment where nature itself has been reconceived in a more dynamic way. Contemporary theories of dis-turbance ecology give us an understanding of nature neither in balance nor equilibrium, but in a constant state of flux. The ecology of the metacity should be understood as a complex adaptive system in disequi-librium, and the social actors of the city are seen as an integral part rather than separated from nature.

Following on Saskia Sassens work on global cities (1991) and Peter J. Taylors studies of the global networks, relationships, ranking and hierarchies of cities (1995), architects became aware of the dif-ferentiation of functions between cities and within

cities. Urban geographers like Ed Soja, studying Los Angles initially (1989), and later more global sys-tems in Postmetropolis (2000), emphasized both the multiple nodes of the global system with its linked networks, and the differentiation of patches within cities, as each patch linked in to different urban sys-tems that had different global links. Patch dynamics is an urban ecological framework that emerged at the same time for modelling urban ecosystems (Mc-Grath et al, 2007).

Architectural theorists of the city were slow to spot the emergence of this new hybrid world because of their preoccupation with built form in contrast to nature and natural processes. The interval between two international competitions for the old slaughter-house district of La Villette in Paris marks a turn-ing point in the professional design imagination. The first competition was explicitly metropolitan in conception, and the scheme by Leon Krier, which received a special prize, imagines a reconstitution of the legible residential quarter of the nineteenth cen-tury metropolis. His plan for housing development was never developed, and instead a new competition for a park of the twenty-first century was commis-sioned. In both Bernard Tschumis and OMAs proj-ects there is evidence of a new form of architectural practice based in the open space of the city as a field of unpredictable events which radically undermined the carefully constructed nature of Paris metropoli-tan parks. These projects linked back to Ungers City Archipelago projects (1977) for Berlin that set high density urban fragments into Berlins low rise archipelago of islands, lakes and forests.

In the data rich social democracy of the Netherlands, Architect Winny Maas together with MVRDV de-veloped an exhibition and catalogue Meta City/Data Town (1999) and became the first architects to theo-rize the metacity. Meta City/Data Town examines the three dimensional consequences of the increased urbanism at global, national and meta scales. Their data town is site-less, and is modelled directly from statistics on population trends, needs of water, food and natural resources, as well as social experimen-tation. MRDV used the Meta City term to describe a city that was primarily only a pile of statistics and data, recording the presence of hidden patterns inside a huge urban conurbation, housing masses of people. Their idea was that from a properly orga-

This desakota/rur-urban mixture ranges from Ja-pans rice production areas to Chinas SEZs in the fertile Pearl River and Yangtze Deltas or Bangkoks industrialized Eastern Seaboard, forming the fabric of many Asian megacities. The UN Habitat Program studied design approaches to this hybrid situation in a variety of Asian cities in its Urban Trialogues, undertaken with KU Leuvens Post Graduate Center for Human Settlements (Loeckx et al. 2004). David Sattherthwaite at the IIES together with SDI (Shanty Dwellers International) has also attempted to pub-licize bottom-up strategies that can help in this rur-urban fabric in an up-grading approach, without destroying their hybrid and mixed nature.

While the European and North American metropolis ages, sprawls, fragments, or shrinks, Asian, Latin American and African cities now dominate the ur-banizing world. Only immigrants and their children are responsible for the continued population growth of New York, Toronto, Los Angeles or Vancouver. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are also at the cusp of a demographic decline similar to Europe. The global corporate trading system is currently being restructured to reflect this demographic shift, with a redistribution of functions from command and control systems and centers (London, New York, Tokyo etc) to a new fractal system of secondary cit-ies and out-sourcing back offices (see also chapter 5_3). Problems with the scarcity and environmental impact of oil demand new energy and natural re-source management models that will greatly impact city life and form. New modes of distribution mean restructuring highways, trucking, container ports and airports.

Our theory of the metacity is qualitatively dif-ferent rather than just an extra-large city or big architecture. It is not just a question of hybridity and heterogeneity, mixture versus mono-functional zoning. The difference is the agency and reflexiv-ity empowered by new media. Distant people can measure the differences between mixtures in patches or islands of the archipelago and make informed choices about their desires, goals and movement paths. Bottom-up participants play an increased role in this new city archipelago, evaluating and trying new mixtures. The metropolis, megalopolis and megacity are reconfigured in the metacity as is the role of architecture in this new multi-form rather

nized analysis of this data a cellular, fractal structure of flows would emerge, which could be tweaked just a little by the architect to create a new urban archi-tecture of flows.

But the metacity thrives in all corners of the world where data, indoor plumbing and architectural statements are rare, but electricity, televisions and cell phones are ubiquitous. Urban environmental-ists were quick to question the megalopolitan cult of bigness, and had their own cult of small is beauti-ful (Schumaker, 1973) justified in part by the rapid miniaturization of electronic devices that altered energy supply possibilities (making miniaturized solar power and wind generation possible), beside facilitating communications between individuals in social networks (aiding bottom-up organization and NGOs). Environmentalists were also much more aware of the differentiation of patches in the city, as in John Seymour and Herbert Giradets Blueprint for a Green Planet (1987) that rigorously explored urban systems, their energy sources, their enclaves of production and consumption, their flow systems, intakes and exhausts. They emphasized the limits of the earths carrying capacity and measured urban impacts on ecological systems in an open, visual and accessible way.

Girardets Cities, People, Planet (2001) places a big emphasis on urban agriculture and shows how this emerging hybrid morphology extends from Beijing to Cuba to Russia, Europe and even North America. Informal economic systems, farmers markets and cooperatives also are acknowledged, as are self-organizing NGO groups in barrios, favellas and ranchos in South America that both provide food and education and that seek to improve housing. Terry McGee coined the term desakota (desa=town+ kota=village) studies in the Indonesian archipelago showing how different urban actors chose different mixes of urban and rural activities, responding to both local and global conditions, changing quickly and never well regulated by the authorities (1967, 1973). Stephen Cairns (2003) writes that this hybrid Indonesian archipelago functioned as an internation-al entrepot based on indigenous cultural practices, mixing agriculture, urbanization and international trade without central regulation, creating a powerful, local-global sorting machine.

than megaform environment. Architects find them-selves now designing the relations between urban islands and monitoring new mixtures in the reverse archipelago rather than just focusing on the architec-ture of the fragments themselves as Rossi and Rowe advocated. Most of our metacity is locally generated or reorganized through bottom-up social organiza-tion, and it is the relations and management of these fragments and hybrid mixtures in heterotopias that is the new horizon for architecture. (Foucault [1967], Shane 2005, Dehaene and De Cauter 2008) New media and communications systems both close-up and remote - provide tools for offering architectural services to a wider range of actors than the current client based system of the metropolitan architect or the corporate designer of the megalopolis. Represen-tation takes on a new role of persuasion and altering cognitive images of the city, rather than in articulat-ing specialized units of construction.

Conclusion.

The metropolis, megalopolis and metacity models each constitute specific theories, representations, and speculations about the city as well as distinct ways of theorizing the role of the architect in shap-ing embodied urban experiences and imagination. Our three models represent world views as well as attempts to maintain cities as respectively con-trolled (metropolis), open (megalopolis), or com-plex adaptive systems (metacity). The metropolis was a primary instrument of modernization and the uneven redistribution of resources at a world scale. It emerged at the height of the European colonial world system and its metabolism was based on coal, steam and resource extrapolation based on a peas-antry bound to the periphery. It culminated in the architectural splendor of world capitals London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, as well as major trading and industrial centers New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sao Paolo, and Barcelona, but collapsed in the totalitar-ian military fascisms centered on Berlin, Rome and Tokyo.

The spatial imagination of designers in the Metropo-lis, the symbolic center for civic order, was restrict-ed and controlled. While the old walls that defined the traditional city came down in Paris and Beijing during the construction of the modern metropolis, it is still a conceptually and legally bounded en-tity, whose form is strictly maintained by central-ized planning and land use control. Zoning dictates where the city ends and the countryside begins, and regulates the relative importance of institutions and individuals in a strictly hierarchical social order. Residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural uses are ideally separated and coded according to status, and the citys growth is controlled by incre-mental change in the land use. The metropolis is top down and modernist, a product of enlighten-ment thinking. It forms a legible and rational tree structure at a global scale, a centralized hierarchi-cal colonial world system. The architect is both the master planner and master builder of the metropolis, and contemporary urban theorists and practitioners nostalgically embrace this patriarchal and heroic

role. However, social theories of the metropolis after Simmel (1903) point to the psycho-social diver-sity which emerges within this hierarchical, closed system, that continually put its ordering systems in crisis and risk. Heterotopias remain the masked, cloaked or hyped spaces of change for those people and activities which are excluded, the metropolitan other.

Designers in the Megalopolis sought to house the complex organizational spaces of the new socio-economic order of the network city, with its deregu-lation, capital accumulation, individual freedom and mobility. But its metabolism is powered by burning oil and its Cold War politics are based on the contin-uous supply of natural resources, consumer products and credit. Both flows of oil and capital require strict global military management at great expense. Gottmanns brilliant re-conception of the Metropolis as a city network imagined the northeast seaboard of the US as a new spatial model, the Megalopolis, even before the interstate highway system legislated by President Eisnehower in 1956 had its imprint. Gottmann recognized Boston, New York, Philadel-phia and Washington, D.C. --BosWash as a poly-nucleated network rather than a centralized system, linked by telephone communication and television broadcast. The most successful practicing architects of the megalopolis became the org-men who can command the corporate architectural firms that serve the commercial and institutional megastructures of the megalopolis, from Victor Gruen, Eliel Saarinen to Wallace Harrison and todays faceless alphabet soup of global mega-firms: SOM, HOK, NBBJ, etc. Large fragmentary heterotopias that had been the basis of change in the periphery of the mega-lopolis, malls, office parks and theme parks, began to mutate, proliferating everywhere across the city network, empowered by hand-held and desk top informational devices.

The megacity grew in parallel with the megalopolis, its implosion of growth from deregulated rural mi-grations in the Global South reversed the explosion of suburban sprawl in the Global North. The frag-mentation of metropolitan order and rise of the mas-sive scale and logics of the networked megalopolis led to a new wired spatial imagination and theories of architectural resistance- from the PR savy, radical neighbourhood movement and microeconomics of

Jane Jacobs to the self-reflexive anarchitecture of Gordon Matta Clark. The metacity grows out of the limits of the fossil fuel logics of the metropo-lis and the megalopolis as well as their structural fragmentation and unbounding. The new figure of the metacity architect is the designer and commu-nicator of the relationships between the anarchy of the fragments, adept at complex urban ecosystem thinking through new close-up and remote tech-nologies. Now designers skills must also include navigating the ecologies of our urban dreams and desires, and articulating these dreams as powerful images back in the collective mediated realm of the city as desirable public goals

The following chapters address particular issues within the tension between these three concurrent city models. Paolo Vigano describes in chapter 8_2 the fragmentation and dispersal of the new megalopolitan archipelagos around the unbounded European metropolis; she articulates the morpho-logical change from metropolis to megalopolis at the territorial scale which represents new relation-ships between city, power and nature that consti-tute the important urban project for contemporary architects in Europe. Vyjayanthi Rao in chapter 8_3 critiques the discourse of the megacity slum as theory and instead points to the megacity as an archipelago of self generated local systems and sites of design research and practice. Deborah Natsios in chapter 8_4 looks at the fragmented and dispersed metacity in a post 9/11 geopoliti-cal context. She cautions on the psychological realm of the political landscape of security that accompanies the reorganization of the Cold War megalopolis in a period of Americas endless war on terror. She asserts for a new open city and a new civic commons aided by the same technolo-gies that seek to reassert national sovereignty and municipal order. Together, these three chapters fill in our sketch of the co-situational emergence of the metropolis, megalopolis, and metacity as a layered psycho-socio-natural system and provide both detailed substantiation and caution to the limitations of our models.