Overpopulation 人口过多

Online version by: Bert de Muynck
Photography Neville Mars and Nick May.
Illustrations Adrian Horsnby

KEEP ’EM COMING 人口过剩论

在一千年后来分析21世纪，一个非常重要的事实是：世界人口从1900年的16亿增长到了61亿。在2003年大约有30亿世界人口生活在城市。在未来30年中，绝大部分人口增长也将发生在城市，他们将被人口少于五十万的小型不发达城市吸收。而中国作为目前人口最多的国家，应如何应对城市和农村的人口增长呢？人是城市的建设者，也是城市的使用和消费者，这一两面性给中国正在崛起的城市化和现代化带来了诸多问题。面对这些挑战，中国的城市化能否向我们理想中的方向发展呢？

Introduction

If one were to analyze the twentieth century in a thousand \years, a crucial point will be this one: the total world population grew from 1,6 billion (1900) till 6,1 billion (2000).

Recently the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations (an interface between global policies in the economic, social and environmental spheres and national action) published two reports. The WORLD POPULATION IN 2300 Proceedings of the United Nations Expert Meeting on World Population in 2300 (UNWP2300) focuses on the long-term expectations of world population, in World Urbanization Prospects The 2003 Revision Data Tables and Highlights (UNWU2003) the focus is on the relation between urban and rural population in the period. The predicted growth doesn’t mean population will cluster in megapolises or maxi-metropolises. In the short term (2030) a world with 8.2 billion people organizes itself as follows: Almost all population growth expected for the world in the next thirty years will be concentrated in the urban areas. The smaller urban settlements (with fewer than 500,000 residents) of the less developed regions, will be absorbing most of this growth. Mega-cities, like Tokyo, Mexico City and New York will continue to dominate the urban landscape in some countries, but the majority of the urban dwellers will be residing in the smaller cities. The world’s urban population was estimated at 3 billion in 2003 and is expected to rise to fi ve billion by 2030. The rural population is anticipated to decline slightly from 3.3 billion in 2003 to 3.2 billion in 2030.

In China we can discern two evolutions that reflect the impact of population on the urban growth. Firstly there is an individual and explosive growth of the small cities and villages located all over China, secondly there is the clustering and steady hybrid growth of mega-urban regions such as the Pearl River Delta, Yellow River Delta and the BXS-axis (Beijing, Xian and Shanghai). The UNWU2003 points at the shift in balance between rural and urban population). The UN distinguishes between more, less and least developed countries. In architectural and urban thinking the issue of overpopulation, technological progress (influencing infrastructure, building process and consumer culture) and the shift from rural to urban society led, after the second World War, to an eruption of visionary Western and Asian architects and urban planners that were theorizing, thinking, speculating and designing the future of the city. A future attaining its form by advanced technological possibilities, leading to cities that could be built the next day and updated the following. Technology, preassembly, montage and industrialization of the building process are the key-concepts for making a global construction culture possible. In that era, the future was bright, the future was fast-growing: ‘fast-growing industrialization, a fast-growing population, and a fast-growing urbanization. And one of the byproducts of this world is that architecture is coming to be considered as just another product, able to be produced almost full-blown by the same processes that now make other things for human use.’ In retrospect, one sees that this future may have gotten full-blown, but never full-grown. It was aborted by its own ambition. Architecture didn’t become an added-value or integrated part of the building process, but the last rampart resisting reality.

For the last thirty years, let’s say from 1970 on, this serious speculation was banned from public debate and pushed in to the foggy realm of architectural and urban research and mapping. We live in a global village, see generic cities, and are mesmerized by its aftermath, rigor mortis, or possible resurrection. Rem Koolhaas wrote of his nostalgia for the era of grand thinking, being part of its last spasm at the end of the sixties, in 1985 as follows: Who does not feel an acute nostalgia for the types who could, no more than 15 years ago, condemn (or was it liberate, after all?) whole areas of alleged urban desperation, change entire destinies, speculate seriously on the future with diagrams of untenable absurdity, leave entire auditoriums panting over doodles left on the blackboard, manipulate politicians with their savage statistics – bow ties the only external sign of their madness? For the time when there were still... thinkers?

Today thinkers are doom prophets, architects space suppliers and urban planners politicians’ puppets. Fifty years ago, this was not the case. After the fi rst wave of Modernism set out the design opportunities for technology, infrastructure and culture to deal with demographical and morphological growth, we forgot to speculate about urban and architectural strategies that can deal with housing, infrastructure and urbanism for the city and reality to come. An no 2006 their message is, under the cloak of educational utopian awareness, brutally raped in the darkrooms of retro-active awareness.
In China, this serious speculation seems to be absent. The combination of a forced speeding up of the country’s ambitions and a slow mutation of the country’s political power, gave way to China’s contemporary urban and architectural image; a mélange of bottom-up urbanization, do-it-yourself architecture and unplanned development. At the same time, at another side of the speculative urban spectrum, China introduces planning and architectural projects of colossal proportions. Direct incentives to stimulate the growth of 20.000 towns and villages, new harbors, airports, 6000 new high tech development zones, a steppingstone policy of mega projects such as the Olympic village, the world-expo, three Gorges Dam, CCTV. It’s China’s market realism responding with such Bigness.

Urbanization is a game of Sim(pli)City. Simple renewal and expansion. There is no insight, no vision, “no big thinking” that ties all the elements together or suggests a common goal. This two-line struggle between the small and big, is nothing less than a global schism implemented in all corners of the world, here with Chinese characteristics. In their report, the United Nations, which coins China as a less developed country, have a list of Urban Agglomerations with 10 million inhabitants or more, set out at four different moments (1950, 1975, 2003 and 2015). In 1950 there were two (New York and Tokyo), in 1975 four (Tokyo, New York, Shanghai and Mexico City), in 2003 twenty and in 2015 there will be twenty-two of them. In 2003, Shanghai was ninth on the list (12.8 million), in 2015 it will be fifteenth (12.7 million). Beijing was in 2003 sixteenth on the list (10.8 million), in 2015 it will be twentieth (11.1 million).

The UNWP2300 gives the balance, for 2003, between rural and urban population in China. The total population of China is at that moment estimated at 1,304,196, the relation between the rural and urban population the following: 800,456 is rural and 503,740 urban. Another interesting graphic is the one with the title Percentage of population at mid-year residing in urban areas), see graphic. What we can see is the following evolution, in,5 % was residing in urban areas, in,8 % and it is estimated that in,5 % of the Chinese population will reside in urban areas. In terms of numbers this is in,528 million, in,247 million and will lead to an urban population of 877,623 million people in 2030. For the rural population this mean that in 1950 there lived 485,232 people on the rural side, in,093 and in 2030 there will live 572,898 people. This in return means that the total population of China went from 554,760 million in 1950 over 1275,215 million in 2000 and will move to 1450,521 million in 2030.

The far more interesting list of numbers in the report is the one with the heading Population of urban agglomerations with 750,000 inhabitants or more in 2000, by country,. If we look at China, then we can fi nd a list of 118 cities (from Anshan till Zigong) that reached in 2000 the 750,000 inhabitants level. Out of these 118 cities, 10 cities will have in 2015 less than 1 million inhabitants, 86 of these cities will have in 2030 between 1 and 2 million, 16 cities between 2 and 3 million, 4 cities more than three million and 2 more than ten million.

Chinese Population and the Medium Scenario

In the aforementioned The WORLD POPULATION IN 2300 Proceedings of the United Nations Expert Meeting on World Population in 2300 report talks also about the predicted decline in terms of world percentage of the Chinese population when heading toward 2300. It states the following:
According to the medium scenario, China, India and the United States are and would continue to be the most populous countries of the world until 2300. By 2050, India would have surpassed China in population size and would remain as the most populous country in the world thereafter.

However, between 2000 and 2100, the three most populous countries would account for a declining share of the world population, passing from 43 per cent in 2000 to 34 per cent in 2100. Their share would then rise slightly and remain at about 35 per cent until 2300. (...) China also experiences a reduction of its share of the world population, mainly between 2000 and 2100, when it drops from 21 per cent to 13 per cent. Thereafter, it recuperates slightly, growing to 14 per cent by 2300. The share of the United States remains fairly stable between 2000 and 2100, at about 5 per mcent, and then rises slightly to 5.5 per cent by 2300.

2005, the Ongoing Situation

Today, we celebrate spontaneous urbanism, instant architecture, self-organization and growing or shrinking cities. Architects facilitate phenomena with or without an understanding of their impact. They test technological innovations on un-profi table scales. This leads to a slowing down, qualitatively worsening off, and increase in construction costs. On top of that one can’t deny that the split between architectural and urban thinking is today painful. Where technology would bridge architectural and urban thinking, it now widens the chasm between them. Does the rural-urban shift challenge thinkers and designers? As we gave up theorizing the (Western) city, a new concept of urbanism enfolds before our eyes.

The two UN-reports call for a fundamental thinking and designing exercise, for the necessity of a radical rethinking of a quantitative and qualitative organizational concept, as the logic and reality of the city to come will be without precedent. Cities won’t sprawl eternally, population won’t grow forever, but architecture and urbanism will more than ever deal with organization and shelter. The renewal, upgrade and progress of the city will happen within the city, will be about future and after-life of the skyscrapers we erect now and the slums, bidonvilles and gecekondu’s that are booming by the thousands. What happens if we think that the urban explosions in Africa and Asia are transitory episodes in a story for the concept of urbanism to fi nd opportunities to re-invent and revolutionize itself? Can we think and be specifi c instead of generic?

The Modernistic Momentum for the Metropolis

Technology, communication, mobility, prefabrication and infrastructure pushed the city or Metropolis after World War II beyond its limits and created a halo of inhabitable parasitic instantness around (Western) cities. Architects and urban designers were discouraged from pushing forward this evolution or forced to build. Little time and space was left over to think. In Capitalistic countries the mix of private and public planning leads to patterns of pre-fabricated building blocks and the single housing colonization of suburbia. The “strip”-ification of roads leads to the image of a vast sprawled mass moving through a soulless wasteland. In less and least developed countries the rush toward the city leads to a catching up and pushing back-forth scenario, the combination of erectile booming in and colonial deconstruction of the inner-city, the upgrading and solidification of the infrastructure, stirred by a population pressure-housed in an ever-growing stock of concrete skeletons and cardboard slums around a name. For the Socialist regimes the agenda for the future for urban planning was set out by the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev in his December 7th 1954 speech at the National Conference of Builders, Architects, Workers in the Construction Materials and Manufacture of Construction and Roads Machinery Industries, and Employees of Design and Research Development Organizations, a speech entitled On the extensive introduction of industrial methods and improving the quality of, and reducing the cost of, construction. A thrilling milestone for architecture and urbanism, some extracts:

We must set about decisively strengthening our building organizations. Without this there can be no question of industrializing construction. (...) We have an obligation to significantly speed up, improve the quality of, and reduce the cost of, construction. In order to do so, there is only one path – and that is the path of the most extensive industrialization of construction. (...) It’s wrong to use architectural decoration to turn a modern residential building into something resembling a church or museum. This produces no extra convenience for residents and merely makes exploitation of the building more expensive and puts up its cost. And yet there are architects who fail to take this into account. (...) It’s well known that there is much room in the construction sector for improving productivity of labour and consequently for increasing salaries earned by workers. Such room is to be found in mechanization of building work; correct use of the powerful equipment we have on our building sites; a switch to industrial methods of construction; improvement of workers’ skills; better use of the advanced experience gained by innovators; and strengthening of production discipline.

For Socialist regimes this lead to the massive ideological and industrially manufactured concretization of the (sub)urban hinterland, the notorious Plattenbau-planning. As a horrifying seduction, this urban organization (70 percent of the East-European housing stock) is currently testing the infiltration of, or its resistance to, the late-capitalistic regime.

To reflect upon the implications of the Sino-Soviet cooperation during the so-called start-up period of China (the 1950s when industrialization needed to be artificially speeded up) would require more space than available here, but to make a long story short, one can see tendencies in the way this cooperation was implemented.

At the one hand there is the urban organizational influence of Soviet designers, making the blueprint for Chinese further urban development, at the other hand there was the impossibility of a nationwide implementation of the industrial building principles, having its impact on today’s architectural image. In terms of urban organization, during the 1950s Soviet designers developed in China an architectural tradition that would reflect the communist era and were according to the principles of post-war Soviet city planning; functional organization, low-rise standardized landscapes, the persistence of the walking-scale of the city, super blocks, emphasis on formalistic street patterns, grand design for public buildings and monuments built around huge public squares. One can argue China doesn’t have its own Modern tradition. In terms of production techniques, they are at the heart of cultural shifts, like concrete for Modernism. In China, the mass-production in residential (!) construction, in contrast to the Soviet Union, never really took off.

Today, we see in China a third hybrid of “manual massproduction”. Buildings and cars alike are produced at conveyer belt speed, but without robots and pre-cast concrete. The sheer size of the labor market - i.e. the population – allows for a diverse even individualized production process. This is revolutionary and defining the new housing typologies and the Chinese architectural landscape. Where Modernism’s hunger for minimalism was rooted in a lack of labor and liberating the worker from grueling frivolities, the massive mobile manpower itself is China’s technological breakthrough. It is this flexibility combined with modern production methods that is reintroducing ornamentation and details to otherwise generic buildings. At the same time the upsurge of the residential tower block makes China one the first nation to full-heartedly embrace Le Corbusier.

Revolution

We can’t project the methodology, or better the lack of it, by which we today analyze the Western City onto the Chinese one. Our problems are not (necessarily) theirs. What we need to understand is not only what we today in China experience, feel, taste, smell and do, but more important the history of urban development in relation to ideology, era, industrialization, form, population, organization and structure. In China industrialization, and consequent urbanization, didn’t occur gradually, it went with leaps, through a process which one could coin as an uninterrupted revolution. About this ‘artifi cial’ speeding up of industrialization Carlo M. Cipolla, wrote in his book The Economic History of World Population (1965) the following: Actually, when ‘industrialization’ occurs gradually, these socio-cultural changes take place in a balanced process with economic changes. But when, as in many backward areas today, ‘industrialization’ is artificially speeded up, the socio-cultural environment may show a much greater degree of resistance to change than the economic structure. If such is the case, the static socio-cultural environment can indeed represent a formidable bottleneck and invalidate all efforts to achieve industrialization. This is the reason why some of those societies who want, or are forced, to quicken the pace of industrialization may feel – more or less emotionally – the urge to resort to political and social revolutionary movements. The socio-political revolution is a rough way to break through the socio-cultural bottleneck. All the miseries and the hardships that follow then become part of the price of industrialization. Since 1948 China had the urge to resort to these kinds of political and social revolutionary movements through action and reaction when it comes to the issue (over)population. Analyzing the recent history of China, we see a process of “struggle-criticism-transformation” when dealing with these issues and implementing them. Today we are overwhelmed by this process of urban transformation. What comes after this? Another round of “struggle-criticism-transformation”? In order to do so, there needs to be the understanding of the fundament on which a new society has been created and can be recreated.

Mao’s stated China’s position in 1958 as follows: “China’s 600 million people, have two remarkable peculiarities: they are, first of all, poor, and secondly blank. That may seem like a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it...” The question is if China’s people are still poor and blank, or if we heading toward a new two line struggle, this time between the rural and urban population? Almost half a century later, China’s population reached an almost stable level of 1,300 million people, which means a more than doubling of its population within fi fty years. The two remarkable peculiarities that Mao noticed underwent change, or a split; the rich vs the poor, the blank vs the complete.

During this half a century, China quickened the pace of its industrialization (some call it an industrialization without urbanization, in situ urbanization, or “doorstep urbanization”) , thereby exploring new methods in establishing a viable relation between its urban and rural population, which resorted to a history of political and social revolutionary movements, experiments and challenges. China’s consecutive governments used sociopolitical revolution as a rough way to break though the socio-cultural bottleneck, a situation it found itself in at almost every moment in the (young) history of the People’s Republic of China. Throughout its history, and in order to deal with its growing population, planning at both an economic, philosophical, population and rural-urban level was a necessity; its ambition was to combine a rapid economic advance with a conscious, self-remolding in the social group. The governing of its population, exemplified by the notorious one to- two-child policy, has been the main challenge for the government of the PRC, one with repercussions not only on the organization of the family (leading up to the idea of the spoiled and perfect 1-2-4 child, one kid receives all attention from his two parents and four grandparents where these grandparent has to spread their attention over dozens of grandchildren) but also with regard to the organization of its territory.

In their book Governing China’s Population – From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford University Press, 2005) Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler explore the concerns, the solutions, the failures and the ideology steering the PRC’s governmentalization regarding the issue of population. Throughout the history of the PRC, the authors discern the following concerns: Those concerns focused initially on the location of the population (keeping rural people out of the cities), but gradually grew to embrace its quantity (slowing growth and limiting size) and its “quality” (enhancing not only health and education but also social morality and political commitment).

On population and Chinese urbanization

The effect this governing of the population had, was a spatial regulation, these were institutionalized by the government, which lead up to different political-economic regimes in the Chinese cities and villages, a gradation in space and an institutional dichotomy; being registered as either urban or rural, dramatically altered the life chances one has.


This governing of the Chinese population reached a condition in which the difference between the rural and urban population, due to the ‘small family’, was able to create a population that was psychologically adopted throughout its recent evolution to the urban-global aspirations and practices of China. The difference between the policies on the countryside and those within the city, created from the 1980s a generation of ‘floating migrants’ that seemed to roam through China and has their effects on the growth and reorganization of the cities, as well, on their return, has their effect upon the urbanization of the countryside, as we can read: Among China’s huge “floating population” of rural-to-urban migrants were not a few who moved in order to give birth to more children. Unrestricted by urban work units or residence officials, peasant communities in the cities sometimes served as “safe heavens” where couples could have births without fear of being fi ned – to the great frustration of local birth planning officials. (...) Meanwhile, the youngest generation, having grown up in a mediasaturated culture and in many cases having experienced city life fi rsthand, were living in imagined worlds that were urban rather than rural. Carrying modern urban culture, these returned migrants, now roughly one-third of all rural-to-urban migrants, are major forces for reproductive change in the villages.

The governance of China’s population has its implications on the governance and organization of the country as a whole, not only in terms of the rural-urban difference in politics, but also in the political dimension of urbanization, as we can see in the influence of the urban land reform of 1982, which declared that all urban land was to be property of the state, while all rural land was the collective property of villages. This process of adjusting urban to rural governance (not only territorial but also population-wise) is not immutable, but is in a constant state of adaptation and change. This uninterrupted change, the contradiction between balance and imbalance, is an echo of Mao Zedong Thought as we can read in the following extract: “The contradictions between balance and imbalance exist in all fields and in all sectors of every department. They arise without interruption and they are resolved without interruption.” This is not unfortunate for “if there were no contradictions and no struggle, there would be no world, no progress, no life, there would be nothing at all. To talk all the time about unity is ‘a pool of stagnant water’; it can lead to coldness. We must destroy the old basis for unity, pass through a struggle, and unite on a new basis. Which is better – a stagnant pool, or ‘the inexhaustible Yangtse comes roaring past’?”

The current development of China’s urban and rural organization, the flowering of thousand construction sites, the discussion between the modernity of the City and the conservation of its authenticity, the issue of ‘floating migrants’,... can’t be discussed without understanding the effects, the reasons and implications of the doubling of the Chinese population over a period of half a century. These two evolutions, the speed of growth of the population and the speed of growth of the cities, are intertwined, the governing of the one has implications on the governing of the other. And I am not writing something new when stating that this intertwining happens in a structural haphazard way. But that architects, planners and politicians are in the possibility to obscure, in the future, the design opportunities for technology, infrastructure and culture to deal with the effects of this with demographical and morphological growth, is foreseeable.

Can we see in the formal and organizational, the urban and architectural and in the economical and the political evolution a new sign that a new revolution is at hand, an uninterrupted one that is an echo from the times of Mao? In their book China’s Uninterrupted Revolution VictorNee and James Peck write the following about the concept of the uninterrupted revolution:

...throughout the course of the Chinese Revolution appeals for “pragmatism” and “gradualism” have been the ideological alternative to uninterrupted revolution and the fundamental need for rapid, conscious change encompassing all aspects of a society’s and an individual’s life, propelled both by the need to overcome material backwardness and the desire to create a new public spirit. If the transition from feudalism to capitalism took place in an unplanned or haphazard way in the West, in China many came to argue that planning at both an economic and philosophical level was a necessity. In time the Maoists spoke of combining rapid economic advance and conscious, self-remolding in the social group. It is this double, intertwined, speeded advance toward what they regard as a higher stage in the revolution of mankind that underlies the Maoist view of uninterrupted revolution.

Mo(u)rning after?

Some fifty years? after Khrushchev and Mao, some forty after the Metabolists, we have a new event to look forward to: five billion people that by 2030, ergo the next generation, will live in an urbanized part of the world.

This is a challenge for a future in which the shift between rural and urban thinking will get a new impulse, in which housing the billions will be a reality and require new paths for dealing with our habitat. The way to do that is designing present, exploring the possibilities of a morning-after planning, the understanding of the current evolution and directing/ designing the necessary/wanted revolution. Imagine the contemporary ad hoc planning will continue, will be the blueprint for even more cities, cities with less people than the major ones, but all formed to one ideal – sprawl combined with skyscrapers. After these cities reach their population balance (after one generation, maybe two), temporarily organized infrastructure will become a fixed pattern, plots of lands will gain value and new buildings, new programs, will be connected underground or sky high with other cores, leaving the sprawl as diehard in-between buffers. Then the catching up will start, saving the historic inner-city (a by then pink and rotating skyscraper designed in the 2020 Retro-Postmodern Style as dictated by the Dhaka-school of Urban Renaissance) from new design, progress ideas: all developed for continuous metabolism, their idea merged with the sprawl tissue, creating green, corridor, linear cities out of 1990 slums and Megastructure out of 2000 skyscrapers.

Can we offer a growing population a quality of life that is based on a speeding up, improving quality of, and reducing cost of, construction? Is there in order to do so, only one path? The path of the most extensive industrialization of construction. Or will we opt for the path of the most expensive industrialization of construction?

The challenges lay in the understanding of the two evolutions that reflect the impact of population on the urban growth, the individual and explosive growth of the small cities and villages located all over China, ands the clustering and steady hybrid growth of mega-urban regions such as the Pearl River Delta, Yellow River Delta and the BXS-axis (Beijing, Xian and Shanghai). Next to this organizational question there is the issue of how these constellations are produced; “manual mass-production”. These define a changed form of modernism; Mao-Modernism.

We should abstract the debate from the 20’s to the 60’s on housing for the masses from its geographical capitalistic roots and implement it post-actively in those cities that today are necessarily, due to the rapid population influx, stuck in a catching-up scenario, thereby, albeit using efficiency in technology, offering the world a capital question. What will happen and what is to be done? According to the report, one should expect to reach a population plateau in these areas, also a total capitalistic catching up scenario whereby everyone will have an all European-American lifestyle of spending space, technology and time. The ultimate shabby way by which these cities are pushing the urban and architectural envelop, gives us a territorial thrill. Things are happening there. But what is happening? Are they pushing the elite into heaven and the masses into the mud?

What is to come?

Where cities in the west grew at the speed of a double century, the new cities double with the speed of less than two decades. But resistance to this evolution seems to be less, which could both on short and long terms lead to the permanence of ad-hoc thinking and planning. These evolutions will force us, fi rstly from a socio-political and economic viewpoint, secondly due to not immediately applicable premanufacturing systems, into the realm of urban self-restraint. Until spontaneous, cheap chaos reaches its social saturation point. At that moment, somewhere between 2030 and 2050, new models can be implemented.

Here, again, everything is possible, from arranging support-structure ribbons in patterns, organizing cities as a network of mutually related building planes and extent, determine closed spaces, outline green areas, give context to freestanding buildings, and reach conclusions about main lines of development. China is not a clean canvas anymore, it is full of built blotches. In front of us there lays at least a quartercentury in which we can develop post-active, not post facto, scenario’s for the modern city, where we can bridge the gap between the single building and its overpopulated disintegrating and hyper-congesting urban context, for this and the next Contemporary City. A development in which we should discuss the retro-active feasibility of the megastructure, Khrushchev and the Metabolists. Not as a die-hard example but as an analogy. That vision of society needs to be commanded and demanded. We still have industrialization and technology at our expense. Hopefully we won’t fall into the traps that say that by doing this everything will look the same everywhere. That is maybe the current evolution, but there is nothing that cannot be undone.

In this developing condition, we need to see the areas of alleged urban desperation, change entire destinies, and speculate seriously on the future, not only about the Chinese future, but also about ours. Although the scale, ideology, speed and power relations, the characteristics, between them and “us” differ, the outcome, or lack of, our planning ambitions turn out to be very similar and address the same problems; the conflict between the ambition to think big in a market context and a reality in which everything is per se ad hoc, in situ and phasable. Today we can’t lock ourselves in the universe of reflection and awareness because at the moment we leave our caves the world will be different than the one we imagined.