Abstract
This essay analyzes the spatial and temporal dynamics which have emerged from the rapid development of Chiang Mai, Thailand over the last four decades. Modern urbanization since the 1980s in the previously remote Chiang Mai-Lamphun Valley has coincided with digital and financial globalization, neo-liberal governance, and the articulation of a new geological era of the Anthropocene based on evidence of human induced climate change. This time frame serves as a lens to theorize the architecture of the “metacity”, a new urban form and new form of urban practice responding to the demands of global digital financial networks and neo-liberal trade policies, but grounded in the ecology and life worlds of particular localities. The metacity appears in Chiang Mai within the interstices of a particularly fragmented rural/urban mix within a self-organized rather than plan-controlled built environment. The entire valley has been the site of intensive inhabitation for centuries, and recently urbanized, yet is spatially heterogeneous, extensive and patchy rather than ordered, bounded and uniform. The resulting landscape is marked by a disjunction between a feudal wet-rice cultivation land tenure structure overlaid with a market-based typology of urban real estate products with little enforcement of land use controls. The essay begins with theorizing the form of the metacity, continues with a description of the Chiang Mai case study, and concludes with a general assessment of the need to create a new form of metacity urban practice. A metacity design practice would re-conceptualize urban theories and forms by inking architectural and ecological thinking with inclusive social practices, enhanced by new digitally-enhanced urban imaginaries and new representational tools of mapping, modeling and design.
Highlights
Metacity TheoryOver the last four decades, the digitalization of global finance and the deregulation of world trade preceded the recent exponential development of a dense and volatile cloud of social media, communication and information.While 19th century industrialization produced the spatial logic of the modern metropolis and American postwar hegemony produced the late 20th century oil-based megalopolis, the digitally networked 21st century will produce a new form of meta-urbanism
This essay employs the theoretical framework of the metacity, a term recently introduced in urban design and ecology discourse (McGrath & Pickett, 2011; McGrath & Shane, 2012), in order to develop methods to decipher the architectural form, social equity as well as ecological performance of Chiang Mai, Thailand
Pickett has called the metacity a spatially extensive, system of cities, suburbs and exurbs, structured as dynamic mosaics of patches, in which flows, distant connections, historical contingencies, and the disturbances act in spatially explicit ways (2012)
Summary
Over the last four decades, the digitalization of global finance and the deregulation of world trade preceded the recent exponential development of a dense and volatile cloud of social media, communication and information. Urban Planning, 2017, Volume 2, Issue 1, Pages 53–71 metapopulation theories in ecology (Pickett, 2015), and is difficult to disentangle from pre-digital urban forms and inherited urban images. The metacity is both virtual and actual, concentrated in the hyper centers of global capital, and widely distributed in new hybrid mixtures in the urbanizing countryside. The metacity framework serves as a basis for a call for an urban practive of ecologically and socially activist design, linking a new digitally enhanced urban imaginary with the actual reality of contemporary urban life
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