Prototropic 0.1: Honolulu and Rio

K. In Honolulu, as you walk by these huge parking garages, they are
totally dissociated from street life. The Metrophilia involves the street.
Tall buildings, in its kind of most basic way, doesn’t care about street,
you drive into your parking garage and you go to your unit. Unless this is
resolved via design, we are going to see this as a conflict.
So that is how modern city has come down to and that is an old debate
and has not been resolved.
D. I think much of the intensities going towards the real estate
developments in high rises are driven by financial speculations and
short term profit and immediate discussion is needed to determine the
long term impacts of these developments.
K. Well first of all, I am not quite sure the total ramifications of new
developments, centered around high-rises, I don’t know any complex
being built, or any integrated as a district have been built, I think the
whole thing is about high rises, so its impacts haven’t been discussed
much. So are high rises are going to be the only discussion regarding
economy and urban development?
Are there other models that doesn’t include high-rises right away and
that is something we need to discuss and that leads us to another topic
which you have laid out that as the tilt of your journal itself, the tropic,
the “tropical city.” I think the whole question of tropical city is key…
because the kind of model of the city being reproduced in Honolulu,
have been built elsewhere, like Dubai or Shanghai, so that’s one kind of
model and that mode is generated by economy, and not quite driven by
civic obligations.