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2. Changing:
How can we recognize, anticipate and manage change? The organic city, which has taken generations to mature, is as an ‘Open system’: never complete, always adapting and self-organising over time. Planning and urban design in the modern era has focused on completeness and control within a ‘Closed system’ in harmonious equilibrium. Urbanism is less concerned with establishing a blueprint conceived and delivered as a single project, but the management and moderation of a process of continuous change. Change can be both seismic, as a result of a major intervention and incremental, gradually being undertaken in small steps over decades.
Bordeaux: Transformed Riverfront from a cardominated throughway to a shared space for people, trams, cars and pleasure
You cannot “build a city” but you can shape a place. HafenCity has created a framework for “actor-centred, induced development” focused on integrating old and new, changing perceptions not with a fixed masterplan but by establishing processes to support collaboration and coproduction within a guiding framework.