Future City: The Impact of Residency

WHAT WILL THE FUTURE city look like?  Can we imagine it?  Will it be a luminous city or a dark city or an oasis of life?  Will the city continue a drive toward exclusivity and separation from the nonhuman Earth community rather than inclusion?  Whatever the city will become in the future, it now is a provocation that offers a threshold of sorts to cross over to a qualitative step in our understanding of human nature and nature in general if we are readied to take it.

Were we to ask what a desert or a forest of the future might look like, to a large extent, their constancy would be more predicable.  This is a measure of their maturity.  It is likely that the city of the future, being young in the history of the Earth, will look remarkably different than it does in the contemporary moment.  And it is this clear leap in what the city of the future will look like, that opens a door for the city to become nearly any possibility, even an oasis of life that mimics a wilderness ecosystem.

The contemporary city-form is so much softer that we allow ourselves to imagine.  The city is a threshold through which we are just beginning to step.  There is nothing rock-firm on the other side.  And yet, global urbanization has not been completely directionless.  The peopling of the Earth and migration toward urbanization as inhabitants rather than as tenants has been a qualitatively positive ecological response in many strong ways as well as continuing to reflect dysfunctional activities.  At this beginning point, we cannot see the end.  We cannot see the future of human habitation with clarity.  As John Hay writes in The Undiscovered Country,

A new relationship between us and the living world is still ahead of us, in what form no one can say.  Who knows how the infinitely complex relationships of the watery planet will realize themselves tomorrow?  It will not be entirely our doing.[i]

A global shift toward the city as the predominant human residence is the dynamic that forms a threshold between the past and the future.  Global urbanization is so suddenly different that it forms a clean threshold like industrialization did in the past in human habitation.  For the foreseeable future, the one thing that seems clear is that the city of the future will be different than before because it will become the predominant residence for human life.  The future city will be home and not just house.  And we will increasingly discover that to be “home” we will be possessed more than we possess.

At times, we have imagined cities to be zoos that domesticate people and nonhuman inhabitants by restricting activity to square meters and concrete.  We have even described cities as prisons.  But human life is increasingly drawn to them in search of opportunity.  While this draw may be, in part, the result of exploitation that depletes the rural economy, the draw is much stronger than this.  It will be important to “green” and make sustainable the smaller rural communities rather than presume that human life will be completely urban.  And yet, for all of their difficulties, cities are a landscape of opportunity and possibility in a peopled Earth. 

To a large degree, the inability to describe the city of the future is due to its function as a residence.  As a place of human habitation, the city will function even less orderly than as a mercantile or sacred center.  The more that a city becomes a residence, the more that there is a “psycho-geography” and a “creatural geography” that derives from the lives of inhabitants and creates freedom, meaningfulness, variability and ongoing exploration.  It is dynamic and automatic and somewhat decipherable, so that it suggests design possibilities, but it is also private and effusive.  In Formulary For A New Urbanism, Ivan Chicheglov described a give-and-take process of an “urban relativity” of “vortexes,” and “currents” that react like an “undertow” against the “fixed points” or physical and ideological restrictions of the built urban environment.[ii]  This psycho-geographic “undertow” is an expression of the ongoing emergence of the city, always remains indecipherable, and is important to acknowledge and explore to understand the city.

Residency shifts the city from an architectural machine to a living process that is ecological and organic and continually changing far more than it is artificial.  It offers an opportunity to be more than a luminous machine or a dark city.   Finding a living city rather than a machine, we have a base to optimize our life in a way that the separable city cannot realize.   The living city is a part of nature rather than apart from nature.  And it is not simply an eco-dream for the city, but something that can be discovered by diving into the contemporary city. 

In global urbanization, we find a rock-solid infinite game like we also find in a forest, rather than a finite game that we might find in a machine or in the past emerging industrial city.  It has an ongoing metabolism that stresses adaptation rather than defense of the status quo.  Feeling that we cannot change who we have become, we begin to discover that change is all we have ever done.  We can acknowledge inherent aliveness and vitality and aspire to support it as design.  Attention can be directed particularly to the soft ambience that underlies the hard ambience (physical construction) as well as acknowledge and explore the organicity of urban architecture.  As residents, the required resilience and desired public health or “quality” will ultimately require the action of affiliation rather than dominion and exploitation.  Finding ourselves inside the world, we act differently that if we find ourselves to be apart.  Accordingly, attention is directed toward optimizing the nonhuman events that are present in the urban landscape to optimize human life.

And as we begin to live more as residents, we begin to approach being indigenous.  “Indigenous” primal societies have been more migratory than we tend to acknowledge.  Primal societies have been essentially migrants who populated the Earth, and who often replaced other indigenous human groups only a decade or so before being identified by literate cultures as “first” inhabitants of a particular landscape.  Their success and subsequent population growth often drove members or whole societies to continue migration and abandon the local place.  And with success, they adopted exploitive strategies to sustain successfully expanding populations that we now attribute almost exclusively and erroneously to modern civilizations.  But the longer they remained in a place, residency developed an affiliation and intimacy with nonhuman and elemental processes.  

For all of our modernity, residency is essentially our new-old process as we step into the future.  In the post-industrial, unlike in the rather recent past, we have no vast remaining physical frontiers.  Having peopled the Earth, we will have to do something that we really have never fully accomplished throughout human development—indigenous residency.

Ultimately, our sense of being “post-natural” may be the epitome of our longstanding, illusory dream of separation.  In futurist speculation, “post-humanism” or “trans-humanism” refer to an extension of the longstanding vision of separation in which human life becomes more integrated with the machine, and might be described as even less natural by becoming less biological.  It is apparent that human development will always involve leaving ourselves behind, just as our deep ancestry did to become us.  But this process is a natural response to meet the changing conditions of existence.  In this ecological sense, human life always involves more than human beings.  In this context, even our machines are natural expressions, as will be some degree of integration with both the machine and the larger Earth ecosystem that is an astonishing self-informing “computer” in an ongoing developmental process. 

Human designs are adaptive responses rather than activities that separate us from nature, and that design us.  Human activities that have seemed to separate us worked naturally and successfully when we had vast material resources to exploit.  That which designs us is not internal, but rather the vast ongoing cosmic landscape in which we are lost.  Rather than being post-natural, human life remains enduringly indigenous, and needing to remain wildly attentive to adapt to the changing conditions of ongoing creation to sustain as a species.

Now, in the contemporary moment, integration rather than migration has now become our way forward.  This integrated residency will also have to do something that is new.  Rather than simply join in a relationship with the large Earth community, optimal human habitation will have to express the operating Earth dynamic and become an oasis of life, both human and nonhuman.  If we imagine the city of the future to be hard architecture, this oasis cannot occur.  But if we imagine the city to be living and adaptive, an eco-oasis will become a possibility.   

The city offers an opportunity not only for survival but also for growth and choice.  That which has seemed to be the antithesis of nature is coming to be understood as a natural adaptation that can express the wild eloquence of diversity and fittedness.

In The Undiscovered Country, John Hay writes,

Missing a free exchange between us and the waning riches of the earth, we invoke the wilderness.  But this is wilderness still, in our blood, where the water runs and the leaves as shaking.  This is our only house and its provision.  Home is the universal magnet. Even the wanderer whose only goal is money on the run requires it sooner or later, feels it as an imperative. Home is not only our dugout, our room, our building, the place we need so as to know one another, but it is the center where hemispheres cross, the winds collide, where world life has its lodging.  Home is the mortal body where opposites meet and find each other.  We could not survive our own anarchy if life did not insist on affinity.  The searching for it never lets up.  There are no neglected corners, in spite of appearances.[iii]

With global urbanization, we are just beginning to open an old language with a new key. We are describing something that is fresh, and just underway, and yet, primal and enduring.  Our first new words are still simple and effusive, but we know in our hearts what they are trying to say.  We have begun to feel like we belong to the Earth even though it might not have been our intent.  And it is a rewarding feeling of coming home, in the sense of coming inside vast support.  We begin to experience of sense of never having been apart.  And we begin to sense that our use has never been unnatural, but it has been incoherent and largely deconstructive and immature, using and disregarding with too little admiration and wonder. 

Our literacy is not a step out of nature that separates us forever.  Our literacy remains a subtle, wild listening point that is Earth-made and continues to express Earth and cosmos through the facets or currents that we name modern human life.  The city calls to us like the forest and desert, and aspires toward becoming the essence of any landscape, that of eloquence.  Without really knowing it, this is what we have never ceased moving toward.  This is our high human quest, and it will never be completed.  With the city, we have been given a great challenge, and a new chance in a peopled Earth.  It is another face of Earth that has been masked by our limits.  Not an island as we have long believed, the city is an ecological adaptation that can flower into an oasis of life. 

Where is the "city" going, if it is authentically "living?"

Now in a peopled Earth, the city of the future is already expressing its wildness far more than its tameness.  The destiny of the city lies in its maturation as a wilderness ecosystem that integrates with the larger Earth ecosystem.  While this can seem to be an impossible stretch and a Romantic eco-dream, it is likely the practical destiny of the city.  It is the way that the Earth and cosmos work.  It is astonishing but reasonable to presume that the global human population is capable of being less at the turn of the century in 2100 than it is now.  The key dynamics of biotic wilderness ecosystems—diversity, fittedness and complete recycling—are possible in cities. 

Given our most rational measures, the destiny of any ecosystem is most likely one that evolves or advances [not devolves] into a wilderness ecosystem.  And a wilderness ecosystem can have many forms, including human technologies.  An advanced culture would have a high eco-literacy that would expand human identity to integrate with the larger Earth ecosystem rather than exclude it.  And it would do this because the enduring conditions of existence are, paradoxically, ongoing creation.  The key dynamic of the universe is ongoing creation, and the key quality for biota [those events occurring in landscapes capable of having macromolecules such as the Earth] is wildness.  Wildness is not something shrunken down to distant remnants but rather the central operating factor in the biosphere and the cosmos.  And wildness is alertness and response to eco-pressures that would result in mutations such as your writing explores.  As awkward as it seems due to our longstanding strategy of exploitation of resources as a natural middle step for human evolution, cities are more ethological events [driven to appear and evolve as evolutionary responses] that artificial.

Ultimately the advent of new strategies renders the reliance on a traditional city/manufacturing base/etc. rather obsolete.  Technology advances but serves an identity larger than a specific species as in John W. Campbell’s 1937 short story, “Forgetfulness.”[iv]  A synopsis of Campbell's story might go something like this: A pre-colonization expedition by a group of advanced humans visits a lush, semi-primeval planet, and encounters a race of peaceful and simple inhabitants.  These apparently simple-minded denizens know little about the ancestors that built a tremendous set of ruins near-by, a city and spaceport slowly being recovered by the jungle, with records and artifacts of an impressive interstellar empire.  Eventually, the obnoxious visitors push the locals too far, and then realize that these 'primitives' have actually evolved far beyond them, building anything and everything they need from scratch, converting matter-to-energy readily.  Who needs permanent structures and vast collectives when you have finally achieved a rational, thriving harmony with nature?

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[i] John Hay, The Undiscovered Country, p. 12.

[ii] Psychogeography [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography.  See also, Ivan Chicheglov, Formulary For A New Urbanism: Sire, I Am From Another Country.London: Psychogeographical Association, 1997.

[iii] John Hay, The Undiscovered Country, p. 171.

[iv] John W. Campbell, “Forgetfulness” in The Best of John W. Campbell. New York: Ballentine Books, 1976.

The Manicured Wilderness

The Manicured Wilderness:  Author’s note, as Preface:

WRITING OF RIVERS, prairies, and small but rich streams being dammed to create lakes [likely to be filled too soon with sediment], and patches of lorn, dusty landscapes lost to apartment complexes and condos, I had not dreamed of ever writing of cities as ecological bastions and, further, of cities as having the capability of ever, Ever, EVER attaining a designation of “wilderness.”  I was challenged to think about wildness by an individual who would never see the city as wild.  Having a dog, feeding birds--to him, whom I deeply respected, all of these things were significant measures of our separation from nature.  But so challenged, the closer that I looked, a door opened that I had not anticipated.

Popularly, cities were the antithesis of nature—artificial, domesticated, civil, an “intrusion” in nature.  Environmentalism and ecology stood against cities in an effort to prevent the obvious, and very true environmental degradation caused by human activity.  Cities seemed to be the poster child for anti-nature.  And so, the last thing that I was interested in writing about as "NATURE" was the city-form.  And yet, in beginning to look at cities—not at intentional urban design as much as unintentional global migration to cities [rather than away from cities as in the past] and participatory architecture—the activities of people becoming residents, cities were unintentionally producing intuitive—“wild”—ecological adaptive responses that were beginning to achieve ecological changes, such as a reduction in the rate of global population, that intentional advocacy and legislation were unable to achieve.  And, it became apparent, that even ecological advocacy and environmental monitoring were being driven and even amplified by essentially urban, academic institutions.

There is no reason why cities might not be ecotopias, rather than artificial dystopias.  We have reconciliation ecology.  Human life and cities are young in the history of the Earth.  Eco-literacy is, really, in its infancy.  And the possibility that the city has emerged as an ecological adaptation to fit human life into the wilderness dynamic that is the biosphere is very real, once one begins to look at the city as an ecosystem.  This is not to say that post-industrial human life is not creating severe environmental degradation that threatens the Earth ecosystem.  But the city-form may be a step forward, once we begin to look at it as if it were a forest.  As it begins to reduce the global human population, the city-form may begin to keep up rather than perpetually try to keep up with a burgeoning global human population. 

++++++++++

THE LIVING CITY wears a disguise of hardness, domesticity and artificiality that hides it enduring heart.  Scrutinizing close, the city-form endures because its essential nature has not changed.  It sustains by doing that which all “infinite game” [James Carse, Finite And Infinite Games, NY: Basic Books, 1986] ecosystems do—by changing and adapting.  It is Earthen.  In post-industrial culture that seems to be a step out of nature, it is still quite remarkable that we might believe the city-form to be a step out of nature.   Our most rational post-industrial scientific measures keep losing us deeper in cosmos rather than lift us above it.  And yet, in modern life, we still tend to go much farther than that—either to believe or to act as if we are born into the world rather than are born from the Earth itself, as if the Earth was a separable stage set.

In Dawn Light [NY: W. W. Norton: 2009, p.3], Diane Ackerman writes.

We live on a planet, a planet in space, surrounded by millions of other planets and suns.  And on this planet, eons ago, by chance life evolved. Then I picture the cavalcade of life, from grub-like strings of bacteria and knobs of blue-green algae through weird mammals to people, in suits and shoes, driving metal shells, talking into electronic ears, having dinner dates, creating art, craving love, living in palatial huts.

How strong and eye-poppingly wonderful it is to live on a planet in space, and to be alive with intelligence, maybe something unique thus far in our relatively young universe.  I’m often startled by this thought, like the way you flinch when someone surprises you.  How unlikely, and what an adventure.  For me, it’s important to wake up often to our true nature and circumstance, to remember how lucky and fleeting it is just being alive.   Most often that happens outside, while walking or biking in the country, or enjoying a park in the manicured wilderness that is a city [bold added].

As modern life becomes increasingly machined and electronic/cybernetic, there is not a material that is not fundamentally Earthen.  And rather than having become separate from the natural world and intrusive, modern life is increasingly lost in both space and time, linked inseparably with not just apes but ancestral shrews and seas still carried in blood salt.  Even the most literal “manicure” of civility—expressed in the billions spent annually on fashion and cosmetics—essentially expresses the creatural dimension in human life far more than the civil.  The rouge on the cheeks is an ethological display like the color flash of a bird’s feathers to another of its species.  Holidays, shelters, territory—there is nothing that is unnatural, albeit sometimes extreme.  But these variations are natural—diversity—with some changes adaptive, like the lower rates of global population growth brought about indirectly as an aspect of increasing global urbanization, and others a wrong turn, like a wind-blown seed falling on rock.

Throughout human development, the term “wilderness” has undergone a variety of meanings, from dangerous wasteland to a rather Romantic complex ecosystem devoid of human development.  But even in the Neolithic era, human activity is now understood to have begun a profound impact on the most remote ecosystems, from savannah to rainforest, favoring certain flora.  We imagine “wilderness” to be declining down to remote landscapes, when, in fact, the dynamic of wilderness is global and stellar, and still in creation. Every modern action is lost in a vast Earthen and stellar wilderness and subject to its dynamics.  The city-form is a mix of aversion and affinity with the larger Earth ecosystem.  The city-form comes into existence as a response to the need for a more efficient habitation design to sustain a vast global human population.  And human activity that is termed “urbanization” has adaptive ecological features.  These adaptive features are limited by both sacred and secular belief systems that imagine human life as separate and above nature as well as by the difficulty in trying to outpace the rapid rate of global population growth.  Most of the adaptive features to be found in the city-form are the unintentional result of human urban actions, including reducing the major barrier of the global rate of population growth, which our intentional environmental efforts have failed to achieve.  One of the remaining major barriers involves our clinging to beliefs of  having become separate from nature.  Our most rational scientific measures and a relatively new eco-literacy easily challenge such beliefs.  By beginning to recognize “wilderness” in modern “manicured “ life, we might expedite our intentional efforts to optimize adaptive ecological features.   It is possible to begin to imagine that even cities might achieve wilderness status, as measured by increasing eco-diversity, exquisite fittedness, and near-complete recycling.   

The Living City As Ecological Renaissance Rather than As Apocalypse

Copyright Lance Kinseth, Jet Con-Trail Over Lightning-Struck Oak, 2011

IN THE SEPARABLE city, attention to sustainability is increasing.  We “taste” ecology in the bitter form of degrading environmental quality, and yet there is a sense that ecology does not include us.  Nature is envisioned as on the “outside” of human life and moving further away from human life, and reacting negatively to human life.  And we sense that improving environmental quality requires some forfeiture of future human development:  redirecting resources “other nonhuman nations” to which we are linked by a need for material resources and absorption of our waste.  Our language and our subsequent actions describe our longstanding vision of a separation from nature, either as a result of intentionally aspiring to leave it behind or by being excluded from it by literacy and abusive technological development. 

With the living city, our self-perception is radically different:  We perceive ourselves to have always remained inside nature, and now measure being more deeply lost inside it.  “Tasting” our bitter imbalance with the larger Earth ecosystem, we also taste something sweet in that which has seemed to be only a wasteland of our own making.  We begin to aspire to move from a deconstructive pioneering strategy to a constructive post-industrial strategy of residency.

• We find our cities to be living, ecological adaptations that are already self-designing in response to the conditions of existence. 
• We begin to sense that urbanization itself is an ecological adaptation.  Rather than the illusion of the end of a separable nature, we now begin to realize the end of our illusion of separation from nature. 
• We find that we are not post-natural but rather “post-separable,” and that we cannot be healthy and optimize without integrating in the larger Earth community that we have now “peopled.” Rather than trying to enhance a separate nature, we begin to shift from a sense of “intrusion” in nature to try to optimize our inherent “inclusion” in nature.
• We begin to try to overcome the way we have limited both human and nonhuman life by our misunderstanding of nature. 
• We begin to imagine that global urbanization is not an apocalypse, but rather a renaissance that is just beginning and that is dramatically altering our understanding of human nature, just as the Italian Renaissance did in bridging the Medieval and the modern.

The Radical Green Return and The Sustainable Eco-vill

(See previous posts: “The Sustainable Society Is Not The Same As The Living City,” “The Livable City Is Not The Same As The Living City” and “A Continuum Of Eco-City Models: A Brief Introductory Sketch”)

AS ONE INCREASINGLY MOVES toward the ecologically integrative end of the continuum—toward the sustainable eco-vill to the “radical green return” where urbanism and environmentalism finally become mutually exclusive.  The remote cabin and the organic farm and the eco-vill as a community development offer explorations in alternative technology that are applicable to cities, such as John Todd’s “living machine” that recycles wastewater[i] or off-the-grid developments using passive solar and solar and wind generators and alternatives to lawns such as fruit and/or rain gardens.  These models of human habitation are also important to the city, not only as a local food source, but as both an optimal ecological habitat in their own right and as an innovation lab for “seed ideas.”  They are to be strongly encouraged. 

The eco-vill offers much to the long-term future of the “living city,” but it inaccurately presumes that post-industrial urbanization is ecologically unnatural.  While this presumption seems obvious to most, it contributes to reinforcement of a strategy of separation from the larger Earth ecosystem and keeps the relationship adversarial.  Plus, as a model, it does little to resolve the immediate and near future impact of a global population of billions that urbanization is addressing on a large scale through ecologically adaptive features.  Across the long run, if global population levels and even reduces, sustainable society’s emphasis upon urban townships and eco-vills will become increasingly important.

Characteristics of an eco-vill might include a development/community of perhaps

• 20 houses ranging in size from 900 to 3600 square feet [five bedrooms and four baths, using 100 kilowatt hours per month as compared with a non-green home using 1000 kw/month, using wind and solar power with an annual power bill of three-hundred dollars for propane] with each house having a maximum budget of 250 kw/mo,

• smaller yards foregoing grass turf for grapevines, kiwi, gooseberry, plum or other

plants fitted to the climate,

• passive solar design, power-sipping appliances, earth tubes extending six feet underground for low tech geothermal cooling, thick walls and insulation, solar panels for hot water, water collection, and
• a community area, community wind turbine, orchard, greenhouse, ponds, 4000 square foot community garden that sells produce,  and sewage using worms and carbon material that then leaches into a constructed wetland.

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[i] John and NancyTodd, From Eco-Cities to Living Machines: Principles of Ecological Design. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1994.

The Sustainable Society Is Not The Same As The Living City

(See previous posts: "The Livable City Is Not The Same As The Living City" and "A Continuum Of Eco-City Models: A Brief Introductory Sketch")

A DESIRE FOR CITIES to be more livable in the face of increasing impact of degrading environmental quality have provoked a shift in urban design toward “sustainability” or activities that improve livability by prioritizing attention to environmental quality.  While sustainability can appear to be an obvious direction and is generally accepted as a rational direction, it is often challenged as lessening human quality by having to give up comforts to appease environmental demands.  Sustainability efforts, such as pollution control, are broadly resisted as an overreaction by environmentally oriented special interests.  Therefore, “sustainability” describes a variety of models that range from a limited separatist accommodation to ecologically-integrative models.  Interestingly, whether separatist or integrative, current models are in agreement that the city-form as separate and unnatural.  And this underlying perception of the city as a machine can misdirect efforts to achieve sustainability. 

The sustainable society is an environmental movement strategy that aspires to address environmental concerns by breaking up the city into smaller living and working units.  This is like new urbanism, but it is an outgrowth of an emphasis upon “sustainability” rather than upon a more human-scale comfortable livability.   It aspires to modify urbanism to produce interconnected villages.  The overall landscape would take on a natural appearance with green space.  The emphasis is more upon local and small and organic, recycling, simpler (less consumptive) lifestyles, green space, and expansion of outlying uninhabited landscapes.  The sustainable society is ecologically oriented and aspires to be less intrusive upon the non-human landscape.  There is an overall aspiration to be organic and to accomplish a large-scale change, with a strong emphasis on the region, and particularly on the bioregion, and not just the city.

While environmentally sensitive, the sustainable society is not broadly shared.  Its directive has come from the environmental movement and is on the fringe of urban planning.  Unless one defines “comfort” from an Earth-centric environmental value-set rather than from material consumption, the sustainable society seems restrictive.  The sustainable society models tend to be dualistic and inflexible, envisioning contemporary society as either under the control of private (corporate) interests or a chaotic sprawl. 

In The Great Turning, David Korten describes a battle between the “empire” and an Earth community[i] as an either-or choice. Essentially, Korten argues for a complete overturning of contemporary post-industrial society because he envisions it as is fundamentally destructive at its core.  For Korten, the most needed changes involve overturning economic structures such as an end to private interest corporations and a redistribution of wealth, along with more environmentally-specific changes stressed by other sustainable society models such as increased public transportation, reduced consumption, compact communities, and environmental rejuvenation.  For Korten, it would be naïve to presume that the post-industrial economic strategy would intentionally shift from an exploitive environmental strategy to an integrative strategy.  And even a more compromising environmentalism envisions a dualistic struggle between post-industrial culture and nature.  However, it might be naïve to presume that in a now peopled Earth, there is a new option that finds crucial economic profit in integrative environmental technologies and services, and that this process might drive a blend of personal interest that employs and supports large populations that increasingly might serve a public interest in optimizing both settled and uninhabited landscapes.

Even for the most separable, exploitive model of human habitation, the more environmentally specific components of sustainable society models offer valuable design elements that can be directly incorporated or modified to practically address environmental dilemmas.  Chip Ward[ii] describes features that might be emphasized in a sustainable society: Unbroken green with grids of roads and fences fading away, sustainable farming, wind farms, solar farms, retreats, spas, green belts, regenerated wetlands, river valleys as corridors between huge habitat reserves across the continent that also provide respite from city while continuing to conserve biodiversity, maximizing public transportation, lawns as rare and replaced by native plants, strong regulation of urban sprawl, and cities become more attractive with parks and activities.

Richard Register[iii] emphasizes the value of features of sustainable society models but also looks somewhat more positively at the city, identifying a functional quality to the emergence and ongoing development of the city rather than the city as something to be eradicated.  For Register, a blend of sustainable society features with urbanism might include:

            urban life fitted to location and climate,

            radically de-emphasizing the auto,

            "necklaces" of separate towns,

more people work in same area as they live,

rivers removed from underground with arcades along watercourses,

parks, orchard, playgrounds, gardens, rooftop gardens, greenhouses,

buildings with terraces, mixed use, roof top cafes.

foot and bicycle paths.

downtown living with work places for non-commuters,

transit shelters: bus, trolley, street car travel,

no car parking downtown,

solar collection and windmills,

streets for human activity, auto street made narrower,

south facing buildings with greenhouses/ backyard gardens,

lawns refigured,

recycling approaches 100%,

more food produced locally,

less TV, more neighborhood socialization, and

tree planting and harvesting of crop-producing trees.

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[i] David Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, San Francisco: Berret-Koehler, 2006.

[ii] Chip Ward, “Rewilding America: The Froggy Love-Tunnel Vision Quest” [www.commondreams.org/views04/0514-13.htm].

[iii] Features of eco city are adapted from Richard Register, “EcoCities, Making cities sustainable is a crucial challenge,” in Living With The Land, Winter, 1984, p. 31, and from In Context, A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture, 1985, [www.context.org/ICLIB/IC08/Register.htm]. See also, “Building ecocities: An interview with Richard Register, January 2000, a three-part series in Ecotexture, The Online Journal of Ecological Design, www.ecotexture.com/library_eco/interviews/register1a.html   

The Livable City Is Not The Living City

(See previous post: "A Continuum Of Eco-City Models: A Brief Introductory Sketch")

THE LIVABLE CITY is the predominant public post-industrial alternative model, while the “separable” city is the actual model.  There has been long-standing design interest in “livable” cities, and more recent public interest and support for livable cities.  The livable city is primarily a large-scale professional redesign of urban and regional space to make it energy efficient and enhance the quality or “livability” of the city.  The primary emphasis is upon “decongesting” traffic, improving air and watershed, and expanding recreational green space. The livable city is environmentally sensitive, but not ecologically oriented.  While there is interest in “green” technology for its efficiency, there is less interest in a “green” values-set, because there is less commitment to an ecological perspective that includes human life.  Human life is still separate.  The focus remains primarily upon being more “humane” than ecological.

The quality of urban life is the primary focus, and urbanization is perceived to be a cultural process rather than a natural process.  Environmental progress is slow because the focus is on costly, large-scale changes in the built infrastructure that require municipal and regional cooperation.  Design is predominantly large-scale redesign that is directed by planning and architectural expertise.  Transformations affect large physical areas such as central city and industrial parks and processes such as modes of transportation and watershed. 

“New urbanism” reflects an effort to improve personal and family life by creating townships where most everyday activities such as work and home and education and civic activity and recreation are all in close proximity.  Proximity is seen as positively decreasing the congestion and pollution caused by urban transportation.  However, the primary focus is on enhancing human scale interface in urban areas where life can seem impersonal and alienated.  There are efforts to be eco-sensitive as an aspect of improving the quality of residential life.  And there is an important focus on urban residency rather than mobility and transitory relationships.  While aspiring to be a return to human-scale, this “local” effort is really a large-scale effort because it essentially builds a new community.  And while new urbanism has created actual communities, it is not widespread, due perhaps to the cost of such change and lower public interest.  And perhaps more importantly in the face of rapidly expanding global urbanization, it acknowledges the inability to planning to control the city, but sees this as a limit rather than sees the post-industrial global process as have functional aspects that are active on both immanent and large scales.

The general model of new urbanism[i] is important for its attention to human-scale and involves

a neighborhood with a community center,

a five minute walk to resources,

a variety of dwelling types’

shops on the edge,

close by playgrounds and school,

parking in alley, and a formal neighborhood association.

Looking at a larger livable city, The American Institute of Architects list ten principles for livable communities:[ii]

1.   Design on a human scale,

2.   provide choices in housing, shopping, recreation, transportation and

      employment,

3.   encourage mixed-use development to create vibrant, pedestrian-friendly

      and diverse communities,

4.   preserve urban centers to help curb sprawl,

5.   vary transportation options including walking, biking and public transit,

6.   build vibrant and welcoming public spaces,

7.   create neighborhood identity to enhance a sense of place,

8.   protect environmental resources by balancing nature and development,

9.   conserve landscapes such as open space, farms and wildlife habitat, and

10. design excellence as the foundation of successful and healthy communities.

Similarly, the Congresses International Architectura Modern [CIAM] list ten Principles of Intelligent Urbanism[iii] which describe livability of cities:

1.     a balance with nature

2.     a balance with tradition

3.     appropriate technology

4.     conviviality

4.1  a place for the individual

4.2  a place for friendship

4.3  a place for householders

4.4  a place for the neighborhood

4.5  a place for communities

4.6  a place for the city domain

5.     efficiency

6.     human scale

7.     opportunity matrix

8.     regional integration

9.     balanced movement

10.  institutional integrity.

The livable city is the primary current working model, and it derived from urban planning rather than from the environmental movement.  “Suatanability” is a very recent push, but still oriented on green technology and recycling for “livability” far more than for ecological integration.  Certain aspects such as modifications of mass transportation and regional planning for water and air quality are the predominant accomplishments that have occurred to a minimal degree globally, but that are present as useful demonstration projects.  Importantly and yet limiting, the focus is on people rather than environment with the objective of increasing the quality of human life or “livability.”  Green space is valued both for park-like human recreation and buffering open space and to a lesser yet increasing degree as a chemical recycling process. 

The variety of “livability “principles sketched are representative of an approach to cities that is definitely increasing globally.   The overall appearance of the city does not necessarily change.  Core environmental features are primarily technological and include:

alternative fuels for mass transportation,

redesigned mass transportation to reduce emissions and personal transport,

passive solar and efficient heating and cooling and insulation, and

recycling.

By far the most popular world example of the livable city is Curitiba, Brazil.  Rather than move toward smaller communities, Curitiba has grown from 150,000 people in the 1950s to 500,000 people in 1965 to 1.6 million in 1994.  Young architects in the 1960s, thinking about the environment and people’s needs, approached the mayor and made a case for better planning.  The mayor sponsored a contest for a master plan, debated responses with the citizens and turned over comments to the architects.  The focus that was different was upon rehabilitating built-up areas rather than spreading the city outward.  There was resistance from shopkeepers with proposals to turn the shopping district into a pedestrian zone.  After a thirty-day trial, other shopkeepers asked to be included. 

Public transportation was modified so that now 70 percent of commuters use it.  Plexiglass tube stations allow shelter, very low fares, private ownership that keeps part of the fare and gives the city part for roads/terminals, faster loading and unloading and noticeably cleaner air, access to buses though all of the city, and express bus lanes that move at fast as subway cars on radial routes.   There is 25% less congestion in Curitiba than in similar-sized cities.  As much as two-thirds of daily garbage is recycled by dividing waste into organic and inorganic only.  Trash can be exchanged for bus tickets and local food, and the trash goes to plants where it is sorted and sold and provides employment.  Builders get tax breaks for including green areas.  Open space has drastically increased from 5 square feet in 1970 to 559 square feet with 16 new parks and 1000 plazas throughout the city.  There are 341 industries involving Fiat, Pepsi, and Volvo and environmental laws do not slow industrial development. Adult education has been enhanced through mobile training centers.[iv]

The values that are operant in Curitba are important to consider.  Various general design elements that contribute to the success of the city and the local state include:

people first/ “humane urbanism,”

non-partisan,

public-spirited and eco-efficient,

integrated urban planning component: IPPUC laboratory,

visions/design/creative innovation,

cheap solutions,

efficiency of transportation [encourage public transportation],

land-use planning,

minimize downtown traffic,

encourage social interaction by providing more leisure areas and pedestrian zones in the center of the city, and

environmental health.

Comments by Jamie Learner offer an important vision in looking at the role of the environment in urbanized human life:[v]

*

There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree. i

*

The dream of a better city is always in the heads of its residents.  Our city isn’t a paradise.  It has most of the problems of other cities.  But when we provide good buses and schools and health clinics, everybody feels respected.  The strategic vision...leads us to put first the priorities on the child and the environment.  For there is no deeper feeling of solidarity than that of the dealing with the citizen of tomorrow, the child, and the environment in which that child is going to live. I

*

There is no endeavor more noble than the attempt to achieve a collective dream.  When a city accepts as its mandate its quality of life; when it respects the people who live in it; when it respects the environment; when it prepares for future generations, the people share responsibility for that mandate, and this shared cause is the only way to achieve that collective dream. ii

*

The city of all of us ii

*

...cities need to be rediscovered as instruments of change. iii

*

The city [Curitiba] has become more intelligent and more humane. iii

---

[i] Selected aspects for a new urbanism neighborhood [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_urbanism]

[ii] The American Institute of Architects [www.aia.org/liv_principles].

[iii] Congresses International Architecturea Modern (CIAM) ten Principles of Intelligent Urbanism [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Intelligent_Urbanism].

[iv] Donella Meadows, “The best city in the world? Making a solid case for better urban planning,” Good Medicine, Fall, 1994 and [www.context.org/ICLIB/IC39/Meadows.htm]. See also, “Orienting urban planning to sustainability in Curitiba, Brazil,” [www3.iclei.org/localstrategies/summary/curtibia2.html] and Sustainable Communities Network Case Studies, “Brazil, Curitiba’s “voluntary sustainability,” [www.sustainable.org/casestudies/international/INTL_af_curitiba.html].

[v] Jamie Lerner quotes are from: i.  Donella Meadows, “The best city in the world?, Making a solid case for better urban planning,” Good Medicine, Fall, 1994 and [www.context.org/ICLIB/IC39/Meadows.htm], ii.  “Orienting urban planning to sustainability in Curitiba, Brazil,” [www3.iclei.org/localstrategies/summary/curtibia2.html], iii.  Sustainable Communities Network Case Studies, “Brazil, Curitiba’s “voluntary sustainability” [ www.sustainable.org/casestudies/international/INTL_af_curitiba.html].

A Continuum Of Eco-City Models: A Brief Introductory Sketch

When we look at environmentalism, we have a broad array of approaches that appear to cluster on a continuum that ranges from Earth-centric emphases on one end  to anthropocentric emphases on the other.  In future pieces, we will look at the components of each of the models to see what they offer to an evolving living city model, as well as get a sense of the way in which each reflects a unique philosophical orientation that can then be compared to the components and philosophy of the “living city.”

FACING VERY REAL environmental dilemmas, a variety of responses have emerged in modern life.  They range from an intimate, low technological integration into remote and rural landscapes to be as non-intrusive as possible to a separation of human habitation from non-human landscapes with little regard to the impact of human activity because of a sense that human destiny no longer has much to do with nature.  When applied to the city, these responses form a diverse continuum.  They can range from a desire to completely dissolve the city, break up the city into smaller and more “humanized” settlements, make the existing city more efficient and less consumptive, or have the city become a place where culture is separate from nature.

Beginning on one end of a continuum with an Earth-centric model and going to an anthropocentric model on the far end, these responses might be generally categorized as follows:

a feral “radical green” immersion that involves living off the land, accepting discomfort as essential for intimacy, avoiding modern technology and honoring hand-built craft, foraging and hunting and/or gathering, being nomadic, and aspiring to be politically anarchist; 

a sustainable eco-vill—off the grid, recycling everything possible, emphasizing local action, alternative technology, oriented toward a social co-op network and being food/energy-oriented;

a sustainable society—potentially urban townships, community action, cessation of specific practices such as animal agriculture and pets and feeding wildlife and industrial plant agriculture, a value for simplicity, enhanced human freedom/expression, a bioregional vision, activism to rewild landforms—emphasizing unsettled “corridors” that connect unsettled landscape and the expansion of unbuilt landscape, and hi-tech alternative engineering;

a livable city—attending to comprehensive management of resources, conservation to enhance airshed and watershed and food quality, expansion of quality green space and reduction both of brownshed (abandoned or undeveloped property) and greyshed (industrial properties), specific emphasis on “greening” both home and commercial architecture and industry to dramatically increase energy efficiency, efforts to “decongest” transportation by improving mass transit and a closer approximation between work and home through community developments such as “new urbanism,” an overriding goal of enhancing the quality of life;

and

a separable city—wherein uninhabited landscape is a backdrop that is considered inactive wasteland without use and existing for human use and recreation, with human destiny envisioned as now technologically-evolved beyond nature and/or even beyond Earth or spiritist, anthropocentric in the sense of all priorities being human-centered with no standing to the non-human, emphasis upon urbanization as the built environment rather than on inhabitants, resolving dilemmas through technological solutions, environmental concern as hysteria or delusional, Romantic nostalgia, with development being synonymous with comfort and culture.