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.

*

And yet, the way cities are built, the logic of their internal functions and their connections with resources and natural environments are virtually ignored.

*

–they’re not seen as potentially whole, living organisms.

*

....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.

*

The city must gather people for some worthwhile reasons or it would not persevere these hundreds, even thousands, of years.

*

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].

The Living City: An Overview

THERE ARE TWO major changes that are profoundly transforming contemporary human life.  First, the city has become the predominant global human habitat and global urbanization continues to increase.  And second, the most urbanized person now experiences direct feedback of increasing environmental degradation to the point of being a public health concern rather than as something that is only degrading distant, uninhabited landscapes.  At first glance, increasing urbanization and increasing environmental degradation can make the city appear to be at the vanguard of the destruction of the Earth ecosystem and be self-destructive as well.  However, there is an emerging sense that the “problem” of global urbanization is at the vanguard of nature, and that it is creating an opportunity for integration with the larger Earth ecosystem. 

While urbanization is accepted to be occurring within a natural universe, cities are envisioned as artificial intrusions that have become irrevocably separated from wildness.  However, our most rational scientific measures find human life deeply lost in infinities of wildness, making it increasingly difficult to describe human life as separate from wildness.  And looking with the lens of geological time, there is an emerging sense of the city as being still very young in the history of the Earth rather than over-old and mature.  And in everyday urban life, direct experience of environmental degradation revisions nature as coming inside the city rather than being described as an increasingly distant, shrinking process. 

There is a very new sense of the city as being natural and even wild, not unlike like a young river ecosystem that can seem more deconstructive than integrative.  And perhaps most surprising, there is a new sense that an ecologically adaptive living city is already operant within the ecologically destructive “separable” city.  In fact, there is a new sense of the city-form as being an inherent ecological adaptation to integrate a global human population of billions into the larger Earth ecosystem.

Degrading environmental quality that is provoked by global consumption and waste can appear to distance us from nature.  Increasingly, it is doing just the opposite.  Now in a “peopled Earth,” “nature” in the form of environmental quality is no longer “out there.”  It comes inside the city as it has always done, but it is no longer masked by the capacity of once vast distant frontiers to absorb degradation or at least displace degradation. 

Surprisingly, the degrading environmental quality that seems amplified in the city is not the city-form.  There is a process that is inherent in cities that always “softens the grid” that is environmentally adaptive.  The authentic environmental problem is a longstanding strategy rather than a structure or a place.  Components of this pioneering strategy, such as “separation from nature” and “exploitation/extraction,” now create a global public health problem that is already life threatening for billions of people and that is rapidly degrading the Earth ecosystem.  Pioneering has been a process of natural adaptation, exploiting vast physical frontiers brimming with stored material resources. This longstanding strategy of pioneering that has been successful as measured by population growth and increased lifespan.  But the successful “peopling of the Earth” requires a transformative, renascent shift in strategy to optimize health.

Urbanization has been erroneously envisioned as an expression of this strategy.  However, the global drive toward the city is an intuitive, natural response to meet the changing conditions of a “peopled” Earth.  Urbanization offers a way to absorb the global human population of billions, to then reduce this population and to use resources more efficiently as population density increases.  In fact, urbanization overrides the exploitive strategy and has begun to accomplish functional environmental changes that intentional efforts such as legislation, education and the environmental movement have failed to match.  For example, urbanization reduces the rate of population growth to such a degree that the global human population may be less that it currently is by the end of the 21^st Century.  And the city-form can potentially reduce consumption though efficiency as well as effectively recycle waste in ways that are valued by its inhabitants and that optimize human life. 

Combined with an exploitive strategy, the rapid rate of global urbanization, rather than urbanization itself, does amplify global environmental destruction.  Global urbanization is also producing movement toward a new strategy of residency that favors integration with the larger Earth ecosystem rather than it’s exploitation.  Without planning, the everyday actions of urban migrants soften the hard urban grid to reveal an ecologically adaptive process that can be enhanced.  Across time, it is possible that cities might become ecological “arks” rather than separable fortresses that are integrated into the larger Earth ecosystem, that produce rather than consume resources, and that optimize global biodiversity.

Environmental degradation is now accepted to be a priority problem to be addressed in contemporary life.  Increasing priority is directed toward “green” technological solutions to lower the high metabolism of cities to create environmentally sensitive livable and sustainable communities.  This seems rational and appropriate, but it reflects a strategy remains primarily a strategy of separation from nature.  Cities can be environmentally sensitive, but when they are envisioned as artificial intrusions, they are deemed to be incapable of being a natural ecosystem.  Rather than integrate with the larger Earth ecosystem, the solution remains largely an internal technological one.  Cities are sensed to be finite machines created by technology.

Approaching the city as a machine that can be technologically fine-tuned is being challenged.  To “green” architecture and transportation and recycle, and to continue to exploit as if separate will not be enough.  “Green” technological responses will certainly need to continue, but they need to serve a more appropriate strategy.  An exclusive technological response to fine tune an urban machine may look like it is doing something but it can only compensate for degrading quality and may even threaten sustainability across the long run.

Environmentally sensitive communities are not the same as ecologically integrated communities.  Rather than a finite machine, the city is being explored as having always been and continuing to be an infinite process that is natural and that already has ecologically adaptive features that can be enhanced.  The city is being explored as a natural process and, more specifically, as an ecosystem because this is what both our direct daily experiences and scientific measures are saying.  We experience immediate eco-feedback when we either support or destroy.  And in just beginning to come face-to-face with the environment, we have begun to see some of our own actions as important adaptive responses.  And we begin to discover that the city-form is not primarily architecture, but rather is a process of habitation that essentially designs cities far more than our intentional efforts, and that might be enhanced.

Facing the decline of vast material resources, we begin to open a new natural “frontier” in the process of global urbanization that we have believed to be the antithesis of nature.  We have to invent very little.  We have myriad green technologies that we can tweak and improve.  Our greatest physical technological dilemma involves finding a way to get the technology into the expanding infrastructure in the near future to match the rapid pace of urbanization.  But our greatest design dilemma involves developing our emotional technology that uncovers the longstanding nature of human nature and its contemporary adaptation—the city-form—that has been masked by vast resources now depleted.

The conditions of existence of a peopled Earth transform the fundamental strategy from extraction of material resources to integration with the larger Earth ecosystem.  In our efforts to integrate into the larger Earth ecosystem, we have nothing to recover, nor do we have to return to a previous stage of development.  Throughout human evolution, there have been transformational leaps in our vision and actions when we have uncovered an enduring reality that has been proscribed by our beliefs.

An ecological renaissance is just beginning that aspires toward integration into the Earth ecosystem.  And because it is so profoundly transformational throughout the culture, a renaissance requires time.  The word ecology is still very fresh, and our conscious eco-literacy only barely begins to include human life.  Perhaps the greatest discovery is that people are nature.  Because of beliefs that have centralized human life in nature or even separated human life from nature, the spontaneous migration of human life toward the city has worn the mask of being a flight from nature.  But a dramatic shift in human migration toward the city is itself creating enough pressure to part the veil of our ignorance to reveal this migration to be an infolding of nature, a natural and even wild process.  The city is beginning to transform from fortress to habitat.  While the rate of urbanization grows and global population continues to grow, the rate of population growth is beginning to decline.  Like a wild young, destructive river, the city is maturing very slowly but functionally toward a dream of fittedness.  In the contemporary moment, all human activity is enduringly wild and young.  While difficult to gasp, a sense that cybernetics, plastics, aircraft, industry are wild will reflect an advancement in human perception rather than a backward step. 

Paradoxically, to resolve our environmental problem we need to identify that which is not a problem.  We need to explore the city as we might explore a forest.  We need to look for that which is not wrong in the city—“diving” with a new openness into that which is already ecologically adaptive—and aspire to enhance it.  We shift from a disease or disorder or problem orientation to a health orientation.  We are very good at defining problems, but very limited by our biases when it comes to describing our health.  We will discover that we have the same health goal as the Earth ecosystem—optimization—and that we are an ongoing, inseparable, wild expression of the development of the Earth.

The Living City is an exploration of the beginning of a renaissance in our view of human nature.  It is a vision of

·      urban life as inside a vast biospheric and interstellar wilderness process where wildness is the primary creative dynamic rather than inside a global landscape where wildness is reduced to fading remnants; 

·      urbanization an expression of this wilderness process rather than as separate and artificial intrusion upon nature; 

·      an enduring human wildness as continuing to be the primary design force even in the post-modern era where it has seemed to be impossible;  

·      a people-positive habitat that optimizes human life by integrating with the larger Earth community rather than an Earth-centric model that aspires to restrict human activity as disorder; and

·       an optimal health orientation rather than a political or ideological movement of a special interest.

Hard-edged and listening only to words, the city-form wears the appearance of a glass and steel machine.  And yet, its essence is a fluid softness and vital aliveness rather than a hard grid.  Whatever its ultimate fate, the city flies forward as an expression of the Earth rather than as an artifice.  Beneath its hard appearance, the contemporary city-form offers an opportunity for eco-adaptation.  Integration with the larger Earth community will be a measure of our expanding intelligence and wisdom to uncover an enduring authentic wild state rather than a step back to recover a lost Romantic pastoral.

So come now and step inside the living city, one of the youngest and wildest events on Earth, and relax, and allow yourself to open a gateway where there had not appeared to be one, in a renascent view both of the city and human nature.

Why Did Cities Come To Be

WEARING THE APPEARANCE of artificiality and environmental decimation, the city is not separable from the rest of the Earth; it is an expression of the development of the Earth.  In fact, the city remains more ethological in nature—a process of natural behavior with evolutionary explanations—than sociological.  Culture, society and personality can appear to be separate and above the Earth ecosystem.  And yet, they exist as expressions of larger ecological themes of land use, resource production and consumption, and reproduction.  In a very real way, the human species continues to be an agent of the grasses, deforesting the Earth, maximizing seed production of grass species, and favoring temperate and structural characteristics of grasslands in the built environment. 

Seemingly domestic and artificial, the function of a city is essentially as a natural, ecological process—specifically, to adapt a global population of billions to the larger Earth ecosystem.  If it doesn’t appear to be adaptive, it is because human emergence is still very new in the history of the Earth and very wild rather than tame and domestic.  Global ecological decimation is not due to global urbanization per se, but rather is both a consequence of the rapid rate of urbanization that cannot yet keep up with its infrastructure and, more importantly, a consequence of a once successful exploitive strategy of pioneering that no longer fits in a now-peopled Earth with no vast physical frontiers.

The contemporary process of global urbanization is provoking spontaneous ecologically adaptive features that intentional environmental advocacy has failed to achieve.  The hard grid of the city reflects the longstanding pioneering strategies, while global urbanization is fundamentally a softening of the grid and reflects a drive toward a new residential strategy.  Perhaps the most notable example of relatively new adaptive features is a reduction in the rate of population growth that might result in a global population at the end of the century that is less than the current global population. 

Overall, there is a new emerging sense that cities come into being as natural and adaptive responses; that they an ongoing development in the evolution of the Earth rather than a separate event that is an intrusion in the larger Earth ecosystem, and that urbanization is an adaptive ecological process that is transforming more exploitive strategies.  Migration that is now toward cities rather than outward to exploit unsettled landscapes reflects spontaneous, intuitive efforts by people toward fittedness with the larger Earth ecosystem.  In a now peopled Earth with no vast physical frontiers, global urbanization reflects a transformative shift from an exploitive pioneering strategy to a strategy of residency that requires integration into the larger Earth ecosystem for sustainability.  The provocation for this change is not driven by a nostalgic desire “to return to the Earth.”  It is an issue of survival, and practical and economic.  And the evidence for this transformation is coming from our most rational measures of population and environmental degradation that begin to describe adaptive features resulting from increasing urbanization.  The implications of this new view suggest that given the intensity of environmental dilemmas that have risen to global issues of public health, it is critical to “get on board” to optimize these adaptive features in our environmental advocacy and legislation rather than try to erroneously treat the city as the poster child for the environmental enemy.  That which appears to be the environmental problem is, in fact, an ecological opportunity.

What cities will become is unknowable.  They are extremely young in the history of the Earth.  As natural processes, the city-form/urbanization is not completely controllable or intentionally designable.  The essence of a city is softness rather than its hard grid.  Dynamically, the city-form is natural and intuitive, and ultimately is more patterned randomness, but structured more like chaos theory than chaotic. 

[overview of longer article of same name]

A SAMPLE OF NEWER MATERIAL ALONG THESE LINES:

See Grimm, Nancy B. et al.  “Global change and the ecology of cities,” Science, 319, Number 5864, (8 Feb 2008), pp. 756-760:

Urban areas as hot spots that drive environmental change at multiple scales;

            Urban areas integrate natural and social sciences.

See Ash, Caroline, et al. “Reimagining cities,” Science, 319, Number 5864, (Feb 2008), p739:

            ½ world’s 6.6 billion people now live in cities;

            By 2030: 5 billion people in cities;

            Responsible for 75% energy consumption/ 80% greenhouse gas emissions;

            Positive: closer proximity to health;

            Negative: burgeoning urban slums [but compare with rural poverty];

            Pos/Neg: “sprawl” is also “resilient pattern.”

Future: urban areas produce own crops/ hybrid cars/ super energy of super-conductors and hydrogen energy;

Overall: a need for radical rethink of our concept of cities and their place in the global environment.

See Adam Kissell [on looking at the work of Brian Mcgrath], “On the origin of cities: Adaptive urbanism,” Australian Design/Review: Architecture and Interiors, 6/7/2009:

                        Approach the city as a dynamic urban ecology:

Urban ecology more than nature outside the city or natural pockets within—a complex system dynamics--and

Cities as “vessels of ecology;”

Design should lead to optimization;

Design beyond a single client—a broader multi-stakeholder;

Design that recirculates;

Design that looks at archaeology or city-thru-time—urban archaeology;

Design analysis that looks at “enclaves”—built and natural environments;

Design that sees “rapid flow”—pedestrian, goods, vehicles and how they flow together;

Design that expands “habitat”—both human and non-human;

Design that identifies “blockages” or impediment of flow; and

Design that looks at Darwin as well as Le Corbusier.

After “adaptive reuse” in UrbanOmnibus, some general terms come to mind:

                        Rewilding,

                        Participatory architecture,

                        Reconciliation ecology,

                        Reforesting cities, and

                        Urban “living rooms”

            Odds and Ends:

[Related to reconciliation ecology]: K. L. Evans, et al. “Independent colonization of multiple urban areas by formerly forest specialized bird species,” Proc RSoc, 276, (2009), pp. 2403-2410.

Green Technology: A Student Project

GREEN TECHNOLOGY is exploding.  From the birth of ecology as a social movement perhaps now forty years past, it can seem like we have made a few gains.  But when we begin to explore, we have made far more than a few gains.  Green technology has exploded and is almost beyond our capacity to keep up with the actual and the possible.  Go to the internet and search a term, and we suddenly have a website or blog with many other links, and each of those with many other links promoting the achieved technology or envisioning the possible.  We find that we have many new working applications and myriad ideas to apply.  As will be evident shortly, we have breathable buildings and the capability for vertical urban gardens and on and on, almost ad infinitum.

Developing categories of search words and specific links can get a better handle on what is occurring, and it can be a group student project.  A few possible categories might include: architecture, infrastructure, micro-architecture [house and work environment], transportation, agriculture (related to urbanization), personal, eccentric innovation, and “links.”  A project offers a document for others to use to access information and to begin to increase eco-literacy with an expanding list of terms that relate specifically to green technology.  It may also give focus to students looking for environmental vocations, such as developing “vertical urban gardens” that they may not have considered as a possibility.  And it may offer “seed ideas” that lead students to eventually produce new applications, and to find themselves in a broad community of others.  Very basically, it simply begins to reveal how many projects and ideas are out there.  I offer the following sample that I did a few years past as an example of what is out there, and it was almost endless then.  This sample also offers a simple format to which groups everywhere can add. 

 ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW

Breathable buildings [search “living city”]

Carbon neutral construction

“Clean” or filter air surrounding buildings rather than only inside buildings

Construction materials: recycling slag in concrete

Daylight panels to regulate heat

Design philosophy:

building for fifty years [Europe] vs. 12 months [USA]; building as naturally organic and so optimizing this dynamic; current buildings produce 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, 65% of landfill waste, and consume 70% of electricity produced; city center producing ¼ CO2 of suburb [Lincoln Institute of Land Policy]; Germans using ½ energy of Americans; urban rationalization and modernization orientation threatens local networks; USA 4.6% consume 25% of world resources [PBS.org, from design e2 DVD]; real sustainability and not just “lipstick” rain gardens or trees as “building parsley.” USA 5% of global pop using 22% of greenhouse gas emissions [32% CO@ due to transportation, 40% CO2 due to construction/ building operation (See Richard Moe on “preservation”)

Grass roofs

Green building standards; plus innovative standards:

e.g., required solar power in Barcelona for 60% of hot water

Green technology as profit vs. extra cost [Battery Park Design]

Integrated buildings, sharing resources

Lighting: motion sensors

Low income design for global projects

Solar panels; solar roofs [Austin Texas panels reducing the equivalent of 200,000 cars];

            Renting roofs for solar [Duke Energy]

Solar, passive

Solar plastics: “powerfilm”

Solar surfaces

Solar Wi-Fi Streetlight:  starsearchproject.com

Solar windows [each producing 80-250 watts: “RSI Solar”]

Steel container rooms: “SG Blocks,” “Quick Build,” *“Greentainer”

Water reuse; groundwater/rainwater reuse; LID; retention

MICRO ARCHITECTURE: HOUSE/WORK ENVIRONMENT

Appliances: efficiency; solar; turn off “sleeping” electronics; “energy star” heating and

cooling efficiency

Clothing:

Faucet heads, weather stripping, wrapping water heater, refrig. temperature, water temperature, etc.

Gardening: windows, “victory gardens,” micro greens,

Geothermal

Insulation: attic, insulated drapes

Lawn: landscape for wildlife certification; passive paths, cluster gardens, rain gardens;

Compost

Lighting:

Paint, eco

Paper: use recycled paper; copy both sides of paper; mugs vs. paper cups;

Paperless office

Printing: “Ecofont”—20% less ink

Passive solar

Passive house: air tight/ passive solar gain, people, electric heat

Preservation/ reuse: an “embodied energy” (in existing architecture) 65 years for a green,

energy efficient new office building to recover the energy lost form demolishing an existing building [Richard Moe, president, National Trust for Historic Preservation; in Christopher Hawthorne, “Green to the people, Low income housing and sustainable architectural materials” [http://kcet.org/explore-ca/web-stories/greeen-architecture/materials.php]; 35-50 years for new energy efficiency of home to recover the carbon expended during construction: Richard Moe, “Preserving building helps preserve the planet.” Planetizen [www..planetizen.com/node/36253]

Rainwater collection

Radiant heating

Recycled furniture

Solar roof tiles: “Solar PV”;  Sole Power

Sugarcane charcoal [save trees]: d-lab.mit.edu/resoruces

Toilets: efficiency

TRANSPORTATION

Bike pedal charger [e.g., cell phone from empty to full in 90 mins]

Bike trail systems

Bike sharing: Paris “Velib”; Washington “SmartBike”: Barcelona

Biofuels

Car sharing: Washington D.C.

Electric motorcycles: “Enertia” and “Empulse” [faster] at brammo.com

Free bus passes for public/corporate employees [Des Moines, public]

Hybrid vehicles

Hydrogen fuel

Hydrogen fueled bus

Light rail systems [Denver, by sales tax of 4 cents (?) per $10]

No idling policy for public vehicles

Pedestrianism

Priority parking for hybrids

Roads, energy generating[ Innowatted (Israel)]

Smart cars: e.g., Zenn [25-35 mp charge]; Fortwo, ARUP.com

Tele-working

Walking:  50% of all trips are less than three miles; 28% less than one mile

AGRICULTURE [related to urban]

Environmentally-friendly landscape design [David McDonald, Seattle]

 “Landscape ecology” [Harvard U Grad School of Design]

Lawn revision: till to absorb rain, “rain garden” of native flora, National Wildlife

Federation—certified wildlife habitat yard; 50,000 nationally

Food scrap recycling for free compost

Genetically-Altered Species:  More food: crops, salmon doubled in size; Less pollution: enviropigs—manure that doesn’t pollute as much, cattle that don’t produce methane in their flatulence; pharmaceuticals:  bananas and other plants producing vaccines [Genetically-engineered plants in 2 billion acres in 20+ countries

Micro greens [The Cook’s Garden; Thompson &Morgan Seedsman]

Organic farm/ truck farm network

Park planting of native/drought-resistant plants

Passive green space; GPR “green plot ratio”: tree 6, bush 3, grass 1

“Pockets of nature”: alleys, railroad tracks, sewage lagoons, neighborhood creeks, field edges

Rain garden in parks

Reconciliation ecology

Rural: 50 foot corridor from water; hedgerow vs. fence; “wildlife highways” [Montana];

Holistic grazing management [foraging]; Conservation Reserve Program; cellulosic vs, grain ethanol, “sinking carbon; promotion of small wind turbines on farms; Aldo Leopold Center For Sustainable Agriculture

Tree planting goals

Urban farm/ urban garden: Will Allen, Growing Power

Vegitated architecture: to mitigate urban “heat islands”

Vegitecture

Vertical garden

 Vertical farm

Wetland oasis vs. Mitigation “trade off”

            Environmental Law Insititute/ Sustainable Use of Land Program

            www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs/wrp.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Biodegradable products, policies to encourage use

certified green architects/ green realtors

City pools requiring solar heating

Cold water form deep lakes for air conditioning [Toronto]

“Complete Street”—seniors/disabled/transit users/pedestrians/cars/bikes/safe school

routes—curb on one side, landscaped median on the other with planters and granite seats. (See “pedestrianism.”)

“Eco-footprint” evaluation [Wm. Reese, co-creator of term]

Energy rebates for alternative energy projects/Federal tax incentives

Entrepreneurial “Incubators” for recycled design; investment funds [e.g., E+Co], venture

philanthropy, enterprise development [e.g., “Vision Spring”]

Environmentally-damaged sites: restoration of landfill, brownfields, waterfronts

[Andrew Blum, “the long view” Nov 19, 2008, Metropolis magazine (on james Corner, landscape architect]; Hudson Yards Development Corp;

Four day work week and tele-working policies

Geothermal incentives

Greenhouse gas emission goals [e.g., 10% by 2010,  80% by 2050]

Local Governments For Sustainability software package to inventory a city’s greenhouse gas emissions

Green space requirements [e.g., 48% of subdivision]

“Landfill mining” vs. garbage /”Waste transfer faculties vs. generic landfills

sort recyclables, de-manufacture or “deconstruct” electronics/appliances to reclaim resources vs. demolish, compost organics, capture leachate and methane gas, burning trash for energy

LED bulbs in city lights/stop lights; reduce street light wattage

LID goals [low impact retention of water, “bio-retention”]

Nuclear power

Pay for trash

Pedestrianism: e.g., Jan Gehl, Denmark.

Permeable asphalt parking lot

Prohibiting bottled water

Public sustainability coordinators

Recycled construction materials: glass into sand; asphalt singles and rubber into paths

Retrofitting suburbia: big box stores, malls, corridors [transp., pedestrian, greenspace]

Sales tax exemptions for energy efficient products/installations

Solar panel bulk purchase programs for households/businesses

Voluntary water conservation programs; storm water management [enhance stream

            quality]

Water recycling goals and incentives

Wind energy goals [Houston 25%, Albuquerque 20%]

PERSONAL

Lifestraw.com: cheap water filter

Mighty Light [cheap solar lamp]

One Laptop Per Child Project: affordable computers

INNOVATIONS

Illuminated umbrellas, powered by rain

Weed gardens, veneration of weeds

Watershed educator: outside the box

“Adopt the sky”

GENERAL WEB WORD SEARCH

Living city

Urban farm

Wildlife highways

Stanford University Institute of Design: “Entrepreneurial Design For Extreme

           Affordability

Andrews Experimental Forest, Oregon

Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, Oberlin

Earthshare.org

School environment lessons

American Institute of Architects Custom Residential Design Committee

“www. story of stuff”

www.servegodsavetheplanet.org

reconciliation ecology

adaptive reuse

breathable buildings

landscape ecology

certified green architects

bike sharing/ car sharing

smart cars

solar plastics film

recyclable products

compostable products

www.freecycle [recycle]

PBS.org—“design e2” six-part DVD on infrastructure/building design

SPECIFIC LINKS [that, in turn, have related links]

A Daily Dose of Architecture

Adaptiveresuse.com

*airoots

All About Cities

anArchitecture

Architecture for Humanity

Architecture—urbanism

Arch News Now

Archinect

Archinow

BLDGBLOG

Brooklyn Modern Center for Architecture

The Business of Green

The Center for Land Use

*City Fix [sustainable urban mobility]

*City of Sound

*Civic Nature

CoolBoom

Core 77

Critical Cities

Critical Spatial Practice

Daily Green

Design Observer

Deseen

Design Sponge

Design That Mattters

The Dirt

*DotEarth

Down To Earth

Earth Architecture

Earthfirst

Earth 911 [recycling centers]

Earth Island Journal

Ecoartspace

Ecoble

Ecopreneurist

Eco Fashion World

Ecogeek

Ecologue

Ecorazzi

Ecotechdaily

Eco Street

Eco Worldly

Environment 360

GLUE

Green For All

Green Daily

Great Green Goods

Green Line

The Green Loop [clothes]

Greenopia

Green Options

Green Patriot

The Green Room

Green Tech Forum

Grist

The Huffington Post

Inhabitat

Kids Against Pollution

Land+Living

*Landscape + Urbanism

Life Without Buildings

Live Earth

Living Cities

*metropolismag.com

The Next American City

Next Billion [sustainable business models]

Nomada

Nomadology

OSI Baltimore

Population Counts

Pruned

Putting People First

Resilience Science

The Sphere

Subtopia

Sundown Channe: The Green

Sustainable Design

Sustainable South Bronx

Tessellar

Treehugger

U.S. Green Building Council

UnBeige

UNEP [United Nations Environment Program]

Unhoused

The Urban Land Institute

Urban Palimpsest

URBAN TYPHOON

Urbanite

Urbanology

WebEcoist

Web Urbanist

Where

Wikia Green

Wiser Earth

Worldchanging

WRI [World Resource Institute]

Yahoo! Green

Yale Global Online