Battle of Ideas - Masterplanning The future, By Theodoros Dounas

Politics and Aesthetics: Utopian future.

Aristotle Describes in his Politics Hippodamus, the first planner and creator of the classic city
grid, as taking things too far with attention to detail etc. For example in the city of Miletus
Hippodamus planned for a large, unoccupied, unsettled space in the heart of the city, which
years later grew into the agora, the place where civic life and discussion flourished in the
Greek city. Despite Aristotles accusation Hippodamus knew where to stop planning and
prescribing things and where to leave his plans as subject to evolution and formulation by
civic life, by politics.

And it is in politics where we must find the reason why the West has lost all faith in cities, and
how China, as an example, is creating cities that we have never seen before. The West
collectively has lost confidence in politics, and therefore in polis, the city, as a platform for the
improvement of our lives. In contrast, China is on track to raise another 200 million of people
out of poverty, by using cities as a tool, even if a repercussion of the Chinese social contract is
the authoritarianism of the Communism party.
This happens I believe because the value of community in China, where things are made for
the improvement of all, is still at the heart of things, even if in a big time scale that seems
bewildering to the west. It is in this sense of improvement of all peoples lives that
masterplanning makes sense;
Masterplanning also finds its normal place within aesthetics, the aesthetics of risk and the
aesthetics of the future. It has been at least 30 years that we have not seen an utopia project
coming out of the hands of architects and planners, which would inspire and project a future
of infinite possibilities, and i think this is due to the fact that architects have restricted
themselves into the aesthetics of conformity, of not being agents of change and improvement,
into not being seen as shaking up the established path.
Let me clarify what this means: Risk does not mean jumping over a cliff without a parachute, it
means to not let fear stop you from going forward. We should perceive masterplanning as an
orchestration of infinite possibilities, beyond the possibilities of the grid and of organizing
space with two dimensions locked so to find balance and the third dimension a vector of
possibility. We should move forward into removing the initial restrictions of the grid and move
to the aesthetics and politics of large scale, three dimensional cities, initial fragments of which
have been happening in the East, for some time.

We should maspterplan utopian platforms, cities that span from Shanghai to Hangzhou to
house 100 million population and production capacity, from London to Manchester to house
another 60 million, taking extreme advantage of the third dimension. This would be a setting
of infinite possibilities for people to discuss, live, entertain educate themselves and be allowed
to shape their own future. In a sense we should create cities that allow more people to form
the agoras of the future, and allow them to reclaim the civic life, reclaim polis. I do not think
this can happen with fearful, small, so called sustainable projects. We should dream beyond
our current restrictions, and maybe we will fail in the first 50 years to succeed in the next 50