Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals
(Paola Viganò, Andrea Palmioli)
Horizontal Metropolis. A Radical Project
The Horizontal Metropolis is an oxymoron. Two contrasting terms are joined to conjugate the traditional idea of metropolis (the center of a vast territory, hierarchically organized, dense, vertical, produced by polarization) with horizontality (the idea of a more diffuse, isotropic urban condition, where center and periphery blur).
Beyond the theme of the “peri-urban” or of the “sub-urban”, the Horizontal Metropolis refers to closely interlinked, co-penetrating rural/urban realms, communication, transport, and economic systems. It is a layered territorial construction where agriculture and non-agricultural economic activities create an original mix.
The Horizontal Metropolis is a “City-Territory”: it works today as natural and spatial capital and as an agent of transformation, it is the support and place of potentiality. The Ville-territoire connecting Geneva to St. Gall, the Città diffusa of Northern Italy, the Desakota in China, Japan, Thailand or Vietnam, the Radiant Periphery of the fine grain settlement dispersion in Flanders, or the Zwischenstadt in Germany have described the emergence of a new urban condition. It has been the test case for the elaboration of original urban theories and is today facing new challenges, paradoxes and crises. It can also be – this is the hypothesis of the exhibition – the support for an innovative urban and territorial project. Horizontality (of infrastructure, urbanity, and relations among the different parts as among peers), mixed use, diffuse accessibility, isotropic conditions generate a specific habitable space.
The exhibition explores scenarios and design strategies for the re-cycling and upgrading of cities-territory in a radical project. Working on the Horizontal Metropolis as a specific spatial condition requires pushing the imagination of the architect and urbanist far from any orthodox and academic way of thinking, away from a blind pragmatism, far from theories clinging to few simplified, overriding images.
The Horizontal Metropolis is a vision for planetary urbanization where processes of polarization and hierarchization are weakening horizontal networks, disconnecting, and marginalizing territories and populations; where no ‘outside’ exists anymore and the urban ecosystem is compelled to offer proof of its sustainability.
Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals
The exhibition “Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals” is aimed at expanding the knowledge and understanding of the urban transition in the Yangtze River Delta Mega-Urban region under the concept of “Horizontal Metropolis,” which refers to a specific array of theories, practices, and processes involving disciplinary intersections between environmental sciences and design disciplines.
The concept of capital entanglements aims to foreground the synergetic embedding between environmental, energetic, social, spatial, and economic capitals. It takes its cue as a conceptual metaphor from the quantum physics phenomenon of Entanglement, which establishes correlated connections among particles spatially disconnected, meanwhile marking a divide between classical and quantum physics.
The concept of horizontality, in relation to urban environments, concerns the roles played by different parts of the territory, their dependence or complementarity. And in general, it refers to the accessibility of cultural, economic, environmental, and spatial capitals in the areas of mega-urban regions. It is aimed at framing the emergence of a wide array of research on horizontal forms of urbanization originating within the European milieu by conceptualizing the progressive fusion of urban and rural contexts under various notions of mixed settlements. The same phenomenon has also been explored in other continents, such as in Terry McGee’s conceptualization of “Desakota” in Indonesia and China. This body of studies simultaneously points out the limits of modernist urban theories in understanding the transformation of peri-urban fringes and agrarian landscapes in which hybrid programs are scattered across fields and ecological corridors, but also the disciplinary inadequacy to achieve adaptive responses to the environmental transition.
The exhibition “Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals” surveys the contexts of worldwide Mega-urban regions in which the interrelations between variegated types of capital (social, ecological, energetic, etc.) are constantly reshaping the urban system’s sustainability. Taking the territory of Mega-urban regions as a medium for interdisciplinary synthesis and spatial integration between urbanism and environmental disciplines, the exhibition identifies urban landscape as the theoretical ground to construct comparisons in the Yangtze River Delta Mega-Urban Region (YRD-MUR).
The Yangtze River Delta is a cultural and geographical region that has been defined variously from historical, cultural, economic, and geographical perspectives. According to the National Earth System Science Data Center (geodata.cn), it includes Shanghai, eight cities in Jiangsu Province (Nanjing, Nantong, Changzhou, Yangzhou, Wuxi, Taizhou, Suzhou, Zhenjiang), and eight cities in Zhejiang Province (Ningbo, Hangzhou, Jinhua, Huzhou, Jiaxing, Taizhou, Shaoxing and Zhoushan).
In the past four decades, the rapid process of urbanization and industrialization has transformed the YRD into a MUR characterized by a dense cluster of intensively and extensively developed large and medium-size cities intermingling with multifunctional rural areas. With an increase in the urban built up area of 668.8% since 1978, in 2022, the Yangtze River Delta Mega-urban region accounts for 3.7% of China’s land area with a population of 235 million and a GDP of RMB 20.5 trillion (accounting for 20.2% of China’s GDP)1.
Together with the Pearl River Delta and the Tokaido Corridor in Japan, the YRD-MUR constitutes one of the largest world’s conurbations.
Central to this aspect, the expansion of MUR leads to an increase in the demand for food production, industrial zones, a decline of agricultural land, rural depopulation, energy consumption, environmental challenges, and saturation of environmental resources, all at major expenses of rural areas. To respond to these challenges, it is necessary to interlink variegated types of capital (economic, social, historical, ecological, and energetic) through a multidisciplinary approach and design strategies aimed at overcoming current tendencies to homogenize these diversified urban spaces by clustering into zonal models of mono-functional programs.
The exhibition “Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals” aims to develop new investigations regarding the distribution and accessibility of cultural, economic, environmental, and spatial capitals, and ultimately will emphasize novel ecological dynamics.
The exhibition proposes a new framework in design-led research through the definition of a comparative methodological protocol for the description and the assessment of adaptive design strategies in metropolitan urban landscapes.
Framed within an interdisciplinary context aimed at bringing together the general public, academics, professionals and students from Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Economics and Environmental Science, Geography and Agronomy, the exhibition builds upon the notion of entangled Capitals, with the scope of analyzing and mapping ecological and environmental systems through design strategies along three themes:
Social and Cultural Capital: This axis explores hybrid multifunctional rural-urban territories reflecting on the long-term construction of micro-infrastructures and spatial development of built environment which integrates new forms of urbanity in rural context. Reflecting upon long term processes of territorial construction, collective agency in reshaping local contexts, existing modes of production, accumulation of labour, and landscape management, the expected outcomes will ground strategies aimed at consolidating the inhabitability of these highly functional territories. Particular attention will be given to the physical construction of the rural contexts by exploring and understanding long term processes of cultural and social capital accumulation, here conceived as latent resources for designing adaptive scenarios for living.
Ecological and Environmental Capital: This axis considers the relation between open and built spaces and their ecological assets. Drawing upon the UN-SDGs, this research axis intends to foreground design strategies for re-cycling and restoring ecological and environmental capitals. Rural landscape, water, soil, forests, agrarian fields, waste production and land degradation will be explored with the scope of redefining future action for sustainable inhabitability.
Economic and Energetic Capital: Understanding and fostering sustainability of economic processes and energy reduction will be the focus of this axis. The upgrade of industrial production, local agricultural biodiversity, recovering of traditional crops, re-functionalize crops toward new uses, permaculture design, neutralization of CO2, and the implementation of blue and green infrastructures constitute some of the possible approaches to collaboratively explore operational frameworks in response to climate change and environmental transition.
An Exhibition of Fifth Episodes
The exhibition is organized in fifth main episodes.
The first episode is the Genealogy. The scope of this first part, made of interviews with an important group of authors that have proposed relevant interpretations of urban phenomena, is to highlight a genealogy of ideas and positions able to connect long-term and inter-generational processes of territorial construction and contemporary forms of urbanity. The research hypothesis is that this tradition is today fundamental to the understanding of the city and its future, in the drawing up of interpretations, new design images and tools. Featuring: Andrea Branzi, Bernardo Secchi, Thomas Sieverts, Marcel Smets, Francesco Indovina.
The second episode is about Measures. The second part of the exhibition is collected in atlases describing the spatial characters of the “City-Territory” through an investigation of its measures and of its different rationalization processes. Measures and modules are often the expression of deeply embedded rationalities related, for example, to water management and accessibility, quality of soil, social and demographic diversity in space.
The third episode is Projects, design as a research tool, models and drawings of “Another Broadacre City”. The hypothesis of the Horizontal Metropolis as renewable resource is investigated through the elaboration of models and axonometric representations which take the twelve-foot (3.65 × 3.65 m) scale model of Broadacre City, elaborated by Frank Lloyd Wright with his apprentices at Taliesin, as a frame for radical design investigation.
88 years after it was first exhibited in New York at Rockefeller Center (1935), This Exhibition features ten large models representing an area of 3,2km x 3,2km at 1:880 scale – the same as the original Broadacre City model, in order to showcase some recent case studies: the Chinese examples of Hangzhou, Shanghai, Ningbo, Suzhou, Nantong, Hong Kong (Desakota), Switzerland, both the plateau in Lausanne and the alpine territory of Valais (La Ville Territoire), Veneto region (Città Diffusa) in Italy, Boston metropolitan area (Megalopolis) in USA.
These models define a research protocol that has been used in ten different contexts to explore, in space, the socioeconomic transition as well as strategies of mitigation and adaptation to climate change in time.
Two main aspects can be underlined: the scale of the model (original scale 1:75 inch to feet), which is coherent with a territorial three-dimensional representation of space and the non-selectivity of the model, which implies a non-selective rethinking of space. It represents a metamorphosis.
This representation is accompanied with overviews of the same area made by drones filming the territory.
The fourth episode is People and Lifestyles. The fourth part of the exhibition is related to the stories and the lifestyles of people who inhabit and produce the space of the Horizontal Metropolis, incrementally built through diverse and minute interventions, not only through top-down rationalizations.
The Horizontal Metropolis is a palimpsest comprising a rich deposit of continuously reconstructed materials that offer countless localizing possibilities and different types of spaces, enabling ever different lifestyles. In this frame the Horizontal Metropolis can be read as the sum of individual approaches relative to the best mode of dwelling, working, recreating and living. In the past, these territorial systems have actually subverted and undermined the stable hierarchies expressed by the traditional city and power, opposing varied polycentrality to singular polarity. It is an extensively used territory, in which each small portion and each item or material is attributed a specific role or function; in which each space appears to be used differently and charged with its specific meaning.
Today the modification of life-cycles (social and economic) is strongly modifying this image. New exclusions arise, new weak populations emerge, horizontality fades. Still the multifunctionality of space is reflected in the lifestyles of its inhabitants and vice versa, who with time have learned to make use of its considerable potentialities.
The fifth episode is Practice. The fifth section, titled “Chinese Countryside in Practice: Exploratory Grounds,” complements the exhibition by showcasing selected projects recently built in the Yangtze River Delta region. This part aims to portray the consolidation of the contemporary Chinese architectural narrative and design firms’ agency in the reshaping of the diffuse metropolitan countryside of the Yangtze River Delta. It translates into tangible realities the scenarios envisioned in the Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta Exhibition, indirectly contributing to foreground the collective imaginary for the metropolis of entangled capitals and common prosperity.
