The Living City: Being People-Positive

RESTRICTING HUMAN ACTIVITY for environmental gains is ineffective, primarily because it does the opposite; it increases consumption.  Limiting human activity to “save the environment” pushes human life toward isolation in culture.  The mall becomes of central importance.  Portraying people as intruders reinforces a false belief in human life as being outside nature.  More fundamentally, and never discussed because it revisions human life as natural rather than as separate and above nature, restricting human activity restricts the rights and wildness of the human species while trying to not restrict the rights of nonhuman life.  As a wild event, human life has not only the right but the obligation to optimize human survival.  As a species, we have a right to unimpeded self-realization. 

Were we to focus on optimizing human life rather than restricting it, we begin to accomplish that which we are unsuccessful in doing through restriction.  We begin to improve the quality of nonhuman life as well as human life.  This is because we begin to include human life in nature rather than define human life out of nature.  To optimize human life as a species, we begin to value actions that integrate human life into the Earth ecosystem.  And we find that these actions improve the quality of human life. 

When we really begin to be people-positive rather than be people-limiting, we become Earth-positive rather than either Earth-centric or anthropocentric.  We are just beginning to move from actions based on beliefs to actions based on direct experience.  For example, environmental degradation in the form of degrading feedback requires encouragement for non-human events as aspects of the longer reach of ourselves if we are to optimize both our comfort and our survival. 

Now, instead of facing an external environmental problem, we begin to act out of our own deep self-interest to improve the quality of life.  The emphasis on people-positive design in Curitiba, Brazil illustrates how we can begin to be both people-positive and Earth positive in an urban setting without being either anthropocentric or Earth-centric.  We can be socio-cultural, psychological and creatural because this is what our experience is saying, and we begin to attend to our direct experience or to the changing conditions of existence to first survive and then to optimize.  And we begin to attend to our direct experience in the contemporary moment more than ever before because we can no longer live on now-depleted, once vast stored capital in the natural resources of the Earth that let us overlook feedback in a less-peopled Earth.   

Habitat is a right for any species.  And driven by global urbanization more than by an environmental ethic, urban habitation no longer defines quality as synonymous with comfort.  A sense of symbiosis that is both social and ecological offers a durability that is coming to be judged as more comforting because of its sustainability and improved environmental quality than heretofore “comforting” consumption.  And “modern” human life is still young in the Earth, is still natural and even wild, and continues to express a sense of “topofilia” or “biofilia” or affection for nature.

In Ecology and Ekistics, Constantinos Doxiadis suggest that urban inhabitants continue to have affection for nature and landscape, and these inhabitants find that cities are not satisfactory for people, and so there is an incentive to amplify rather than diminish local nonhuman events.[i]  Doxiadis has suggested that uniformity in urban design may produce a lower quality of life.[ii]  And a strong part of this uniformity is the degradation and absence of nonhuman life and landscape.  In the face of global urbanization, environmental concerns cannot be addressed by focusing primarily on enhancing unsettled nonhuman landscapes.  Curtis White suggests that design must first meet the damage done to the human community, and he suggests further that threats to the human and nonhuman are the same one.[iii]  Focus on the declining biodiversity by protecting unsettled landscapes is critical, but it will not be altered without focusing equally on the degrading environmental quality of settled landscapes.  

Enhancement of the built environment for urban inhabitants needs to attend strongly to the existing “automatic” intuitive actions of urban inhabitants, or natural wildness of urban life.  In the post-industrial city, the optimal urban living space may involved into a porous network of dwelling and activity that creates metaphorically a different city for each inhabitant.  And where planning has sought to support this fluid living space rather than design the space, affection for the urban landscape has dramatically increased.  What has been lacking in new efforts to support the natural activities of urban inhabitants is a sense of urban space as a natural ecosystem.  Sustainability design continues to focus on energy restriction, which is an essential element, but lacks awareness of automatic energy restriction that occurs in the most highly urbanized spaces as inhabitants live in smaller dwellings and reduce transportation to gain quality.  There is a natural process of gain rather than restriction and loss that is veiled by a sense of separation from nature and, more importantly, by a misperception of an inability for “civilization” to participate in nature.

The inherent wild process in contemporary life resists uniform built environment approaches whether then be human-scale pods as in “new towns” or multi-level mass housing.  Transforming cities to self-contained communities and neighborhoods and townships as is often proposed as optimal because it prioritizes “human scale.”  Meanwhile, urban dwellers, especially in larger cities, create invisible webs of home and resources and social contact that includes human scale and grand scale space. 

While it would seem obvious that human scale is crucial in urban dwellings and activity, grand scale efforts also provides a vitality and openness that is important, and this, paradoxically, is an unanticipated positive element of each person’s fluid urban living space.   It might be posited that there is a “natural scale” that is a continuum, that continues to be a creatural expression of human life.  It is an automatic affection for both the safety of the “hearth” and the “vista” that soothes our distance-seeking eyes.  And individuals also vary in their sense of comfort regarding the structure of their space rather than uniformly seek the same living space.  The amount of desired dwelling space varies so that diversity of dwelling space in a diversity of city-space (downtown/center, midtown, edge city or exurbia) should be enhanced rather than uniformity.  Diversity needs to address habitat needs for age differences (young adults, empty nesters, retirement, family, children).

Overall, living city design attends to residency and therefore promotes inclusion, and inclusion does not exclude nonhuman events. An emphasis on residency drives the use of terms such as integration and relatedness in design.  These terms eventually outspread to affiliation with nonhuman processes both within and surrounding the city.  This affiliation eventually extends legal standing to nonhuman events in increasing steps out of a growing sense of fundamental economic gain or positive environmental feedback rather than simply out of affection.[iv]   

Residency requires a shift in strategy to be less driven toward production as “development” or “progress” and as optimal life.  It attends to the “roots” or foundations, not to reduce opportunities but to enhance opportunities.  It begins to approach all human life as indigenous to nature, and increasingly in a peopled Earth, indigenous to a local landscape, that will be for the foreseeable future, an urban landscape.  Highlighting the new urban phenomenon of residency may explore a sense of becoming indigenous and relating to the immanent landform and surrounding bioregion and existing nonhuman habitat.  With the exception of very remote places, human development has been more of a process of migration than of living long term in one place.  Cultures replaced by contemporary societies that have been popularly described as indigenous and displaced violently by Western societies often have oral histories that describe violent land acquisition from other societies in an ongoing process of migration, rather than being original to the local place.

The city of the future will move in a variety of directions that blur artificiality and fittedness and that may appear to move away from ecological emphases, but the future city cannot override this fundamental requirement for long-run sustainability.  For example, the “ubiquitous city” is emerging as an outgrowth of cybernetic technology.  In this cyburbia city-form (e.g., Songdo, South Korea), residential and medical and business and governmental information systems are linked and a “smart card” house key could be used for transactions.[v]  Again, “artificiality” that serves residency and integration rather than exploitation is not unrelated from patterns described as natural in primal societies.  In a peopled Earth where the predominant human habitation will be urban, the ecological dimension is not overridden and may even be enhanced through these technologically integrative events.  The key to optimal eco-design will involve an underlying philosophy that aspires to enhance residency. 

A contemporary people-positive focus that is also Earth-positive focus will be a renascent step forward.  It represents a transformation from a centric orientation where people and Earth are mutually exclusive events to an integrative orientation where people are an expression of the Earth.

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[i] Constantinos Doxiadis, Ecology and Ekistics. [Gerald Dix, Ed.] London: Elek, 1977.

[ii] “entopia,”Constantinos Doxiadis noted in Rene Dubos, The Wooing of Earth, p.118.  See also Constantinos Doxiadis, Building Entopia. New York: Norton, 1975.

[iii] Curtis White, The Ecology of Work,” Orion, May/June, 2007. [www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/article/267].

[iv] See, for example, an early argument for legal standing of nonhuman events in Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects. Los Altos, Calif.: William Kauffman, Inc., 1974.

[v] “ubiquitous city” [http://en.wikipedia/wiki/Ubiquitous_city].

A Post-Industrial Definition Of Wildness

This presentation is a very brief selection from three lengthy appendices

exploring traditional definitions of wildness as biased and counterproductive for designing for the integration of human life into the larger Earth ecosystem.

IN THE GREAT WORK, Thomas Berry offers a dramatic shift in perspective.  It is one that enlarges the context in which we define our terms.  It is a perspective that challenges our longstanding beliefs by looking at phenomena from the very real current state of our knowledge.  Thomas Berry looks at the contemporary moment from the broad perspective of the universe.  And from this perspective, the “great work” of the contemporary moment involves the integration of post-modern life into the larger Earth ecosystem.

From our longstanding tradition, we look at wildness diminishing down to remnants while Berry finds the universe to be a wild context.  The universe tends to be imagined as too distant to be influential in daily life.  And yet, in a very real way, every event in our experience is a direct expression of the universe.  Still, it is a perspective that can seem impossible to fit to everyday life. 

Whatever perspective we choose sets the fundamental stage for our actions.  Finding the over-old universe to still be in creation, we suddenly find post-industrial life to be emergent and fresh, lost and not central, and inside an ongoing creation.  Finding ourselves orbiting a dust speck sun in an obscure arm of an obscure galaxy, we begin to face our distorted sense of being at center-point and above nature and apart.  Lost in vast wildness, it becomes increasingly difficult to continue to believe that we are not wild.  All life on Earth can be seen as a fragile expression in the outer rim of a star. In the context of the history of the Earth, we find the city to be infantile rather than “established,” and just beginning in an ongoing creation.

Creativity can be seen to be the ongoing key dynamic of the universe.  And creativity demands the primary element in wildness, that of remaining alert to the changing conditions of existence.  With this universal perspective, Thomas Berry defines “wild” as

that which is uncontrolled by human dominance[i]

and “wildness” as

the ultimate creative modality of any form of earthly being.[ii]

Berry continues,

Wildness we might consider as the root of the authentic spontaneity of any being.  It is that wellspring of creativity whence come the instinctive activities that enable all living beings to obtain their food, to find shelter, to bring forth their young; to sing and dance and fly through the air and swim through the depths of the sea.  This is the same inner tendency that evokes the insight of the poet, the skill of the artist, and the power of the shaman.[iii]

At first, “that which is uncontrolled by human dominance” can seem to reinforce

a traditional sense of wildness as present only in those events that are separate from human control.  However, in both our degrading environmental feedback and even within our human actions, we begin to understand that much of our experience is either separate from our control or not well controlled.  And now with a still rather new awareness of profoundly vaster context of the space-time—the universe and the dramatic shifts of the conditions of existence as evidenced in geological timeframes, we begin to understand that we are an expression of a still emergent, creative universe and subject to it, and deep within it rather than looking out at it.  There is a new sense that there is something inherent in human life that is never subject to human dominance, and that is creatural rather than cultural.  And there is a sense of cultural expression as capable of being a natural adaptive response that expresses the creatural rather than something largely separate.

But the heart of Berry’s definition looks at wildness as the creative mode of any earthly being inside a vast ongoing creative context.  Wildness is a flow of change or ongoing creation.  Nothing in the biosphere is preserved across the long run.  Human life in any era is creatural, and culture is an expression of the creatural—as a response to the changing conditions of existence--rather than a departure from it.  Like an eagle or a sparrow, we focus on our immanent needs rather than on the needs of other events or on total alertness to our landscape.  But our immanent needs cannot ignore changing conditions such as depletion of material resources. And so in the contemporary moment, there is a shift toward global urbanization as residency that begins intuitively, while continuing to consciously attend to immediate needs.  And human beings, we have an additional wild capacity to become aware of our immanent everyday reality as having very real, non-ordinary longer reach in which our activity extends into events beyond ourselves.  This gives us at chance at optimizing rather than either subsisting or disappearing. 

Optimizing wildness requires intentional attentiveness or alertness to a larger identity.  Wildness is fundamentally optimal, because as Thomas Berry notes, authentic spontaneity, which is at the heart of wildness, needs to be optimal to sharpen our ability to adapt.  Optimal health will always involve an expanded circle of attentiveness and identity to allow us to recognize resources.  Our new eco-literacy is not simply a cultural product.  It is a consequence of our experience of changing conditions of existence that demand integration rather than exploitation.  This new eco-literacy is brings this process of integration to consciousness to allow us to optimize activities that favor integration to intentionally replace our once successful exploitation that no longer optimizes our experience in a peopled Earth and can be self-destructive and clearly non-optimal.

While we seem to live largely inside culture, we remain fundamentally more creatural than cultural, which is to say that we are an aspect of a vast wildness.  Try to stop respiration and digestion.  We are so much wilder than we have allowed ourselves to imagine.  Our most contemporary culture serves larger processes such as species continuation and cooperation to access basic needs that we tend to not acknowledge.  And like other species, we aspire to flourish and not simply exist or survive.  We aspire toward influencing the places that we inhabit to be optimal.  Berry’s sense of relating wildness to all living beings is captured in Michael Hough’s design orientation to build habitats that aspire to create “conditions that permit a species to survive and flourish.”[iv]  Hough suggests that the same rules apply everywhere, but the habitats will vary in expression.

In Islands, The Universe, Home, Gretel Ehrlich offers a broader vision of wildness than we tend to use.  Her description is lyrical and metaphorical and not as concrete or as specified as we are used to seeking, but this is its grace, and this grace is its strength in the way that it is opening and expansive.  Ehrlich describes wildness as a dynamic action when she writes that it is “all present tense,” [v] rather than a specific set of fixed conditions.  She suggests that perception of wildness requires us “to see the open dimensions of form—to move through, not against.”[vi]  Aspiring to move through the appearance of an object such as a tree, for example, we might encounter “the flickering universe of a cottonwood tree.” [vii]  Gretel Ehrlich almost “un-defines” wildness when she writes,

Wildness has no conditions, no sure route, no peaks or goals, no source that is not instantly becoming something more than itself, then letting go of that, always becoming.  It cannot be stripped to its complexity by CAT scan or telescope.  Rather, it is a many-pointed truth, almost bluntness, a sudden essence like the wild strawberries strung on scarlet runners under my feet.[viii]

Berry’s definition of wildness has Gretel Ehrlich’s sense of wildness being an inescapable dynamic that is creatively open.  This openness is not bounded, so that each event is more an event or current than an object.  We, for example, are currents of metabolism rather than separable objects, and we are connected moment by moment to hydrologic and atmospheric and material substance and radiant energy.  Every activity in the universe is both intimately interpenetrating the other and authentically wild.  And wildness is the central or “heart path” for all events in the universe.  Berry’s definition is in congruence with Thoreau’s sense that “ In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”  While wildness tends to be so open and creative as to be undisciplined and therefore crude, Berry notes that wildness involves creative and destructive aspects that ultimately conform to “a discipline that holds the energies of the universe in the creative pattern of their activities.” [ix]  This discipline of the universe is not a crude process but rather a subtlety beyond our capacity to either imagine or replicate.

In The Universe as a Green Dragon, Brian Swimme explores the perspective of Thomas Berry.  He begins with the perspective of the universe rather than the Earth or the local place, and describes humanity as a creation of the universe.[x]  He concentrates on the essential unit of focus as the Earth “community” as a whole.[xi]  He suggests that language, including presumably the written word that seems to separate modern human life from wildness, belongs to the Earth as the Cascade Mountains belong to the Earth.[xii] 

In North America, Swimme sees a collision between European (science, technology, masculine and individual orientation) and Native American perspectives (ecological, animistic, feminine, communal—spiritual) and no effort by European traditions to blend perspectives of this new landscape.[xiii]  However, this values conflict has been an ongoing one within Western culture between the rational and Romantic traditions as highlighted by Robert Bly in News of the Universe.  The new eco-literacy is bringing a sense of enduring wildness and naturalness to awareness in an important new way.  It is no longer a clash between economy and aesthetics, but rather it is now an economic necessity and an economic opportunity that can also be optimized to increase the quality of human life. 

In successful societies, whether they are primal First Societies or a post-industrial megalopolis, values change as population increases place new demands on the society.

Societal success in the form of population growth has favored pioneering exploitation for all societies, including primal “first societies.”  The success of “modern life” has dramatically improved survivability and favored pioneering to sustain the rapidly expanding population.   However, in post-industrial life, the value of a strategy exploitation decreases, but it opens a new opportunity.  In a peopled Earth the continuing population pressures favor something new—that of integration rather than exploitation—because of the absence of material resources.

In Biophilia, biologist Edmund O. Wilson envisions reality as a “chaotic richness.”  He suggests that human experience imposes a selection of biases upon reality [101]. [xiv]  Wilson sees modern life as having flawed biases that lead us to act destructively toward both the non-human and ourselves.  While Wilson sees habitats such as cities as superficial when compared to the complexity of a forest, he sees human life as a species that has an urge to affiliate with other forms of life, and he terms this drive toward affiliation, biophilia.[xv]  He suggests that while an absence of contact with the non-human such as occurs in the city can seem real or all that we believe we require, it masks an enduring natural essence.  He writes,

People can grow up with the outward appearance of normality in an environment largely stripped of plants and animals, in the same way that passable monkeys can be raised in laboratory cages and cattle can be fattened in feeding bins.  Asked if they were happy, these people would probably say yes. Yet something vitally important would be missing, not merely the knowledge and pleasure that can be imagined and might have been, but a wide array of experiences that the human brain is peculiarly equipped to receive.[xvi]   

Berry’s description of wildness allows us to address Edward O. Wilson’s cultural biases by

·      looking at wildness from a broader scale, from a posture of inclusion rather than separation, that inescapably includes human life and makes wildness the key operational dynamic of the universe that every activity in the universe must express to be authentic rather than a secondary dynamic, and

·      sensing wildness as a sublime state with on going creative and destructive elements that challenge our more facile [i.e., too easy] descriptors of wildness rather than wildness as an archaic stage that can be well-described.

Wildness can describe human life rather than be something describing that which we are not.  It is remarkable that we have come to imagine contemporary human life as separate from wildness when we are so deeply lost in the cosmos.  Contemporary human life is destructive to nature to such a degree that human actions seem superficial rather than fundamental because of the way that they overlook dramatically changing conditions of existence—in particular, diminishing material resources in a peopled Earth.  This superficial response can still be a natural one, but a response that is no longer successful.  It is natural in that it is more like that of a new species that is unfitted to its landscape.  Global urbanization is a new response that is environmentally adaptive in the sense of trying to provide habitation for a human population of billions.  And while the longstanding belief of separation from wildness continues as a dominant conscious belief, the conditions for life in a peopled Earth are driving intuitive adaptive responses in global urbanization such as a reduction in the rate of population growth.  Gradually, degrading environmental quality is challenging a sense of boundary between culture and nature.  There is an emerging sense of culture and nature being described in terms of differences rather than mutually exclusive opposites, as well as events that occur on a continuum.

When all human activity falls inside wildness, wildness moves from being a dialect opposite to being a point on a continuum, and wildness opens and expands.  When wildness includes human life, the intrinsic value of complex unsettled landscapes is amplified rather than diminished, because they are experienced as no longer distanced and as inherently optimizing health and, therefore, essential to our optimal health as they are. 

Thomas Berry’s “authentic spontaneity of any being” provokes an expansion of wildness to all species—a general condition of living and of being alive.  Making this leap provokes a more profound leap in defining wildness that is present yet understated in efforts to define wildness.  Wildness is the universal response to changing conditions of existence by all phenomena, including not only biota, but also processes such as weathers, stellar evolution.  Wildness can be deconstructive or integrative.  Thoreau’s “preservation of the world” is, paradoxically, a process of response, transformation, succession, and change. 

To see everything as wild would seem both to diffuse the meaning of the term “wildness” to the point of being meaningless as well as to absolve human activity that results in severe ecological destruction.  And yet, to not see everything as wild ultimately distorts natural process.  As with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, there is a simple, integrative and practical eloquence in the observation of a universal wildness that is not separate from any human activity regardless of how tame or domestic or artificial he activity or product may appear to be. 

To not see the city as wild with both deconstructive and integrative expressions misses real, concrete processes that are essential for integration into the larger Earth ecosystem.  To see the city as wild opens a threshold to cross over from a disordering problem to an opportunity for health, and to amplify processes that are already more effective than “green” technological designing for a machine.

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[i] Thomas Berry, The Great Work. p. 48.

[ii] Thomas Berry, The Great Work. p. 48.

[iii] Thomas Berry, The Great Work. p. 51.

[iv] Michael Hough, City Form and Natural Process: Towards A New Urban Vernacular. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1984, p. 24.

[v] Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991, p. 37.

[vi] Gretel Ehrlich, 1991, p. 55.

[vii] Gretel Ehrlich, 1991, p. 71.

[viii] Gretel Ehrlich, 1991, p. 30.

[ix] Thomas Berry, The Great Work. p. 51..

[x] Brian Swimme, The Universe as a Green Dragon: a Cosmic Creation Story. Santa Fe: Bear & Company, 1984, p. 35.

[xi] Brian Swimme, p. 34.

[xii] Brian Swimme, p. 166.

[xiii] Brian Swimme, p. 159.

[xiv] Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 101.

[xv] E. O. Wilson, p. 85.

[xvi] E. O. Wilson, p. 118

Broad Based Environmentalism

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. 

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[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].

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.  

Beyond Present Urban Visions: Eco Vs. Mechanistic

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.

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[i] Sigurd Olson, Open Horizon. New York: Knopf, 1969, and Listening Point. New York: Knopf, 1958.

[ii] From “EcoCities, Making cities sustainable is a crucial challenge,” pp. 1-2, [in www.context.org/ICLIB/IC08/Register.htm reprint].