Future Shift for ‘Big Things’: From Starchitecture via Agritec- ture to Parkitecture

This article analyses three recent shifts in what [1] called the geography of ‘Big Things’ meaning the contemporary functions and adaptability of modern city centre architecture. We periodise the three styles conventionally into the fashionable ‘Starchitecture’ of the 1990s, the repurposed ‘Agritecture’ of the 2000s and the parodising ‘Parkitecture’ of the 2010s. Starchitecture was the form of new architecture coinciding with the rise of neo-liberalism in its brief era of global urban competitiveness prevalent in the 1990s. After the Great Financial Crash of 2007-8 the market for high-rise emblems of iconic, thrusting, skyscrapers and giant downtown and suburban shopping malls waned and online shopping and working from home destroyed the main rental values of the CBD. In some illustrious cases ‘Agritecture’ caused re-purposed office blocks and other CBD accompaniments to be re-purposed as settings for high-rise urban farming, especially aquaponics and hydroponic horticulture. Now, Covid-19 has further undermined traditional CBD property markets causing some administrations to decide to bulldoze their ‘deadmalls’ and replace them with urban prairie landscapes, inviting the designation ‘Parkitecture’ for the bucolic results. The paper presents an account of these transitions by reference to questions raised by urban cultural scholars like Jane M. Jacobs and Jean Gottmann to figure out answers in time and space to questions their work poses


Introduction
We shall briefly introduce and contextuate the discussion around the origins and nature of these architectural lineaments and styles. Sequentially, the first that we, like others, stylise as 'Starchitecture', was a product of the 1990s and overspilling the early 2000s, a hedonistic, narcissistic and competitive markets-driven period whereby city administrations favoured iconic architectural statements by 'star' architects as victims of a hubristic urban positioning tactic harmonising with neoliberal 'survival of the fittest' ideology. The second style under consideration is far less hegemonic but couched in contrarian terms as a first responder tactic trying to answer [2]'s question 'Why the Skyscraper?' This clearly old question has in recent years become complex because it has even more recently begun to evolve diverse answers. While it could once be 'explained' in terms of cultural phallocentrism, or more technically, economies of scale offered by exploitation of land rent opportunities, nowadays both responses are facing obsolescence because many skyscrapers have become 'ghostscrapers.' Many began showing signs of emptying before the Covid-19 contagion infected global cities but after the pandemic struck many have become redundant as office blocks. In some striking responses to that crisis some have become agricultural holdings for aquaculture and hydroponic horticulture, giving rise to the generic epithet of 'Agritecture' although that is by no means confined to skyscrapers.
Moreover, among the diverse answers are 'dwellings', sometimes adorned with high-rise gardens and even micro-forests. This leads conveniently into a speculation about the future of other 'Big Things' than mere skyscrapers, for which the property market has deemed there to be little future use for downtown shopping malls because of the Guggenheim Museum, it was the 'hubris of history' that emerged from numerous interviews with the leading 'Deconstructivist'. A common response was that the oligarchy, many of whom or their descendants still lived in Algorta, the pleasant seaside suburb near the mouth of the Nervión, were still rich and had always invested in the highest quality buildings, equipment, accommodation and cuisine. Bear in mind that persuading a famous but comparatively inexperienced museum 'franchising' foundation to lend its name and its valuable inventory to a grimy, de-industrialising port-city was at the time considered challenging to the Foundation, if not the stakeholders. niece Peggy Guggeheim's former residence on Venice's Grand Canal at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, and the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on New York City's Fifth Avenue that opened in 1959. The Basque government agreed to cover the US$100 million construction cost, to create a US$50 million acquisitions fund, to pay a one-time US$20 million fee to the Guggenheim Foundation and to subsidize the museum's US$12 million annual budget. Amid an outside light show and concerts the Bilbao Guggenheim was opened by the King of Spain on October 18, 1997 with Frank Gehry as its Canadian/US 'star' architect. Scale and space were the guiding motives inside the building while the exterior should appear as a 'dream ship' clad in shiny titanium. Accordingly, some of the largest installations in the world could be housed there; Anselm Kiefer's enormous paintings could be housed multiply and the entrance was occupied by Richard Serra's monumental ship-grade steel 'curved corridor' called 'The Matter of Time'. Outside the entrance since the opening has sat an equally monumental horticultural (Begonias, Busy Lizzies, Pansies) puppy designed as a 'guard dog' by Jeff Koons. According to Museum data the museum attracted over 20 million visits, created 5,000 jobs and €650 million in its first twenty years [5]; [6]. Few 'starchitect' schemes have replicated such indicators, notably Calatrava's 'City of Arts & Sciences' in Valencia overshot its €300 million budget by €1 billion which still affects the regional budget today. Finally many Guggenheim efforts to repeat the 'Bilbao Effect' from SoHo and Las Vegas to Berlin, Helsinki and Vilnius became stalled or shuttered.
Notable in Bilbao's relative success 'effect' was the related variety of its post-industrial commitment. Fig. 1 shows its first achievement in the Guggenheim, Euskalduna accompanied by the transformation of its 'Steel and Shipbuilding' riverine image after the opening in 2010 of the Norman Foster underground rail system with its popular 'Fosteritos' portals, the Calatrava Millennium Bridge, Cesar Pelli's Iberdrola Tower at Abandoibarra and Philippe Starck's Azkuna Zentroa Cultural Centre (2011). But the Zaha Hadid proposal for Zorrozaurre more than a dozen years ago, including another bank tower, this time for BBK, remains one of 30 of the partnership's unrealized redevelopment plans which were projected to revitalize an underutilized peninsula on the Nervión River in Bilbao's port area [7]. Meanwhile the Robert Stern Zubiarte retail mall was built on the banks of the Nervión and opened in 2015. Stern was one of 'starchitectural' critic Christopher Jencks' 'paper architects' whose designs were also often unbuilt and unbuildable. Moreover the late Ricardo Legoretta, from Mexico, whose style was influenced by the Basque master sculptor and architect Eduardo Chillida, completed his Melia Bilbao Hotel nearby in 2005.
Toronto's starchitect motivations were less desperate than Bilbao's successful postindustrial strategy that combined infrastructural, architectural and hospitality investment in an integrated, yet-to-be completed consumption envisioning, but also less needy than Denver's successful arrival on the map of urban cultural-creative spectacle. Toronto had become important as the national financial leader of Canada, displacing Montreal as the latter pursued a leadership role in the mid-twentieth century political campaign in support of independence for Quebec. The flight of financial HQs long-settled in Montreal ensued much as night leads to day. However, following a period of absorption of the banks and bankers, with their housing growth, enhanced salaries and Francophone consumption demands, Toronto's planners began to recognise their city remained culturally Anglophone with a culinary and creative offer to match. In 2020 Toronto received its greatest Fig. 2. Projected (Top) and Existing Starchitecture in Toronto disappointment when Google's Thomas Heatherwick-designed plan for a harbourside, 'smart neighbourhood' on twelve acres of waterside development by parent corporation Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, decided to shelve its Quayside project . This was for three reasons: first Google wanted ten times more space, of which the city government disapproved; second, it wanted to build a city as CEO Dan Doctoroff said, 'from the Internet up'. Predictably the deeper aim was to harvest visitor identities to sell to 'attention' advertisers without adhering to Canadian privacy laws; and third, it claimed Coronavirus had holed the proposed development below the waterline. Nevertheless, Toronto's established history of approving iconic architecture projects, going back to Frank Gehry's early project for the Art Gallery of Ontario (2004), Will Alsop's Ontario College of Art & Design (2004) and Gehry's later extension of AGO (2008) continues with big approvals for3XN's and Barney Ingels Group (BIG) partnership's condominium designs recently approved and under construction (Fig. 2). Ziggurats characterised the failed Quayside development, albeit clearly remaining fashionable for Bjarne Ingels' BIG and 3XN compared to the preceding more Cuboid and subsequent swirling forms Zaha Hadid era. However, perhaps the 'apotheosis of angular' is expressed in the celebrated internationally renowned 'Deconstructivist' architect Daniel Libeskind, after whom another art gallery and museum extension, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) was opened in 2007. Despite appearances the Libeskind design was relatively sustainable in nature. As [9] noted: these elements were included: '.......because Toronto had at the time a 'green' Mayor and city administration, the building is designed to the highest principles of sustainability. Thus it had a planted roof for insulation and relaxation; the building is double clad for high-grade insulation, with local Hamilton, Ontario, albeit energy-intensive, stainless steel framing, and maximum use of natural light.
However, Liebeskind has taken criticism for not demonstrating more overtly green credentials in ROM.' Accordingly, within the building's Crystal portal it was reported the roof had suffered from significant water leakage, causing concerns for the building's resilience to winter weather. Although a two-layer cladding system was incorporated into the design of the Crystal to prevent the formation of dangerous snow loads on the structure, past architectural creations of Daniel Libeskind (including the Denver Art Museum) had also suffered from weather-related complications. So it must be concluded that this neo-liberal 'starchitect' did not adhere to the highest 'green design aesthetics' at that time. So we may conclude this sub-section with an elegiac note. The neoliberal injunction to reflect and express competitive urban vanity, through narcissistic traits could disappoint owing to its architectural over-ambition. This partly fulfilled the criticism that 'starchitecture' often remained 'unbuilt or even unbuildable' and when built sometimes proved flawed or fallible and seldom prioritised sustainability or green principles in its design aesthetic.
If Toronto, even for its large population size (6 million Metro area; 3 million City) was once, if not bland, then not quite blossoming, its penchant for attracting starchitects has remained a firm desire despite occasional disappointments. Nevertheless all that highrise financial and commercial office building since the 1980s and 1990s has occasioned some problems of oversupply in the recent and ongoing current after the Covid-19 hiatus. As we have conjectured there has been, as in every main Western financial and commercial CBD and even subsidiary SBDs, a growing penchant by employees and even more employers than might have been expected to favour cutting out daily commutes, avoiding downtown pollution overload, de-stressing mobility anxiety and securing work-life rebalancing by increasingly working from home (WFH). This has -temporarily, or perhaps for longer than once thought credible -created ghost centres, bereft of commuters, shoppers and other visitors and causing reappraisal by property developers, city managers and bewildered downtown visitors regarding: what to do? Some sunk investments built by 'starchitects' are relatively immune since those in the key parts of the creative sector like museums and art galleries that are hoped likely not to be denuded of determined 'day-out' visitors, although other parts like cinemas, theatres, live music venues, nightclubs, hospitality and premium culinary destinations are largely unable to function under coronavirus conditions and their likely aftermath. Even when the pandemic is brought under some viable means of managed control and in the absence of recurrences either of Covid-19 or, worse, some complex new variant or novel virus re-use can be inferred. Especially in the voided space of the more vintage point-blocks and tired arcades, shopping centres or early retail malls, various forms of repurposing will be due. This is if they are not to feature on deadmall.com with miasma fogs traversing abandoned food courts and frogs spawning in the fountains, as observed at Akron's Rolling Acres 1975 opening, photographed in 2019 by urban explorers. Re-purposing by Amazon to turn the site into a massive 'fulfilment centre' after a decade was finally announced [10] as the first of two such rustbelt regeneration projects, the other being at Toledo. Clearly such 'robotic' fulfilment centres would scarcely re-populate the sites but rather automatically pick, pack and ship small items to customers such as books, electronics and toys.
In Canada, use of such spaces is being made by inventing and investing in 'agritecture' in older modernist edifices. What is agritecture? Agritecture concerns applying architectural thinking when designing agriculture for the built environment. It involves integrating the disciplines of agriculture and architecture to facilitate building use or re-use for growing food. Agritecture is a web journal which has provided news on urban agriculture, vertical farming, greenhouses, and local food systems since 2011. Meanwhile, its Vertical Farming Academy educates ways in which agritecture can operate within any building (indoor vertical farming) to maximize the density of growing or without it (living walls and rooftop farms). This allows advantages of urban microclimates to be realised in or outside of city buildings [11] (Al-Kodmany, 2018). Accordingly, it challenges the hegemony of industrial scale agriculture by promoting food production in urban, local and neighbourhood environments. Vertical farming involves growing crops in vertically stacked layers in empty spaces and rooms inside high-rise buildings, shipping containers, tunnels and usable, albeit abandoned plant. Such farming is usually aimed at optimising productivity using soilless or low water absorbent farming by techniques such as hydroponics, aquaponics and aeroponics. In combination with the use of LED lights, agritecture can achieve yields of ten times conventional cropping. Energy sources and use would be expected to be renewable and organic, though without free infrastructure costs (e.g. abandonment) it can be more expensive than, for example greenhouse production. Conversely, it is not weather-prone, does not require fallowing and has no chemical fertilizer costs. Accordingly no ecosystem disruption occurs.
When Toronto began to attract Montreal's financial centre as an effect of Quebec's rising demand for independence in the 1970s-80s the city's economy was simultaneously suffering the effects of the oil embargo and related uncertainties. As elsewhere, a move to respond by experimenting with domestic and community self-sufficiency was realised in Montreal accompanied by a public and private fascination with urban agricultural solutions. This was expressed in early attempts at a shortlived community gardens programme which began as early as 1972. A year later a further initiative arose from a McGill University architecture programme which entailed construction of rooftop greenhouse farming from cheap, recycled materials. A related initiative was named the Rooftop Wasteland experiment. Vertical gardens were first re-purposed when Pierre Bourque was made Director of Montreal Botanical Garden in 1979. (Source: [12]) By 2011 McGill University's Edible Campus (Fig. 4), begun in 2007, had shown agritecture could involve volunteer citizens from various backgrounds in creating, cultivating, harvesting, and maintaining a productive community space. During the growing season, this garden produced over one tonne of fresh organic produce for the Santropol Roulant's (Meals on Wheels) programme that supplied food to 100 Montréalers on a daily basis. Also in 2007 (small) containerization farming gained momentum from McGill projects evolving from Montréal's Urban Gardens programme (Fig. 4). These use semi-hydroponics, supported with training courses on container-based organic gardening. This success led to the Rooftop Wilderness (formerly Wasteland) practice involving gardens being designed on top of urban expressways, public buildings and hotels where two commercial firms -Lula Farms and Fairmount Hotels -service chefs gardens that are now common in hotels in the city [12].
The stimulus of Montréal's historical development of urban agriculture in the 1970s influenced more top-down practice in Toronto some time afterwards [13]. In 2009 Toronto instituted its first Green Roof By-law whereby all new buildings (commercial, residential, institutional), had to have have a green roof once they were over a specific size. Industrial buildings were added to the list in 2012. In Fig. 5 this contribution shows an innovative (Source: N. Cyprys) vertical farm in downtown Toronto, repurposed from a military tank warehouse. The firm We the Roots was a 2017 spinout from nearby Guelph University's Controlled Environment Systems Research Facility whose Space and Advanced Life Support System project researched food cultivation in hostile environments e.g. without an atmosphere, as on Mars; using complex hydroponics and LED lighting. The company grows top-end herbs, salad greens, rucola and kale for five Toronto restaurants. Hitherto Californian suppliers took four days to deliver while the firm takes less than four hours for shipment. Qualityto-cost innovation has expanded LED luminescence tenfold in twenty years. Meanwhile customised LED bulbs are priced at 20 cents compared to $8 then. Accordingly, what were high energy costs have disappeared from such agritecture settings. Similarly inspired by a future market for food-in-space, Elevate Farms practised high-tech food cultivation indoors that nowadays saves energy and aims at improving food security and safety. [13] reported Ontario's Greenbelt Foundation identified vertical farming as a priority to expand fruit and vegetable growth in the region and listed six vertical farms operating in Ontario (not including Elevate Farms): one in Kingsville, two in Guelph, and three in Toronto. The McCain Foods Corporation in 2021 announced it had invested $US50 million in hydroponics vertical farm TruLeaf alongside its McCain subsidiary GoodLeaf already in Guelph. All grow leafy greens, herbs, and microgreens (such as kale). Elevate's premises used 450 sq. metres as growing space from an 1860 sq. m. facility on an industrial estate. Plants are stacked 13 layers high (about 7.5 metres) and grow with their roots in water, rather than soil. The aim is to grow 454,000 kilos per year from an overall 3,000 sq. metres box. On the downside, most current cultivation involves growing lettuce or some variation on a salad green that has marginal nutritional value. Other popular produce, such as fruits and legumes, take more time to grow and require more nutrition. It is perceived that that artificial-intelligence (AI) should bring step-change for vertical farms, allowing growers to work more efficiently and precisely, thereby opening up more horticultural possibilities. As a case in point, yet another salad greens business Uplift used PlantKeeper, a proprietary indoor farming management system, to control and monitor environmental factors so farm operators can be updated with real-time growing conditions throughout the farm. By using simple and proven robotics and conveyor systems, Uplift automated seeding, transplanting, harvesting, plant transporting and system cleaning, reducing labour intensity to its lowest [14].
Finally, It is worth bearing in mind that, while Vertical Farms have been planned as shown in Fig. 6. They are outweighed, unsurprisingly, by low rise and even rooftop gardens. The oversold idea of Toronto's ambitious Skyfarm 58-storey Agritower designed by architect Gordon Graff remained at proposal-only stage, as indeed were most registered in the first decades of this century. Fig. 6 updates Pyramid Farm guru Dickson Despommier's now dated effort which, nevertheless includes then actually existing vertical farms [15]. These were: South Korea's 3-storey 'grow lights' facility; Japan's Kyoto 50+ Nuvege peri-domestic 'half-lights/half-sunlight' units; Singapore's Sky Greens 4-storey sunlight-fuelled facility; Chicago's The Plant 3-storey 'grow lights' plant; Chicago's FarmedHere 'grow lights' unit; and Vancouver's 4-storey Alterrus 'sunlight' building (bankrupted in 2014). Some of the above occur in Fig. 6. Al-Kodmany, 2018) So it is clear from the above data that the early history of vertical farming has been particularly fraught the higher the facility selected to house the agricultural holding in question rose above ground level and a little higher. Notably, rooftop gardens of which there are many more commercial versions than listed in the data supplied, have a good record but not as impressive as low-rise holdings, or as in the case of Kyoto with over 50 units. On the other hand, recent legislation, energy cost declines and technological change have seen numerous concentrations occurring in Toronto and other large cities very recently. Hence, learning gains have enabled access to investment finance for industrial units capable of housing 7-10 metre cultivation stacks. Developments in current or repurposed older accommodation in industrial zones are more common than high-rise if still sporadic. An example of another unheralded Toronto success has been the Ripple Farms start-up that specialises in aquaponics in an adaptively re-used shipping container at the former Evergreen Brickworks [16].

Summary of
To round off this sub-section, we remain in Canada and explore Vancouver's experiences of vertical farming, or even low-rise examples since, as we have seen, so far Vancouver's Alterrus high rise effort suffered early bankruptcy only two years' after its founding in 2014. Accordingly, the City of Vancouver was substantially indebted as a consequence of its investment. We begin in Vancouver partly because it has possibly more vertical farming equipment firms than actual farms. Hence we begin with actually-existing Valcent Products; innovator of the Verticrop hydroponic innovative system using a technology derivative of vertical farming and operating fully-functionally. The system involves multi-level stacked plastic trays in a climate-controlled glasshouse enclosure (rather than multiple floors). The firm claims its vertical hydroponic farming technology can produce over an area of one standard residential lot (50 by 75 feet) the equivalent output of a 16-acre farm [17]. But following that account, east Vancouver's first vertical farm -Local Garden -announced bankruptcy in May 2017 five years after being announced as North America's first Verticrop farm. Moreover, aeroponic, closed-loop Harvest Urban Farms deployed high-tech Valoya LED lighting but it failed to save the firm from bankruptcy. Vancouver Urban Farming Society data states the city went from 15 farms in 2013 to nine in 2019, since updated to the current number of farms at eight, after another was shuttered in 2020 [18]. The tally stands in stark contrast to the goals laid out in Vancouver's 'Greenest City Action Plan', which aimed to reach 35 urban farms by 2020. There seem to be multiple teething troubles with liberal-seeming new by-laws enabling change of downtown land use to urban farming. But such by-laws are, ironically, claimed to be 'bureaucratic' while costs of repurposing urban farm requirements in the city centre, and associated infrastructure costs for hydroponics and such like, are excessive. Finally, nearly every Vancouver, and many other vertical farmers, while pursuing local market freshness and delivery, is in exactly the same over-specialised market niche selling salads and leafy greens that nutritionists report are not particularly nourishing. Accordingly, it is one thing to have diversification down the supply network to local growers but according to [18] they find the city centre uneconomic. So some have either been encouraged by the City to move out to cheaper, post-industrial premises elsewhere or move out to more rural settings in British Columbia. Finally, of eight kinds of urban farming listed by [19] only two, namely 'Expansive urban agriculture (including backyard and rooftop farming)' and possibly 'Covered urban agriculture (greenhouses and rooftops)' have been deemed likely to thrive in city centres. Those that may still appear possible candidates for exponential growth due to economic drivers, would as we have noted, probably gravitate to the fringes of cities and thus constitute forms of peri-urban, rather than urban, agriculture.

After Over-specialisation in Vertical Salad Greens, can Parkitecture Save City Abandonment?
Despite the rather downbeat assessment of the prospects for vertical farming based on our selected cases from awake and apparently forward-thinking, sustainability-informed city administrations in Canada, it fits a 'pattern recognition' interpretation of a likely scenario for abandoned zones. Such are parts of cities hitherto traditionally populated with retail malls, office villages and skyscrapers that some see as candidates for a revived urban agriculture. The first pattern element is that -unsurprisingly -although land rents charged by property developers have been forced down by failing retail chains, they nevertheless remain extortionately high compared with agricultural land values.
Quite why this might have escaped the notice of urban pioneers and sympathetic city administrations is rather difficult to understand. Not least, the penny should have dropped when many cities in, for example the UK, confronted with swingeing cuts in their budgets from austerity anxiety imposed by global finance upon a willing central state administration, spent irresponsibly to buy uneconomic shopping malls. This was in the unfounded belief that municipal budget cuts could be indemnified by becoming retail landlords. Such wishful thinking resulted in at least twenty cases of egregious loss of local financial control as reported below:  [20] Below, in Fig. 7 is shown the kind of empty office block purchased by Spelthorne in Reading, which might easily have been a candidate for vertical farming in a different universe. In UK it remained empty but with a notional value entered in the audited municipal assets account. Accordingly, Thames Tower in Reading was one of the properties bought by Spelthorne council as part of a £285 million deal in August 2018. By 2021 another UK council had voted to demolish the town centre it had previously purchased for £14 million in 2019. This is the 'pioneering' shopping centre that will be demolished in 2022 to make way for a twenty-thousand square metre park with forestry, sculpture and other art installations. Vacancy rates in the town had risen to three times the UK average, influenced by online consumer retail and a surplus of retail units in need of repair or too large to make a substantial profit. The onset of Covid-19 further contributed to the plight of Stockton's high street, as experienced by many others throughout the UK. Fig. 8 indicates the scale and composition of the proposed Riverside Park and associated installations planned for the former Castlegate Shopping Centre. Designed by convicted architect John Poulson, the Castlegate opened in 1972.  Moving on, the narrative of the final parts of this sub-section consists of three main vignettes revealing design thinking about visible problems of city centres suffering retail and office abandonment, pollution from noxious energy and mobility sources, particularly oil-reliant vehicles and domestic wood-burning stoves, and 'overtourism'. This is prevalent in signature destination cities like Paris, London and Milan and cultural cities like Venice, Florence and Barcelona. What each of these diverse cities has in common is the will to de-congest, clean-up or make more healthy their environment by replacing polluting mobility sources with landscaped, natural, even wild central city parkland. The first comprehensive plan to achieve this for the core of a major destination city is that announced in 2021 for Paris. This plan is led by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo with architect Philippe Chiambaretta who announced the council's approval that the centre of the city from Place Concorde through Champs Élysées to the Champ de Mars beneath the Eiffel Tower was to become an 'extraordinary park at the heart of Paris'. This would return Grenelle, as the 'Mars Field' was once known, closer to its original use for market gardening. Despite its modest fertility, citizen allotments were cultivated with fruit, vegetables and flowers for the local market. Later it became a military parade ground and site of an artificial mountain topped by 'a tree of liberty' as designed by artist J-L David for the Revolutionary 'Festival of the Supreme Being' before hosting five Grand Expositions from 1867-1937 with the Eiffel Tower built as the entrance to the 1889 World's Fair. The French 'Sun King' decreed the construction of the Champs Élysées and commissioned the celebrated royal gardener André Le Nôtre to transform marshy land also used for vegetable gardens into an extension of the Tuileries gardens leading from his palace at today's Louvre Museum. It connects with the Place de la Concorde through existing parkland at the 'Beaux Arts' Large, Small and Discovery Palaces. Despite the tourist guide eulogies stressing the area's luxury retail offer, including top car showrooms on the Champs Élysées, Anne Hidalgo's architect Chiambaretta's judgement was that it needed to be 'ecological, desirable and exclusive' not suffer ongoing problems of 'pollution, the place of the car, tourism and consumerism' [21]. Plans are to be implemented following the Olympic Games, scheduled for 2024. Further plans also apply to the Trocadéro-Eiffel Tower road being turned into a garden, landscaping the Montparnasse Tower and the Notre-Dame Cathedral. Public consultation over what should be done with the avenue occurred at the council's 'Comité Champs Élysée' invitation. Accordingly, the 10-year plans include reducing space for vehicles by half, turning roads into pedestrian and green areas, and creating tunnels of trees to improve air quality. This complements the Jardin des Plantes that was refurbished in central Paris near Gare d'Austerlitz on the Left Bank of the Seine in 1993.
It is notable that adding to urban parkland to control car pollution is recent experimental practice from Utrecht to Vienna where urban villages are planned for between 4,000-12,000 inner-city residents influenced by Anne Hidalgo's 'City of Light' policy idea of the 'Fifteen Minute City' [22] or revived 'Quarters' [23] where residents can limit distant travel from their newly sustainable communities. Location of the new superblock near Vienna's main railway station offers optimal connections to the public transport network via rapid transit and underground railway. The Vienna Aspangründe master plan was prepared by Austrian Real Estate, SUPERBLOCK Architect Office and developed together with Yewo Landscapes, an Austrian office specialised in landscape planning. The 'Superblock' concept was originated in Barcelona by the Catalan architect Ildefons Cerdà, designer of its nineteenth century Eixample city extension (Fig. 10). The original superblocks are now being repurposed as Superilles comprising nine city blocks, or illes, in which the internal traffic flows have been altered to disallow through traffic, with speed limits on internal roads reduced. Today, Barcelona is 'greening' its superilles at the behest of its in-house parks and gardens agency with wildflower meadows, new parkland surrounding the Sagrada Familia cathedral, and horticultural pavement grill-rings beneath its trees in its Alcorques Vivos scheme [24]. A recent study of the health, wellbeing and pollution-reduction gain of Barcelona's greening plan estimated its implementation of the effects upon the 503 'superblocks' in the comprehensive plan could prevent 667 premature deaths annually. Additional gains could be expected from the plan's economic impact of €1.7 billion with average gains in life expectancy of almost 200 days due to reductions in harmful urban pollutants [25]. (Source: Alamy) Another architect advocating conservation of heritage cityscapes and abandoned villages by repurposing empty buildings is Stefano Boeri which, unlike Chiambaretta's lateral perspective, envisages and designs 'Bosco Verticale' or the 'Vertical Forest' as a prototype building for a new format of architectural biodiversity. This focuses not only on human beings but also on the relationship between humans and other living species. The first example, built in Milan in the Porta Nuova area, consists of two towers that are respectively 80 and 112 metres high, housing a total of 800 trees, 15,000 perennials and ground covering plants and 5,000 shrubs. These provide an amount of vegetation equivalent to 30,000 square metres of woodland and undergrowth, concentrated on 3,000 square metres of urban surface. This 'green curtain' regulates humidity, produces oxygen and absorbs CO2 and microparticles. The towers typically display large, ziggurat balconies, designed to accommodate outside containers and allow the growth of larger trees for up to three floors of each building. The towers are serviced by a team of 'Flying Gardeners', a specialised team of arborists-climbers who, using mountaineering techniques, descend from the roof of the buildings once a year to carry out pruning and annual maintenance. Some 1,600 specimens of birds and butterflies have been observed in the resulting habitat. Since this achievement Boeri has also championed the process whereby Italian hilltop village mayors have sold abandoned village dwellings for as little as €1 to city dwellers who now prefer working from home (WFH) while enjoying fresh air and cheap property as better than uncontrolled new construction in heritage [26]. Finally, among destination cities London has recently announced the repurposing of the Camden Highline railway as a limited copy of New York's High Line which transformed a disused railway into an overground pedestrian parkway planted prairie-style as designed by the Jacob Corner partnership with landscape gardener Piet Oudolf (Fig. 11). Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf is considered the most influential garden designer of the past 25 years admired for the peace and tranquility of his 'dream landscapes' of soft grasses and fourseason garden beds. Fig. 11. Piet Oudolf's High Line garden parkway in downtown New York City (Source: Rick Darke) Finally, in brief recollection of Robespierre's artificial mountain topped by 'a tree of liberty' as designed by artist J-L David for the Revolutionary 'Festival of the Supreme Being' on Champs de Mars in 1794, we turn to London's plan, designed by Dutch firm MVRDV for an artificial hill to be built alongside the Marble Arch. This is an attempt to persuade absent shoppers to return to London's once-premier shopping attraction Oxford Street. It is intended as a 25 metre high viewpoint planned to open on July 21, 2021 opposite London's miniature Arc de Triomphe. It will be constructed using scaffolding, which will form a hollow base upon which layers of plywood and soil will then be laid. The soil will be used to grow grass across the structure, while also holding large planters that will be filled with trees. Once complete, it will resemble MVRDV's abandoned proposal for the 2004 Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park, which was designed as an artificial mountain around the Serpentine Gallery but never realised due to costs. Since the Serpentine Gallery's pavilion programme began in 2000, the gallery has built a temporary new structure on its lawn in Kensington Gardens every year except 2004. Each Pavilion is completed within six months and is situated on the Gallery's lawn for three months for public approbation of designers who never before received UK commissions. Starchitects accepting include Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Toyo Ito, Oscar Niemeyer, Rem Koolhas, Olafur Eliasson, Frank Gehry, SANAA, Jean Nouvel, Piet Oudolf, Ai Weiwei, Herzog & De Meuron, and Bjarke Ingels. This listing takes our journey from 'Starchitecture' right through 'Agritecture' to finally reaching 'Parkitecture' in a concept from complexity theory known as 'Strange Attractors'. A strange attractor is a mathematical field in dynamical systems, which after any of various numbers of iterations, will lead to points that are arbitrarily far apart. However some -like Olafur Eliasson and Piet Oudolf , both involved in designing the High Line -after various other numbers of iterations can lead to points that are arbitrarily close together. Thus a dynamic system with a chaotic attractor is locally unstable yet globally stable. For as [27] wrote: '….By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by travelling; namely, the strange," [27].

Conclusions
Having introduced, not the 'Eyes on the Street' Jane I. Jacobs, but the other Jane M. Jacobs in the title of this contribution as well as Jean Gottmann in the Abstract, it is now time to call on their help to tie the main strands of the article together. Our analysis suggests that with the attenuation in demand for downtown skyscrapers the age of the starchitect has reached a temporary if not permanent hiatus. A sign of the future may be glimpsed in Skidmore Owings & Merrill's Hudson Yards complex which is adorned by a brass 'Vessel' designed by timber designer Thomas Heatherwick and contains only two main skyscraper towers but a massive cultural edifice on wheels named 'The Shed'. It is the first LEED Gold Leaf Neighbourhood in Manhattan with the centrepiece of a large, landscaped esplanade framed by a double phalanx of medium-rise office and residential blocks culminating in two super high-rise and one mezzanine towers, a retail pavilion and a shopping mall anchored by a Neiman Marcus store. But more surprisingly, it contains 14 acres of public open space. The Kohn, Pedersen & Fox (KPF) tower is LEED certified and no cars are to be seen, only a subway station, two Long Island Rail Road stations, pavilions and promenades above the entry to Penn Station and associated railyards. The 5 acres of gardens and public plazas on the site's Eastern Yard were designed with Heatherwick Studio as an 'immersive' and varied horticultural experience. It displays over 28,000 plants and includes over 200 mature trees, woodland plants and perennial gardens. The southern edge features a Pavilion Grove filled with a shade canopy of native trees while to the north is a birch grove and a new entrance to the High Line. While hardly 'Bosco Verticale,' echoes of Stefano Boeri are heard in its native perennial gardens and wildflower patches that attract migratory birds and pollinators. Pedestrians may experience paths lined with nearly a mile of garden seating walls and no cars. As even Jane I. Jacobs might have put it, this being the largest private real estate development in US history it is surely a 'Big Thing'.
The notion of 'Big Things' in cultural geography is a way of trying to come to terms with scale in the built environment and how it expresses something of the age it appears in, which can be a admission of failure, as some 'big projects' like the abandoned and even demolished or burnt out housing schemes like London's death-trap Grenfell Tower, shopping centres and office towers of a once 'modernising' era represent. Even Hudson Yards represented the failure of New York to win the 2012 Olympics for which the site had once been earmarked, hence its availability for skyscrapers. Skyscrapers are clearly 'Big Things' in the urban landscape, seldom seen in rural settings or much in suburbia. They thus initially represented a change from manufacturing to information processing, 'frictionless' movement, trust in technology, hierarchical management (the C-suite), phallocentric design, and the monetisation of space. Gottmann noted that skyscrapers were only critiqued in his Soviet Union homeland where they were condemned as a symbol of 'excessive capitalist greed'. Noticeably, Moscow's were not centralised like Manhattan but strung out as 'the Seven Sisters' along the ring-road, albeit some were administrative, others apartments and hotels and the tallest was the Moscow State University. Khruschev in 1955 condemned them as 'architectural excesses' and decreed their expense unacceptable in future. If anything they have remained universal icons of 'Big Power' narcissism, especially since the onset of the 'Attention' economy that monetises 'celebrity' amongst architects, bankers, tech entrepreneurs, who join 'pop royalty' as status symbols for their 'innovative' expressions of 'self'. Such targets were lured to support urban boosters to spend public money excessively in their desire to wish reality away. 'Starchitecture' was the apotheosis of this 'cult image' shared among urban narcissists [28]. The questions of interest here have been: is 'starchitecture' on the way out in the face of urban abandonment occasioned by the financial, climatic and pandemic crises? Have these widely presumed -togetherto have undermined 'Big Things', 'Big Thinking' and urban excess? A further question is: can such starchitectural 'cult objects' as represented, be seen to give rise to 'Agritecture' as a novel replacement for offices and malls, whether designed by 'starchitects or not? The final question is: are central cities as defined by retail malls and office complexes likely to be replaced by a newly discovered 'greening' of downtown city space to attract visitors, shoppers and workers back after these omni-crises pass?
The interim conclusions are reasonably clear. In answer to the first pair of questions; judged by the experience of Hudson Yards as a case in point and even the failed efforts of the techno-entrepreneurial 'smart city' apostles, provided there is money, narcissistic desire and the urban vanity to warrant it, means 'starchitecture' can easily mutate by accommodation to the 'sustainable city' agenda. Moreover, it can easily adjust to the replacement of iconic built spaces in newly developing schemes by facilitating mini-prairies of horticultural planting incorporating domesticated or wilder native species and parlaying the cost in further levels of iconic high-rise floorspace. What seems to be true, from the accounts extracted that many investments already made in Canadian cities have disappointed. These were widely presented as having invented vertical farming or Agritecture to replace and repurpose abandoned downtown retail and high-rise office accommodation with purposeful 'urban food strategies' but much former optimism has been replaced by the cold-bath of realism. Three things seem for now to have mitigated this dream: first, even though fairly generous public funding was available to augment private investment in such re-purposing, it is horrendously expensive to equip existing buildings with hightech hydroponics, aquaponics or aeroponics equipment for vertical farming; second, it is surprising how narrowly vertical farm production was defined by numerous instances of salad-based horticulture, all chasing the same urban customer with much the same not especially nutritious side-dish. This resulted in many short-term bankruptcies, which will likely persist until vertical farming broadens its offer, but in turn requiring more costly equipment in all probability. However, some will probably survive but for the moment as a marginal pursuit in the urban economy. Finally, what of 'Parkitecture'? This seems to have a good chance if , as currently predicted 'Big Things' will be required to replace the parts of the 'skyscraper and shopping mall' model that has prevailed in many cities for the past fifty years and more. The signs from large cities like Paris, New York, London, Milan and Barcelona and much smaller, local centres like Stockton are propitious. Such municipal authorities have been made aware that cars, pollution, congestion and 'overtourism' have reached 'peak discomfort' in the face of online shopping, 'working from home' and re-balancing the work-life relationship. The flight to the suburbs and beyond in pursuit of fresh air, home or garden office space, community life and no or lightlyblended commuting, mean that cities will perforce depend increasingly on the talents of 'star' parkitects like Piet Oudolf, Stefano Boeri and mayors like Anne Hidalgo to encourage the 'new suburbanites' to venture back downtown to see the prairie planting.