Architecture is the definition of place through the encoding of information into structure. This can be ‘read only’, but functional design demands an active conversation between inhabitants and environment through the medium of structure -read/write. For too long architecture as a profession has been under the erroneous assumption that it is in the business of producing sculpture and monuments. Today the concept that any structure has any solitary function or role across its practical lifespan is an anachronism. But too many designers still design as if they were producing a perfect artifact to last for eternity. Civil engineers routinely make this same error. The urban environment doesn’t need more designs. It needs systems, ways of habitation, genomes. I have often wondered why it is that modern cities do not commonly have an underground infrastructure akin to the raised floors of a computer room -a structure that anticipates the obvious need for its own continued maintenance and the constant and necessary evolution of what’s going on above ground.

With the contemporary growth of squatter cities we are seeing the city evolve in the manner of a coral reef or stromatolith. Most cities are dead in their core and surrounded by this blobby membranous organic structure that is the true living organism forced to the perimeter by our compulsion to bureaucratically preserve the status quo of dead architecture. This is the origin of urban sprawl. Without the means of effective wholistic physical evolution, cities are compelled to follow the patterns of primitive organisms that only evolve by growth. We have the technology to do better but institutionalized class divisions and classism/racism preclude a rational consensus view. The wealth gap has become an increasingly broad cultural divide and the privileged, with their absolutist notions of order, seem to really enjoy cultivating giant orderly cemeteries for some reason -even when a declining number of them actually live in them.

City is a verb. It’s something people do. Urban architecture and quality of life would be radically different if more people understood this.