THE INTEGRATION OF the city-form into larger Earth ecosystem is beginning to be driven by a vision of an inclusive environmentalism due to the environmental impact not only on general public health but also on economic development. The vision of the living city will come from a broader base rather than from traditional environmentalists who describe the city as unnatural. Regional and national agencies will become increasingly more important to address, for example, climate and energy with a strong urban emphasis. Most importantly, environmentalism will shift from a disease model to a health model and draw strongly from the broad health community. And as a health model, the general public will become more engaged since everyone has a stake in the health of the community, and may not have felt that the environmental problem was their problem. The focus of health will be on optimizing rather than restricting human activity.
This overall vision is beginning to swallow dialectics of culture against nature and envision continuums of naturalness based on both deconstructive and integrative functions. Seeming a critic of environmentalism, urbanization will more intentionally drive environmentalism as it has always done in an unrecognized way, rather than repress it as we have erroneously assumed. Legislation, research, green technology and even environmental advocacy will continue to be primarily urban phenomena that attends to both the immanent urban landscape and the surrounding landscape, and regional and global meta-communities of ecosystems.
The “environmental Brahmins” of the living city, the “go-to people,” will include regional and urban planners and landscape designers and architects and “urbanologists” who will be both professional and non-professional advocates. Highly regulatory in nature, urban and regional planning provides a key intentional platform for optimizing human ecology. Design imperatives that incorporate design elements to optimize living cities can guide regulatory requirements that optimize integration into the larger regional and Earth ecosystems rather than reactively lessen selected environmental qualities such as water and atmosphere and land use that are of direct economic value.
The longstanding research focus for urban planners will continue to be on long-term urban change, landscape modeling, land use evolution, urban green space and urban nonhuman habitat. But the focus will shift to the increased cultivation of ecological qualities that optimize human life. Interestingly, designers/planners may not simply be limited to urban civil servants and community professionals and advocates from the general public.
Professional ecologists who become involved in urban problems will emerge. There will be more environmental specialists who, for example, monitor microbial changes and chemical changes to regulate sources of pollution. New bio-economies will also favor and promote attention to the natural dynamics of the city. Wildlife biologists will be important as reconciliation ecologists, and eco-villages and farms will offer alternative technology models that can be adapted to the city as well as a habitat option. The differences between rural and urban will shrink as they interpenetrate one another from both directions rather than one-way intrusion from the city.
Perhaps the most avant-garde source of eco-urbanologists will come from an impossible place, from a longstanding source of environmental degradation—the corporation. Superficially, corporate eco-designers who have large resources and global access will increasingly direct resources toward the unsettled landscape. But global urbanization is provoking a much more dramatic transformation of the fundamental nature of the economy that will transform the corporation from an industrial based economy to a ecologically based economy or “bio-economy” focused on “environmental care.” Corporations are subject to the demands of the Earth and will need to transform their extractive strategies due to declining global resources for their own sustainability. A transformation to an eco-based economy is no longer an issue of acting in the interests of others at the expense of self-interest to, for example, reduce their harsh degradation of the unbuilt global landscape and human enterprise in developing countries as described, for example, by Joshua Karliner in The Corporate Planet.[i]
In Hot, Flat, and Crowded,[ii] Thomas Friedman argues that environmental innovation is the future face of industry. He suggests that environmental innovation will not be some small benevolent nod to environmental concerns. Specifically, corporations that develop innovative, clean energy technology will become central global economic forces and surpass and shrink the current centrality of the fossil energy base. Rather than remain a problem, environmental concerns become so central that they may transform to an opportunity. It is not an absence of capability that limits this corporate innovation, but rather a lack of “green government” that can provide the impetus through funding, tax incentives, and environmental standards. Examples of government support are present in some European countries.
Similarly, in an earlier transformational article that revisions the directive for corporations, Stuart Hart writes, “…environmental opportunities might actually become a major resource of revenue growth.” Hart argues, “…environmental strategy consists largely of piecemeal projects aimed at preventing pollution. Focusing on sustainability requires putting business strategies to a new test.”[iii] For example, if design attends to design-for-disassembly, then high quality components can be recycled in new products, and products-in-use may become a part of a corporation’s asset base. This “adaptive reuse” describes salvage and recycling that can be applied to initial design.
Hart describes the need for a “vision of sustainability for an industry or a company” and not just for a city, and he suggests that it is positive for the enterprises as “a road map into the future, showing the way products and services must evolve and what new competencies will be needed to get there.”[iv] He concludes that “Like it or not, the responsibility for ensuring a sustainable world falls largely on the shoulders of the world’s enterprises, the economic engines of the future.”[v]
Corporations and smaller businesses will increasingly shift innovation toward environmental services and products or bio-economies because this shift will be the direction that future industrialization will take. Stuart Hart writes, “Corporations are the only organizations with the resources, the technology, the global reach, and, ultimately, the motivation to achieve sustainability.”[vi] Corporations can purchase land, fund large projects and “green” their property and product design and manufacturing as well as green their processes of resource extraction and transportation.
[i] Joshua Karliner, The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1997.
[ii] Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—
and How It Can Renew America. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.
[iii] Stuart Hart, 1997, pp. 68 and 71 respectively.
[iv] Stuart Hart, 1997, p. 73.
[v] Stuart Hart, 1997, p. 76.
[vi] Stuart Hart, “Beyond greening: Strategies for a sustainable world,” Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb, 1997, 67-76, p. 67 [Reprint 97105].
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