The good, the bad and the ugly.

RECOMBINANT URBANISM: CONCEPTUAL MODELLING IN ARCHITECTURE, URBAN DESIGN, AND CITY THEORY

By David Grahame Shane. Chichester: Wiley-Academy. 2005. [pounds sterling]26.99

This book will repay work from the reader because it represents a lifetime's work from the author. Recombinant Urbanism is the first serious attempt to understand contemporary cities since Rowe and Koetter's Collage City: Shane was a pupil of Rowe. Shane recognises that masterplanning is over, that cities cannot be only considered as rational, that they change with feedback, and that heterogeneity and diversity cannot now disappear. Over half the book is taken up with explications of twentieth-century writers on cities, a lot on Kevin Lynch, maybe too little on Melvin Webber, but excellent on Central Place Theory.

The second more interesting half explains how cities can be categorised using the concepts of armature, enclave, and heterotopia. He returns to Foucault's for this use of the term heterotopia so he can explain how he sees the great metropolises of London, Paris, New York and Tokyo. Shane wants all of the city in his theory, the good, the bad and the ugly; Alan Ladd, Clint Eastwood and Rod Steiger. Like Shane of the classic western, he has a cataloguer's eye and can be a little merciless at times with his grillage. The shoot-out does not leave him wounded.

Brilliant and original, this work brings together and adds insights to thinking about cities, architecture and urban form. Shane's ideals, the Danish experiment of Christiania and the now destroyed walled city of Kowloon, betray a hippy past. But he likes complexity, contradiction, and above all architectural and urban thought which he finds in Peter Wilson and Julia Bolles' Munster public library--a much underrated work better than anything by Koolhaas or Hadid: and more surprisingly in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. This sophisticated assemblage of shopping, concert halls, hotels, apartments and offices is urbanistically orchestrated to terminate Columbus Circle. David Childs may be the one architect no one wants to tangle with but Time Warner is a major contribution, and Shane deserves our gratitude for bringing it to public notice. This is the man who should have given this year's Annual Discourse at the RIBA. For this book, in the immortal words of Elvis, Danke Shane.