During the late modernity, sociologists like Ulrich Beck identified that the one of the

consequences of the social changes, which occurred during this time, was the creation of
individualism. People started to put themselves first. Susan Cain in Quiet: The Power of
Introverts in a World That Cant Stop Talking says that people started to focus more on their
own lives and that of their immediate family. This replaced the church generated
community spirit rather where society expected inhabitants to take care of other people
who lived in their nearby vicinity. Cain identifies this shift in social behaviour with the
apparition of salesmen jobs. Capitalism and advertising had an impact on what people were
subliminally asked to be from that time onward. In architecture, this shift was seen clearly
when analysing occupied spaces by different individuals and their use.
The Spontaneous City by Urhahn Urban Design and the essay The Adaptive City by Dan Hill
have similar thoughts when talking about what the contemporary cities should be, as Scott
Burnham stated: placing the individual at the heart of the citys development and
encouraging creative interaction between the individual and the physical city. However,
their ideas complement each other by creating a more comprehensive vision of their
proposed future cities. These proposals come as a response for the need for a new
approach towards urban design because of changes in social behaviours and economic
problems as well.
When talking about previous ways of designing a building Urhahn Urban Design mention the
post-war strictness on designing something that is coherent and safe. Furthermore, Hill
thinks that the industrial/post-industrial cities were constructed at the scale of cars and
other material resources rather than people. Therefore, they think that the city needs to
accommodate the contemporary culture that involves more individualism than ever,
considering that people started to immigrate heavily. This means that there will be even
more differences between what the individual occupations of certain spaces meant before,
translated into different cultures approaches. They suggest that the cities need to be
flexible, sustainable and that they should allow space for the element of surprise brought by
the participation and interaction of the inhabitants.
The urban designers insist that The Spontaneous City is not a new concept and that it can be
seen emerging right now in different areas of the planet, especially in the Western world.
However, Hill retraces the development of urban form, where he points out the remnants of
cities constructed before the current type of city - whose development is cause by what he
calls artificial metabolism (e.g. sewage, electrical systems), - tucked away in the ancient
centres. The old hutongs of Beijing formed a kind of continuous skin over the lived city,
enabling a co-operative, dense habitat for centuries until their recent ongoing destruction.
The blocks, alleys and courtyards of Barcelonas Ciutat Vella are so conjoined as to create a
hermetically sealed membrane. The Walled City of Kowloon in Hong Kong could
accommodate near infinite variation, adaptation and internal growth, as if New Babylon,
despite its anarchic and essentially intolerable conditions. The old city of Tokyo before The
Fire was made of light wood and paper, such that an earthquake could only rearrange the
pieces with minimal damage to their inhabitants, with simple reconstruction occurring as
soon as the roofs stopped falling. Even in intrinsically modern New World cities like

Brisbane, the timber and tin Queenslander house, mutations of South Pacific vernacular
architecture and colonial exports, are systems that are lived in, operated, maintained and
adapted by their inhabitants, ultimately binding citizen and built fabric into a intimate
relationship. (Hill, 2008)
Moreover, Hill provides evidence that these urban forms, although appear to be old
fashioned, have actually been always used: they are constructed in a way that the fabric
forms a system that will repair itself if need be, but by doing so it allows the built
environment to regenerate towards the necessary need. And if the fabric would ever suffer
any damage they could be quickly fixed by its inhabitants. As an example, Dan Hill talks
about Ciutat Vella that will witness a block removed daily, as if a loose tooth, only to be
filled again within days. He believes that the fabric of this area of Barcelona exists as a
whole continuous skin rather than separate components, where the urban life is conceived
from the cohabiting, sharing, and interacting with the other locals on a daily basis.
Additionally, he argues that these adaptive conditions could also fight against poverty,
disease and malnutrition and whilst it might create a stronger sense of the occupied space,
there is also a possibility of creating a relatively close connection to the city as a whole.
A more contemporary example can be found in Germany, where the idea and need for the
Tbingen-Sdstadt quarter came from the fact that housing became unaffordable in a city
where the main population is represented by students that rent their accommodation. This
quarter was tested as a solution, as the concept was unique at the time but has now been
imitated by other cities. Nowadays, it is known for the fact that the community is very
vibrant and their fingerprints can be visibly seen from the design of thee dwellings to the
activity carried out in the public spaces. This specific character built within the community is
the factor that differentiates this quarter to any other quarter that is newly built, where
neighbours usually do not socialise much with the other locals. These characteristics are
primarily attributed to an innovative development process in which land is acquired and
assembled by the municipality and then sold to building partnerships, groups of usually 5-30
parties (individuals, flatshares, couples or families) who themselves commission an architect
and a contractor with the design and construction of their homes. Thus no private developer
is involved. The quarter was designed based on the decisions of the owners, who worked as
a collective.
Furthermore, Urhahn Urban Design insist that The Spontaneous City is a realisable concept
even though it has large ambitions, because architects are used to designing projects
without being able to predict the outcome. They also need to develop new practices with
government, with the public, with technology and the media, with the experience of the
non-western majority and the limitations of the European worldview. (Urhahn Urban
Desing, 2011, p.3) They urge the urban planning professionals to work in close collaboration
with the project initiators. They forge a path between individual choice and common
interest. Government and market work closely together, but with a different focus: the
initiatives, creative energy and investment capital of end user. Thus, The Spontaneous City
is written to be a manual for reinventing the city that wishes for the urban designers to
reinvent themselves. This proposed type of city remains vibrant as theory and practice, in

part because it challenges the best western urban designers and architects to look beyond
their societies for approaches that are less familiar, but possibly more relevant. (2011, p.3)
Hill states that urban design takes place in a shared space that already understands that the
design is an ongoing process. As a starting point to creating these cities of which both
sources talk about, The Spontaneous City offers us a set of principles, which the urban
designers should consider as guide lines and challenges to obtain a design that is
contemporarily sought for. These principles are: zooming in (by reducing the scale of the
city), supervising open developments (the urban planners need to work closely with the
user), creating collective values (which means giving back the authenticity of the place, but
also supporting collaboration between the local inhabitants towards creating new
sustainable systems), and being user oriented (always designing by putting the locals needs
and wishes at the heart of the decisions). Dan Hill, however, thinks that the urban planners
can access the invisible model that is constructed online. This is how The Spontaneous City
can be applied as a concept furthermore. By working closely together with the user, but also
with the user generated data that can be found online, as suggested by Hill, the planner can
figure out easily the way the city has been and is being used; with the possibility to draw an
understanding of what way the proposed changes will impact the city.
All in all, I think that the observations the both main resource make are built on observing
that even though globalisation is trying to make the whole world blend in, the
contemporary citizens will always appropriate what they think it belongs to them, by
creating their own ways of using these spaces. Both of them are trying to invite designers to
take this challenge of listening to what the end user needs in different ways that
complement each other, and try to see their project as continuous pieces rather than
something that can be completed. The Tubingen Sudstadt case presents many of the
features that these thinkers talk about and want that urban designers to implement in their
future design approaches. It is clear that the social behaviour will always be changing and
the uncontrollable situation in which nowadays cities can be found prove that this divide et
impera is the new way to move forward the design of the cities.

Bibliography
Cain, S. (2012). Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Cant Stop Talking. New York:
Crown Publishers.
Hill, D. (2008). Essay: The Adaptive City. [online] cityofsound. Available at:
http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/09/the-adaptive-ci.html [Accessed 24 Oct. 2015].
Urhahn Urban Design (2011). The Spontaneous City. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.
Webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk, (2015). [ARCHIVED CONTENT] Tbingen-Sdstadt,
Germany | Case studies | CABE. [online] Available at:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110118095356/http:/www.cabe.org.uk/casestudies/tubingen-sudstadt [Accessed 25 Oct. 2015].

Social/Economic Infrastructure Networks Literature Review

Corina Oancea
Level 6