We have beautiful ways of living within the Earth ecosystem—“radical green-feral” returns to unsettled landscapes for a very few, sustainable eco-vills with yards of edibles and gardens and sophisticated yet energy-producing habitats for some, and sustainable townships with unsettled corridors. They offer ways forward out of our existing separable strategies and challenge our unrealized models of dystopian dark cities and utopian luminous cities devoid of organics. There is no way we can design cities that integrate with Earth nor apply our green technology on a grand enough scale without really looking beyond our sense of the city as post-natural.
FACING REAL ENVIRONMENTAL dilemmas in the post-industrial city, all of these models are designed from the perspective that the city primarily as inorganic and artificial and a qualitatively different order from the ecological order of the non-human. To minimize its intrusion for both human life and the larger Earth ecosystem, urban environmental design stresses the invention of mechanistic technologies. An “ecological city” that is an expression of nature is an oxymoron. The best that can be hoped for in urban environmental design is ecologically sensitive, or an accommodation to the demands from nature. The city can compensate for environmental damage but it can never aspire to be environmentally optimal. In fact, cities can be anticipated to inescapably degrade the larger Earth ecosystem as well as the environmental quality of the city itself.
Cities are anticipated to grow and to produce an ever-increasing ecological footprint that has already moved degrading environmental feedback to a serious public health concern that causes human mortality in developing countries and diminishes both quality and public health in all cities. Begrudgingly, the great work of this era will have to address the global environmental impact of the city with the expectation that this will set human progress back. Environmental pressures will place further restrictions on modern human actions rather than optimize modern life. And so “environment” continues to be sensed to be synonymous with “problem” that diverts attention from human development rather than an opportunity. The city-form is perceived to be subject to ecological pressures but is no longer creatural or “natural.” Because of the way that we have perceived the nature of the city, it would seem that the best we could hope for would to become more environmentally sensitive, but never authentically ecological, because we do not see the city as an ecological process, and the city is not going away.
To consider any possibility that the city could become an oasis for human and non-human life seems to be fantasy. And the possibility that the city may be performing functional environmental aspects seems illusory. And yet, we are beginning to see adaptive environmental features that had not been anticipated that challenge a sense of the city as separate from nature and as being only an intrusion.
When we go to an unsettled landscape, especially a remote terrain that we have traditionally called a wilderness, we sense these unbuilt terrains offering, as Sigurd Olson writes, a “listening point” or an “open horizon.”[i] The city landscape offers an open horizon and is essentially James Carse’s “infinite game,” like other Earth ecosystems that we will eventually acknowledge as our eco-literacy expands. However, characteristics that open our awareness in remote landscapes are masked to a strong degree by our familiarity in settled landscapes.
Richard Register’s following statements offer a starting point that challenges us to think about the city in a new way when we try to enhance environmental quality. He suggests that a city is an ecological event rather than a mechanistic product. Register writes,[ii]
In many ways, cities are the main things we human beings build.
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And yet, the way cities are built, the logic of their internal functions and their connections with resources and natural environments are virtually ignored.
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–they’re not seen as potentially whole, living organisms.
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....even many conscientious environmentalists...fail to see the great creative, social, cultural, even spiritual good that cities can facilitate....[We] give up...because of the sheer scale of the task....we have lost confidence in the idea that we can shape our own destiny. In any case, with the exception of war, there is not issue more important for the future of our species than making cities ecologically healthy.
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The city must gather people for some worthwhile reasons or it would not persevere these hundreds, even thousands, of years.
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If we can build cities with millions of acres of concrete and asphalt, 100 story buildings, giant metallic insects and mysterious remote control communications, then we can build anything–even a healthy, exciting, vital future replete with cities that serve both people and nature.
Register introduces the possibility of looking positively and organically at the city as well as looking positively at our capability to meet the environmental challenges that increasing urbanization will present. Before taking a step, the vision is important. This revisioning was done to some extent in Curitiba, Brazil, demonstrating large-scale people-positive and Earth-positive change. But Register is going further than general environmental considerations by examining the fundamental ecological nature of the city. And as we increasingly do in our modern measures, Register suggests that the city-form itself is fundamentally ecological, which is to say natural and organic.
Migration toward the city can be seen everywhere on Earth. Rather than isolation from nature, urbanization offers an adaptive response to provide habitat for a global human population of billions. And as migrants to the city in a now peopled Earth, a new experience of residency occurs. Residency requires an overall process of integration rather than exploitation that works when pioneers can move on to new resources. With increasing adaptation to residency, the rate of population growth begins to decrease. Other adaptive features begin to “fall like dominos,” but occur only very gradually. Rather than a monolithic terrain, the city begins to reveal a natural metabolism and a diversity of niches for both human and nonhuman life. These occurrences and others begin to provoke an emerging sense of the possibility that the city is “alive.”
All other ecologically oriented models for transforming contemporary human life begin from the posture of the city as separate from nature. They form a continuum of response ranging from design to abandon the city for a return to nature, or to be rewilded to recovery a lost nature, or to continue to remain separate.
Quite distinct, the living city is a view of the city as nature, as never having been separated from nature, and as an ongoing adaptive response to the changing conditions of existence of the larger Earth ecosystem, and as an expression of the Earth. The city transforms to habitat and to natural ecosystem. The living city begins to emerge as an ecological response that is already occurring within the most separable, intrusive city. The urban landscape offers a listening point for a new naturalist—an urbanologist—where heretofore there was a hard inorganic wall.
[ii] From “EcoCities, Making cities sustainable is a crucial challenge,” pp. 1-2, [in www.context.org/ICLIB/IC08/Register.htm reprint].
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