A tool to make cities from Domus 861 July/August 2003 Winy Maas talks to John Thackara about new ways to understand the city. Sustainable, working cities are necessarily complex, heavily linked and diverse. As the British writer Will Hutton has commented, just as local knowledge and information was crucial 150 years ago, when there were 80 different steps in the button-making industry, so, too, complex local knowledge and linkages are key today if you are a software, media, care or educational enterprise. The ideal city must contain a rich mixture ofcraft-based workshops, consultants, law firms, accountants, distribution and logistics companies, advertising agencies, universities, research labs, database publishers and local or regional government offices. Unique skills, clusters of specialized suppliers, local roots and a variety of human skills that are unique to a region – all of these are powerful advantages for local cities and regions on today’s economic stage. This picture poses a dilemma to smaller cities, which cannot realistically offer the same density and complexity of knowledge skills as a large metropolis. The metropolitan centres have their own problems, it is t rue, but they will always win on diversity, which is a ke y to evolutionary success. So how are the smaller ones to compete? According to Winy Maas, a principal of the Dutch bureau MVRDV, the answer lies in webs, chains networks and ‘archipelagos’ of cities and smaller regions. By aggregating their hard and soft assets, collective cities – multi-centred cities – can match the array of functions and resources of bigger centres while delivering superior social quality. The ability of small cities to offer a context that supports intimacy and encounter – what the French call la vie associative – is where small-city webs will win out ove r the big centres. City alliances are not a completely new idea. City networks date back to the 13th century, when the Hansa League, an alliance of more than 70 merchant cities, collaborated effectively for the common good to control exports and imports over a wide swathe of Europe. Today’s urban and regional networks can be traced back to the formation of the International Union of Cities in 1913. The 1957 Treaty of Rome accelerated the emergence of networks of cities and regions as supra- nation state actors in Europe. Increased globalization has put considerable pressure on cities to network among themselves – sharing, partnering and learning. Globalization has also driven smaller cities to rediscover Hansa-style alliances and to market them using new business techniques. According to Philip Kotler, a marketing professor in the United States, some 10 per cent of business-to-business advertising – a vast sum – is now spent on marketing places, regions and nations. Kotler has identified 80,000 communities within the EU that, in one way or another, need to differentiate themselves from one another. Place marketing – or, more properly, place and regional design – aggregates and networks complementary functions and core competencies of a region. In Europe the concept of ‘territorial capital’ is increasingly used to describe the synthesis of a region’s hard and soft assets. The hard assets include natural beauty, shopping facilities, cultural attractions, buildings, museums, monuments and so on. Soft assets are all about people and culture: skills, traditions, festivals, eve nts and occasions, situations, settings, social ties, civic loyalty, memories and learning capacity. MVRDV propose a new model for planning, taking the variables that create cities (from density to useage to form) and testing the results through a sequence ofsoftware simulations Most cities’ biggest pressure to collaborate is environmental
