Myths and Realities of Adaptable city. Contemporary City as Adaptable Hybrid

Abstract

Global space – both natural and cultural – is the greatest good belonging to the human community. The said community has, therefore, the right and responsibility to protect it, wisely and in solidarity, from wasteful exploitation. The postulate of public utility of this good must also presume such mutual conditioning of the rights and obligations of private owners that would minimise the chance of their infringement of collective interests. The culture of space management became an important measure of cultural level of societies at the turn of the 20th century, perhaps one of those moments which decide upon the future of our civilisation. The conclusion that large agglomerations in particular are “incorrigible zones of spatial and social pathology, from which we need to escape into pristine areas and there create a more perfect living environment” is unacceptable, also from the ethical point of view, both as regards the people living in those agglomerations and nature. As far as what has been created by man is concerned, we need to assume that we are able to control and improve this material creation of our civilisation. Such is the fundamental requirement of sustainable development – a difficult, but probably the only way of managing “the global village” in the millennium that has just commenced. The spatial structure of the contemporary city as a whole is a broken form: it has formally expressive and perfectly composed elements, it has mutilated compositions, chaotic arrangements and “lost spaces”, finally, it has spaces that as yet have not been properly used compositionally and are still waiting for their role in the whole. A broken form – in compliance with the principle of irreversibility – may not return to its original composition. Thinking about the future of the city and taking into account the irrefutable fact that a considerable part of the built environment of tomorrow already exists today, we should ask ourselves the question: can it adopt, as a whole, a composition of a different kind? If the urbanised environment, being the basic one, is also to become a full-value environment for human existence, it will require continuous and universal improvement of its quality, as well as new strategies, methods and scenarios for rational organisation of urbanised space that will be able to meet new challenges. It seems that “dramaturgically consistent logic of composition” may become an original formula of urban public space. Scenarios built on the basis of the city “genotype”, in which urban “layers of memory” are the basis for adaptive transformations.