Introduction - Addressing Uncertainty

1. . Ontario Population

Projections. ontario. ca. https://www. ontario.ca/page/ ontario-populationprojections.

The focus of this thesis is to develop urban systems and architecture that have more capacity to manage and adapt to change - more latency. Properly speaking, latency refers to the potential for a property to emerge in a system when circumstances change around it. The property is not immediately present, but is assumed to be embedded as a potential within the system and not something that needs to be created from the outside. A recent example of latency can be seen in the way Toronto’s sidewalks and roadsides adapted to become restaurants during pandemic related lock-downs. There was latency present in the sidewalk space for the city to adapt to the changing pressures of the pandemic. This was realized by creating space for restaurants and businesses to continue operating.

The reason these concepts of latency and adaptability are important today is the amount of uncertainty that architects and planners are expected to respond to and plan for, both in the short term and in the long term. For instance, a changing global climate, or, in the case of Ontario, the population is projected to increase by 35.8% over the next 25 years.1 At the same time, we have seen a shock in the way Toronto and other cities around the world have responded to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, in many cases retreating from the city center, which became a challenging place to live when services and social life were closed for a long time. If the world experiences a similar occurrence there is no certainty that what we are building now will be sufficient to the task. With this in mind, it is important to have a planning and architectural strategy that can meet uncertainty straight on.

As architects and planners, we often imagine ourselves as designers and organizers of the future. This sentiment is admirable; however, the challenge is that the future is uncertain and unpredictable. In which case, we need a way to define an intent for the future that allows concrete plans to be made, but at the same time has enough room to adapt, or even be reconstituted into multiple forms. How can we make plans that are unambiguous and concrete, but also open ended?

This question is particularly challenging when we recognize that long term thinking is itself a skill that we are losing. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes this loss in future planning ability in a quote from his book Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty:

“the collapse of long-term thinking, planning and acting, and the disappearance or weakening of social structures in which thinking, planning and acting could be inscribed for a long time to come, leads to a splicing of both political history and individual lives into a series of short-term projects and episodes which are in principle infinite, and do not combine into the kinds of sequences to which concepts like

‘development’, ‘maturation’ , ‘career’ or ‘progress’ (all suggesting a preordained order of succession) could be meaningfully applied... Past successes do not necessarily increase the probability of future victories, let alone guarantee them; while means successfully tested in the past need to be constantly inspected and revised since they may prove useless or downright counterproductive once circumstances change. A swift and thorough forgetting of outdated information and fast ageing habits can be more important for the next success than the memorization of past moves and the building of strategies on a foundation laid by previous learning.”2

Although Bauman implies that it is difficult to plan for the future, large scale projects like urban planning and architecture require a certain amount of confidence about what the future might bring. In his view, long term planning is challenging because assumptions need to be checked continuously. With that in mind, we can speculate on what kinds of tools are needed in order to develop long-term plans that can be checked, adjusted, and modified as circumstances change.

Historically speaking, planning strategies reflect a range of ambitions, from the ideological, to the aesthetic, to pure practicality. For the discussions of this thesis, we will limit ourselves to more recent considerations, beginning with the transformation of cities to their modern form, which began in the 1850s with the Sanitary movement. More recently it can be argued that modernist planning has had the most influence on the current city, along with market-based incentives. This can be seen in the dominance that efficiency and order have as tools of measurement for many aspects of urban planning.3 While this approach has grown out of a need to solve serious problems, such as the population explosion of the 1960s, and the integration of layers of infrastructure related to sanitation, cars, and other technology, it is not without its problems.

If we acknowledge that modern cities grew out of real needs, it is equally important to recognize that needs have changed and that in retrospect the deterministic models that we used to develop urban planning came with consequences that need to be addressed. Chief among this is that modernist planning, which has influenced much of the design of the contemporary North American City, is too rigid. We will see this discussed further in the following chapters.

Reactions to recent political, social, and economic turmoil have demonstrated a reminder that often people react negatively to uncertainty and change. Changes can be viewed as stressors when comfortable existing situations are altered. An example of this could be NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard), where people don’t wish to see development changes near their neighborhood and so protest, or organize to make sure things don’t change. Another recent and widespread example is the mixed responses to the uncertainty of the pandemic. Some people complied with public health rules put in place while others protested changes introduced into their lives.

While change is often viewed with negative reactions, there are some that champion ideas for an acceptance-based response. In Architecture Depends Jeremy Till discusses uncertainty through the concept of contingency, in which there is the possibility for things to change from the way they are. Till references Bauman to argue that contingency and uncertainty should not be viewed as negatives going against the urban systems in place. Rather, he argues change should be viewed through potential opportunities. Till states that there is a “transformative potential latent in uncertainty and the freedom that comes with it. Where order and certainty close things down into fixed ways of doing things, contingency and uncertainty open up liberating possibilities for action. In this light contingency is more than just fate; it is truly an opportunity.”4

Till’s attitude is about using change as a potential. But accepting change is a difficult thing to do for most, and, as will be discussed in the following chapters, planning is often not designed with it in mind. In this realm it is difficult to apply Till’s ideals of embracing

2. . Bauman, Zygmunt.

Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty.

Cambridge: Polity

Press, 2017, pg. 3.

3. . Scott, James C.

Seeing like a State:

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human

Condition Have Failed.

Yale University Press, 1998.

4. . Till, Jeremy.

Architecture Depends.

MIT Press, 2009, Till, pg. 55.

uncertainty and change to urban planning. But, perhaps there are ways in which we could consider working with Till’s ideals by addressing change pressures and uncertainty with adaptable urban systems. Till’s specific line the “transformative potential latent in uncertainty” highlights how to address change and uncertainty, specifically through latent potential, or latency. This involves planning for future change and uncertainty in cities through implementing built in adaptability.

To understand the nature of addressing adaptability, change, and uncertainty in cities, this thesis uses resilience theory, a concept borrowed from the study of ecologies. The theory is used to develop a critique of contemporary North American city development and efforts to build. Resilience theory is also used to form design concepts which imagine the development of an adaptable and resilient urban system.