What Is A "Living City?"

The following offers very general considerations for an urban design strategy 

rather than a "meat-and-bones" description:

First and foremost, a living city is a natural ecosystem rather than an artificial environment.  It is ecologically alive, and it exists as an effort to adapt to the changing conditions of existence that all ecosystems within the larger Earth ecosystem.

The city-form is sensed to have emerged as a natural adaptation to the conditions of existence that all ecosystems within the larger Earth ecosystem face.  The living city begins from the posture that all human life and all human activity, including the most contemporary activity, occurs in a biospheric and cosmic wilderness that continues to design it.  A vision of the living city comes from application of both scientific understanding and the experience of degrading environmental feedback rather than from beliefs.  It is a vision that challenges popular beliefs of the city as a livable or sustainable, yet having a separable and artificial/cultural “metabolism.”  The creatural aspects of human life are recognized as central, with psychological and cultural dimensions reflecting this priority.  Regardless of how hard or mechanistic a city might appear the living city is ecologically “alive,” and approached as a natural “habitat” rather than as an artificial, built landscape.

 

Important for intentional design, all internal functions, including activities that seem environmentally destructive, are approached as natural and ecological.  The task is to approach activities as either continuing to be ecologically adaptive or not.  Rather than the city-form itself, activities that might have been adaptive in the past may reflect a strategy of separation that is no longer successful in a peopled Earth.  Continuing to envision the city and uninhabited ecosystems such as forests as mutually exclusive reflects a design strategy of separation.  Ongoing creation is an overriding dynamic that the living city aspires to express, with adaptability to the ongoing creation being the general objective of the city.  As a living process, the living city aspires to optimize human life by integrating into the larger “Earth community” or non-human landscape and to reduce its deconstructive actions.  As a habitat, standing is given to the non-human, and the living city incorporates reconciliation ecology or enhancement of non-human life within the city.  It aspires to enhance non-human habitat within cities to make the city as oasis of life.

Second, no matter how hard or mechanistic a city might appear, the living city is already present and operant and is the essential vitality or heart pulse of the city rather than a design that needs to be invented.  Its presence is evidenced adaptive features that are just beginning to appear in our measures and be described.  These adaptive features include, for example, urbanization as creating a habitat to shelter the burgeoning global population of billions, a reduction in the rate of population growth, energy efficiency, and a migration toward residency that favors integration rather than exploitation of eco-resources.  Like the dynamics of a forest ecosystem, the living city is intuitive and so multifaceted in its expression as to be to some extent not fully knowable or predictable.

The inherent nature of the city is its inhabitants’ intuitive “soft” actions that continually challenge the hard grid.  The living city has a metabolic quality that is resilient and optimizing.  Popularly sensed to be distinctly cultural and domestic, everyday cultural interaction serves more core needs such as access to sustenance and shelter and reproduction.  Degrading environmental quality and diminishing, once-abundant material resources have begun to drive inherent adaptive features to optimize rather than entrench and compensate for loss.  Attention to this existing “soft” design can optimize features.  Intentional design that aspires to invent the city misses the mark.

To meet the conditions of existence in a now-peopled Earth with no vast physical frontiers, the living city remains surprisingly people-positive, but not people-centered.  Increasing environmental pressures are driving the enhancement of human species just as pressures drive other species toward optimization for best fit.  In a now peopled Earth, there is a clear sense that there is no longer any “outside” or “away” that practically separates human life from uninhabited landscapes.  And so, environmental quality expands a people-positive human drive to be Earth-positive to serve species-specific interests of improving human quality and comfort.

  

A major resistance to prioritizing environmental advocacy involves a sense of taking a step back in human development by diverting resources away from human enterprises for environmental care.  However, environmentalism is now an issue of pubic health and quality of life.  Now, the immediate feedback of degrading environmental feedback creates an increasingly clear sense that there is no longer an “outside” or “away” that separates human life from uninhabited landscapes. Now, when we aspire to optimize the quality of human life alone, it is increasingly apparent that human activity requires fittedness with the larger Earth ecosystem.

Still, in a new environmentalism that includes human life as an expression of the Earth, the living city must aspire to recognize the rights of species sapiens just as the rights of all species must be recognized.  And yet, even a people-first orientation in a peopled-Earth now must begin to be Earth-positive as well as people-positive.

The more recent process of global urbanization that now makes cities the predominant human habitat is the living city’s ecological adaptation of residency.  With no vast physical frontiers, a longstanding too-successful strategy of extractive pioneering now creates the necessity for adaptation to a more integrative strategy.  Mature natural ecosystems favor a strategy of favoring “roots” or integration to live long term in one place over “weed” ecosystems that favor mobility and disturbance and overproduction.

Urbanization is not merely a migration to cities.  It is a drive toward sustainable residency in a peopled Earth.  The visible face of the living city is effusive residency rather than a touchable, physical landscape.  It is the soft heart pulse of the built environment.  And rather than mimic the architecture that is significantly non-participatory, residency is perhaps the key dynamic of the living city that drives a transformation in human activities toward integrative actions and away from exploitive actions.  To live long term in a place and like mature uninhabited ecosystems such as a forest or prairie, human “development” begins to equate less with expanding production and consumption of base resources.  As residents, there is no practical, economic choice but to emphasize inclusiveness as a central guide.  Residency requires interrelatedness.  And inclusion offers multifold directions or options to choose from to meet changing needs.

And as an ecological process, any city is immature and young in the history of the Earth.  Seemingly so long in development as to have “broken the bonds” of nature through literacy and technological innovation, our rather new sense of geological time reveals that the city as barely appeared in the Earth ecosystem.  This immaturity reveals a positive freshness to challenge a sense of the city as so over-old as to be rigid.  The city is akin to a wild young river that is imbalanced in favor of destruction but that can become a more balanced ark of life that is integrated with the larger Earth ecosystem rather than aspire to remain a separable cultural fortress.

The living city is envisioned as immature and imbalanced toward deconstructive activities rather than toward integrative activities. This imbalance is not due to the city-from per se, but rather is a residual effect of continuing to rely on pioneering strategies.  This immaturity reveals the city-form to be essentially a process of change that is fluid and open.  Important for design, the city is to be approached as young and fresh rather than nearing completion.  Design will also need to design for an uncertain context rather than tweak a final form. 

Rather than being a characteristic of shrinking remnants, our most rational scientific measures begin to describe a vast wilderness to which we are subject.  Human life as expressed in intuitive adaptive features strongly expresses the essential core adaptive process of the universe, that of wildness.  The living city is fundamentally wild and fundamentally eco-adaptive rather than somewhat more ecologically sensitive.  And the most contemporary human action or object continues to remain subject to the basic dynamic of wildness—that of remaining alert and adapting to the changing conditions of existence.  In fact, cities and human activity and human morphology remain an expression of the development of the Earth that is still in a process of creation.

The living city model emphasizes wildness as a central dynamic—creative adaptation to the changing conditions of existence in a universe still in ongoing creation.  Rather than culture embedded in an ecosystem and ecologically sensitive, the nature of the living city is fundamentally wild.  “Wildness” is not simply past or prologue to human development or a characteristic of shrinking uninhabited landscapes.  Scientific measures that reach into infinities of largeness and smallness reveal wildness to be a central dynamic in the ongoing creation/evolution of the Earth and the universe.  In the expanding light of ecological measures alone, Thoreau’s admonition that “In wildness is the preservation of the world” rings truer now more than ever.

The wildness of the living city is expressed most explicitly in the automatic activities of inhabitants that might be optimized if acknowledged as present, and then explored, and then brought to intentional awareness.  Wildness is implicit in contemporary human actions and technological innovations that seem artificial and synthetic.  The sense of difference between a computer and a tree are very real but small.  All contemporary human process continues to remain subject to the basic dynamic of wildness—that of remaining alert and adapting to the changing conditions of existence.

The living city is compatible with many features of strong, existing ecologically oriented models such as the eco-vill and the sustainable society.  It would encourage their development within and beyond the city.  Components such as producing local food, reducing diseconomies of transportation, and becoming energy neutral and energy producing can expand from rudimentary expressions to innovations that we have yet to begin to fully imagine.  The living city differs in its core recognition of the city as an expression of nature rather than as a separable intrusion.  It describes the core cause of environmental dilemmas as a strategy of exploitation derived from a misbelief in separation.  The living city attends to major ecologically adaptive features in the city-form that enfold the city in nature, that have always run counter to “soften” the “hard urban grid, and that increasing do so as environmental pressures increase.

The diversity of models of human relatedness to the Earth is to be encouraged.  The city will also create new spontaneous and intentional components, such as, for example, the spontaneous transformation of personal urban “living space” to reference a complex network rather than a specific physical dwelling.  This change in a sense of living space paradoxically begins to allow for increased population density, while at the same time offering inhabitants a sense of increasing living space and quality of life that played a strong role in past suburban sprawl.

The emerging adaptive features of the living city are driving a transformation of environmentalism into an apolitical process of public health.  Rather than a special interest adversarial advocacy, environmentalism begins to mature into a concern for everyone in a process of optimizing the quality of one’s own life.  It becomes integral to life rather than adversarial.  And instead of being a political process, environmentalism begins to provide the emerging core economic opportunity in creating innovative green technologies and services to overcome the limits of an industrial economy facing diminishing material resources.

The living city is an apolitical process.  The living city is fundamentally a health model rather than a philosophical or spiritual or political model.  Environment is a primary locus for attention because degrading environmental quality not only reduces the quality of life but also diminishes public health.  It is not an environmental movement, and there is no strict ideology such as either breaking up the city into townships or not.  It is an inherent process of adaptation that involves everyone.  The only specific element involves an aspiration to optimize health. The living city aspires to optimize life, both human and non-human.  And optimization of human life requires attention to events beyond culture.  Optimization is identified as a fundamental requirement for existence rather than an extraordinary goal.

 

In the contemporary living city, with no vast remaining physical frontiers, our basic health as well as our optimal health is dependent upon our ongoing ecological adaptation.  Ecological adaptation will involve integration with the larger Earth ecosystem.  This process of integration will not be a “return to nature,” because our growing eco-literacy is demonstrating that we have never been separate.  It will likely be a transformation to an economy based on producing resources to optimize health to overcome the limits of an industrial economy facing diminishing material resources that challenge health.

Finally, the vision of the living city expresses the beginning of a renascent vision of human nature.  We begin to address that which our measures are saying to us.  Rather than post-industrial life having become separate and above fading remnants of wildness, we find ourselves deeply enfolded inside infinities of wildness.  We escape forward into the Earth in ongoing human development rather than step backward.

The vision of the living city expresses the beginning of a renascent vision of human nature.  This challenge is being driven by adaptation to the concrete, general conditions of existence rather than from a personal aesthetic choice favoring either separation from nature or a “return” to nature.  Like the dynamics of a forest ecosystem, the living city is intuitive and so multifaceted in its expression as to be to some extent not fully knowable or predictable.

Like a past renaissance, the living city expands human identity; in this case, by including landscape in our identity with self-as-landscape rather than as a separable self-in-place.  And like a past renaissance, the expansion of human identity is being driven by changing conditions of existence; in this case, by the very “peopling of the Earth.  The transformation of our perception of nature and self is, and the city as the critical locus.

Finally, The living city aspires to fulfill the “great work” of the post-modern, that of integrating into the Earth ecosystem.  And like a past renaissance out of economic necessity to both survive as well as to optimize human life and thrive, rather than as an aesthetic goal of high culture.  The living city has a metabolic quality that is resilient and optimizing.  Degrading environmental quality and diminishing once-abundant material resources have begun to drive inherent adaptive features to optimize rather than entrench and compensate for loss with which our imagination is only just beginning to fathom.  The city-form is teaching us rather than we are inventing it.   A living city is seen as an expression of a global biospheric wilderness, and as capable of moving toward wilderness status across the long run of its development.