Tactics, Natural Selection, and Dinosaurs

It seems to me the strategic v. tactics dichotomy could easily be replaced by organic v. fabricated. Tactics is organic in that there is no master plan, no greater power or control, yet it happens anyway, typically to a beautiful result. Strategic is fabricated; a rushed attempt at meeting immediate needs without regard to the patterns of the ecosystem in place.

I think the built environment is very much an ecosystem. We are animals, whether we like to admit it or not. We want to create our own environments, carve out our own place for ourselves. We feel like we’ve accomplished something if we safely survive in the “wild” of a harsh urban environment. The issue with strategic development, and especially strategic housing, is that the environment is provided to us without any effort on our part, without our say, and without our best interest in mind. Many social housing projects feel like a zoo. We’ve been provided with something that feels foreign. It meets all of our needs on paper, but somehow feels like it’s not for our benefit, but for someone else’s.

Our saving grace is the organic, the tactics. The built environment IS an ecosystem, and therefore natural selection is at work. If a project isn’t working, isn’t being utilized, or isn’t profitable, the organic nature of tactics takes over, reclaiming and transforming the environment into something the ecosystem needs. Half-built skyscrapers become vertical cities in the same way a fallen tree becomes a beautiful, vibrant city for insects. We don’t have to lead the insects to the log, and dig out their homes for them—they can do that for themselves. As the great theoretician Ian Malcolm once said, “Life finds a way.”   

So, the conclusion must be drawn that all architecture eventually reverts to tactics as a function of time. When it is deemed no longer useful, it is changed. If we don’t provide something that carefully fits into the existing ecosystem, it will be transformed--and not always in the safest, most hygienic ways-- if not now then several years from now. Better practice is to carefully read the ecosystem and find what is missing, what is useful, and what is beneficial to its inhabitants. Only then can our projects be swept up in the course of nature rather than opposing it until its inevitable fall.