Adapting Anti-adaptive Neighborhoods. What is the Role of Spatial Design?

Abstract

The recent theory of planning and urban design highlights how healthy vibrant cities and neighborhoods behave as complex systems that are capable of constantly evolving and renewing over time, by endlessly adapting to new emergent needs and unexpected changes. Although adaptivity is increasingly considered an essential quality in these uncertain times, our urban areas are still dotted with post-war modernist settlements which have been widely described as Anti-Adaptive Neighborhoods (AANs) with a low degree of openness to processes of incremental adaptation and continuous adjustment. Since the anti-adaptive nature of these settlements often led to their obsolescence and consequent decline over time, an urgent question for planners and designers is: How can the adaptive capacity of AANs be increased, thereby turning them into structures that can evolve and self-regenerate over time? This question is becoming even more relevant in this historic period, in which the sudden and unexpected changes generated by the COVID 19 pandemic have often exacerbated pre-existing problems linked to anti-adaptivity, thus accelerating cycles of decline in AANs. By illustrating the renovation project for “Cité du Grand Parc” in Bordeaux by the architects Lacaton & Vassal, Druot and Hutin, the present paper highlights how designers can play a crucial role in turning rigid definitive structures into open adaptive systems and how their site-specific practice can offer valuable insights for planners and policy makers.