Polycentrality

Definition

Polycentrality is the metropolitan hybrid's first intent (Luna 2018): "The first intent of the metropolitan hybrid (intensifying the polycentricity of the metropolis) can be achieved through multiple urban cores and urban systems." It inverts the modernist civic-core programme of Gregory Marinic's reader-chapter era and of Josep Lluís Sert specifically. Sert (1944) diagnosed sprawl's identity-loss and demanded a civic core: "As a whole, suburban trends seem to be favored and little or nothing new is suggested when it comes to the real problem areas or those nearer the center of our cities… In all these halfway approaches suburbanism seems to prevail over urbanism," with the core as attractor — "This recentralization process demands the creation of new cores that will replace the old ones that the unplanned growth has destroyed." Luna's radicalization converts recentralization into reconcentration: "Recentralization needs to be better understood as reconcentration of activity, and rather than focusing on a single civic core, the metropolis must be understood as a collection of urban cores. These centers are resultants of singular buildings that infringe upon a hierarchy in the urban fabric and therefore attract development around them."

The concept's recognition-theory comes via Deyan Sudjic's "Image of the City": "Population, area, density, and administrative boundaries do not tell the full story of a city. The image of the city depends greatly on who is navigating it" — the tourist sees five percent, students orbit universities, business people orbit financial districts; "These areas are centers of activity that are distributed throughout cities and can be defined as urban cores." Polycentrality is thus also a theory of the city's image: cores are what navigation parses, and design can multiply them.

Its building-scale instrument is the catalyst: "In shrinking and postindustrial cities where either the population or an industry is declining, a variety of building stock is left abandoned, causing a loss of activity and gaps of metropolitanism. The challenge is appropriating these buildings with programming that injects new industries, making them act as catalysts." The anti-speculation rule: "If the goal is to create a catalyst, then programming cannot be derived out of real estate speculation" — and the extroversion rule: "A catalyst building needs to be an extrovert and cannot rely on programming that promotes monoculture. Commercial appropriations hinder the creative programming process for diversity, especially if the purpose is to have multiple cores."

Key Thinkers

• Rafael Luna — the concept's theorist: reconcentration against Sert's single civic core; urban cores as "resultants of singular buildings"; the catalyst/extrovert/anti-monoculture programme; the micro-industry counter-program (Middlesex County Jail; Korea's micro-factory buildings).
• Josep Lluís Sert — the concept's modernist ancestor (no page — see log): "The Human Scale in City Planning" (1944), the civic core and recentralization, the suburbanism-vs-urbanism alarm.
• Deyan Sudjic — the image-theory donor: cores as what navigation parses ("The image of the city depends greatly on who is navigating it," via Luna).
• Jane Jacobs — the diversity standard: the monoculture charge against commercial appropriation descends from her diversity conditions (via McMorrough's "Good Intentions").

Related Concepts

• Metropolitan Hybrids — the intent's parent concept: polycentrality is what the hybrid "has the intent of intensifying."
• Urban Systems — the sibling intent: cores vs. systems as the two programmable formations of the metropolis.
• Programming — the operation: "conceptualizing programming as urban cores."
• Adaptive Reuse — the catalyst's material base: appropriating abandoned stock "with programming that injects new industries."
• Terrain Vague — the condition polycentrality answers: "gaps of metropolitanism" left by declining population or industry; the abandoned and unfinished structures of the shrinking city.
• Gentrification — the commercial foil: "luxury residential condominiums, offices, and retail to appease the neighbors" is the catalyst's failed double — monoculture as the developer's polycentrality.
• Urbanism — the scale at which the concept operates: the metropolis as "a collection of urban cores."
• Urban Sprawl — the enemy condition: Sert's "endless suburbs" where "suburbanism seems to prevail over urbanism."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity (Luna 2018) — the founding source: Sert's civic core quoted and radicalized; Sudjic's navigational image theory; the Middlesex County Jail counter-program; the micro-factory precedent; the extrovert/anti-monoculture rules.
• Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015) — the mega-region register: the Greater South East characterized by Hall and Pain (2006) as "a global 'polycentric metropolis' or 'polycentric mega-region'" — "a region whose central focus is London, even if it incorporates several other centres" (p. 570); polycentricity as overlapping regions, not scalar sub-regions — "part of a more complex system of socio-spatial relations, in which regions are being made and unmade (assembled and disassembled)" (p. 570); commuting patterns plus the location of "back office, logistics and retail functions in the urban centres in the area" confirming "the functional region" and "that region's polycentric nature" (p. 576); the conclusion — the region's development "can only be understood on the basis of recognition of its position within the wider post-metropolitan region." Where Luna's polycentrality is a design operation (cores as catalytic singular buildings), Cochrane, Colenutt & Field's is a governance and functional-economy description: polycentricity as the emergent, contested form of a (sub)urban region. See suburbanism, post-suburbia.
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the post-suburban morphology register: the "dispersed, multi-focus, discontinuous, variably dense, and multi-centred city, not oriented towards the traditional core" (quoted p. 582); the region "punctured by edge cities and technoburbs" (Sieverts, Garreau, cited p. 584); and De Meyer's morphological comparison — "The morphology of postsuburbia, which should be viewed at a wider regional scale, evinces more similarities with the concept of 'megalopolis' as introduced by the French geographer Jean Gottmann" (quoted p. 590). Where Luna's polycentrality is a design operation and Cochrane et al.'s a governance description, Keil's is a morphological description at regional scale: the multi-centred city whose centres are edge cities, technoburbs and the accreted fabric of Gottmannian megalopolis. See suburban-governance, implosion-explosion-dialectic.
• source-notes/soja-2000-postmetropolis

Open Questions

• Luna's cores are "resultants of singular buildings that infringe upon a hierarchy in the urban fabric" — but the Middlesex counter-program is a brief, not a built case. Has a catalyst building ever been built to this programme, and how would its extroversion be measured?
• The anti-monoculture rule ("a catalyst building… cannot rely on programming that promotes monoculture") echoes Jacobs via McMorrough — but Luna's own micro-industry programme concentrates startups, venture capital, and exhibition spaces in one shell. Is a monoculture of diversity-producers still a monoculture?
• Does polycentrality conflict with the civic core's egalitarian intent? Sert's recentralization was a planning-ideological programme (CIAM lineage); Luna's is a navigation-and-catalysis theory. Is the civic core's publicness recoverable in a polycentric metropolis of themed attractors?
• How does polycentrality relate to urban systems — cores are nodes, systems are networks; the chapter asserts both intents for one concept. Are they two phases of the same operation (cores first, systems to link them), or competing descriptions?