A Sketch Of Cities As Wild

TO ESCAPE FORWARD environmentally, the most needed technology to enhance global health will be a “philosophy of care,” an emotional technology, that underlies and determines/guides our actions and our material technology.  We have a plethora of material, physical resolutions.  This “emotional technology” in relation to global urbanization is different.  It involves revisioning the city as an expression of nature. 

As our eco-literacy expands, the important difference between landscapes begins to reveal crucial similarities that are far more important than differences.  The forest and the city share a core strategy.  In Finite And Infinite Games, James Carse describes infinite games as effusive and having no explicit end, no clear boundaries, no clear beginning point, with the intent of the game that of addressing threats to continue.  When viewed as a machine, the city wears the appearance of being a “finite game”—an “end game,” but the city-form is open ended, yes, like a forest or river or desert.

Our longstanding emotional technology approaches cities as over-old to the point of being detached and apart from nature [i.e., “built,” implying artificial, an end-product of civilization], and ecologically dysfunctional.  We tend to view events from an everyday time scale that may look back in time or forward a little more than two generations if that far.  From an everyday perspective, this view appears sensible.  However, seeing things from a perspective of geo-time, our extreme youthfulness in the history of the Earth becomes apparent.  By any measure, urbanization is a fresh event on Earth rather that over old, and immature.  Cities are immature rather than advanced.  While seeing events in geo-time seem impractical and/or philosophical, If we can see that cities are immature and just beginning, we might open a practical, immediate opportunity where before we only seemed to be approaching an endpoint.

 

As natural events, cities are unpredictable, and this unpredictability is amplified by their immaturity that makes them somewhat incomparable with established “mature” ecosystems such as climax forests and deserts.  For example, we know what an eagle or bear needs for survival, but what the city-form needs is more “naturally” vague.  And this amplified unpredictability is a central element in future urban design because it suggests that design must primarily observe rather than know.  Encountering the “ immaturity” of the city that we had described as being over-old implores us to “dive into” the activities of the city rather than design the city as if we know what is required.  In this sense, we discover a “fresh ecosystem” that we may have overlooked.

It is now broadly accepted that any city is incomprehensible and unpredictable in terms of fully controlling its development.  Go to the “starchitects” or “city planners” that are asked to resolve urban “problems,” and they implore us to first listen before we act.  And because the city is incomprehensible, it has been erroneous to approach the city-form as a machine.  As a result, the fundamental ecological nature of urbanization has been poorly described.  Seeing the city as alive rather than as a machine will point us in directions that we have never allowed ourselves to imagine.  Seeing the city as “alive” can begin suspect that there are elements in urbanization that are “natural” as well as erroneous, so that there may be processes at work that may enhance ecological adaptability or function.  

Finding a “natural process” in urbanization would offer design directives if it truly existed.  Cities have appeared to be so inventive as to be “beyond nature.”  But our best measures suggest that cities have always been very fragile (which is apparent in the archaeological record), and continue to be fragile.  In The World Without Us,[i] a speculation of what would happen if human being became abruptly extinct, Alan Weisman describes the rapid deterioration and impermanence of the “concrete,” seemingly impermeable, built environment.

The terms, “artificial” and “domestic” and “wild” and “culture” and “nature” and “human” and “nonhuman” are terms that describe real distinctions at work in the world.  Modern consumption appears to be artificial in terms of over-serving base needs, with, for example, perhaps 350,000 gallons of water needed to manufacture one ton of rayon, or 15,000 gallons of water being consumed daily by each American both directly and indirectly.  But these terms are, finally, not that desperate.  The terms are not helpful for innovative urban planning when arranged into dialectics of opposites.  Rather than discard them or choose one set over another, there is a value in revisioning these concepts, primarily by expanding them.   For example, there is a very real way in which the artificial expresses the wild.  The “eco-literate reality” is that these terms are on continuums, and are facets of the other rather than mutually exclusive, and interrelated and inseparable.  Appearing to be primarily a “built” environment, human settlements seem to be “hard” and artificial.  But “hard architecture”—built stock—is fluid and overturns at a rate that is similar to the replacement rate of trees in forest succession.  And the real essence of the wild living city is, finally, not hard architecture, but rather, the action of human life itself that continuously “softens” the hard grid.

Continued emphasis upon difference more than similarity impedes human integration with the larger Earth community.   Our definition of the term “wildness” has referenced qualities of remoteness and the archaic.  Described in this way, wildness can have little to do with modern human life.  However, this sense of opposites is misleading.  Our most rational scientific measures suggest that wildness is the central dynamic—the functional essence—of a cosmos in which we are deeply immersed.  As Geoffrey West argues, “Cities are just like creatures.  They obey the same metabolic laws that govern every organism.”[ii] 

Wildness is how the Earth and cosmos work.  To suggest that modern human life is subject to some other process suggests our immaturity and limits and biases far more than reality and maturity.  We live inside the comprehensive wilderness of the biosphere, that is, in turn, a minute facet of stellar evolution.  This challenges our sense of wildness being restricted to being a descriptor for a complex unsettled ecosystem that has clearly been reduced to a remnant.  It opens the possibility of an enduring inherent wildness in everything.   It implies that wildness is a dynamic to meet the needs of any species—the “needs” of being alive—including  Homo sapiens.  Outr very bodies will change, and leave our immanent bodies behind, and this is because we are both subject to and express the large Earth ecosystem across the long run of events.

By opening the concept of “wildness,” we can find it already operant in urbanization that appears to be the antithesis of wildness.  As an expanded expression of a naturalist, as an “urbanologist” who begins to approach the city as natural, the core wild task of a species is that of alertness and adaptation to the ever-changing conditions of existence can be seen as inherent in the city and as essential for long-term sustainability.  Inclusion of all human activity is the deep, intuitive heart of Henry David Thoreau’s admonition in his essay “Walking” that “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” and “Life consists with wildness.”[iii] 

In some very real ways, cities may even fit the heart of our traditional understanding of wildness.  As unpredictable infinite games, cities are like “wild” non-human events.  And cities can be both dangerous to live in and dangerous to the surrounding landscape. 

We might approach cities as unfitted because they are a relatively new event on Earth, rather than because they have evolved beyond a fit with nature.  In geo-time, cities are far too young to have evolved beyond nature.  In fact, cities can be viewed as still-crude, spontaneous efforts to adapt a global human population of billions to the Earth ecosystem that other models of human habitation, while important to continue, would not efficiently support.  

Cities might be unbalanced because they are new adaptations.  Perhaps cities are even biologically neotenic—retaining “juvenile” characteristics—perhaps because plentiful resources have not challenged development to fully mature until now.  It is not the city-form itself that is the ecological problem.  The city is wild and unpredictable.  But the city-from is an attitude container.  And its predominant attitude is a longstanding strategy based on separation and homocentrism—still one of pioneering rather than residency.  But now, the global human population is spontaneously migrating toward the city as a residence as a strategy of survival, and no longer outward from an exploitive center.  Wild, intuitive actions are overcoming nearly intractable beliefs of separation and the centrality of human life in the universe as farcical.   Finally, cities might be understood to not describe exclusive human enclaves.  Seemingly artificial and built and hard, the largest quantitative populations of urban areas are non-human.  And the intensive energy of cities can enhance these nonhuman populations.

In The Landscape Papers, Edgar Anderson writes,

If more naturalists would accept homo sapiens they would turn their attention more and more to the plants and animals with which he spends so much of his life: trees of heaven, squirrels, sunflowers, dogs, dandelions, cats, crab grass, English sparrows, gingkoes, weeds of all sorts.  We would take the time to learn the dynamics of waste lots in the city, of dump heaps, and of city parks.  We would know what is and is not practical in bringing country values into city landscapes.  More importantly, we could acquire a fellow feeling for these organisms with which we live.  We would accept cities instead of trying to run away from them, and in accepting them, mold them into the kind of communities in which a gregarious animal like man can be increasingly effective.[iv]

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i Alan Weisman, The World Without Us. New York: Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

ii Geoffrey West, “The living city,” CEOS for Cities, Conversations, CEO blog, 7.17.07, www.ceoforcities.org/conversations/blog/2007/07, the_living_city.

iii Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Nature/Ralph Waldo Emerson Walking/Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Beacon, 1981, pp. 95 and 97 respectively.

iv Edgar Anderson, The Landscape Papers. Berkeley: Turtle Island Foundation, 1976, pp. 83-84.

Cosmic Wildness: A View From The Abyss

THE ACTIVITIES OF modern, post-industrial, cybernetic life seem to have left wildness far behind—to be outside wildness and intrusive in the Earth ecosystem rather than remaining an expression of it.  And yet, it is remarkable that we continue to imagine that we have left wildness far behind. 

Perhaps since literacy emerged in human development, we have described human life has having irrevocably left a wild state.  In the 19^th Century, wildness was dangerous, in need of control and as a wasteland needing our use to activate it.   With a growing ecological perspective, wildness was revisioned in the 20^th Century as complex and dynamic.   Now, we look nostalgically “back” at landscapes and biota, and reference wildness primarily as “wilderness” that our 19^th Century perspective has reduced down to remote zones.

Now in the beginning of the 21^st Century, however, we have been challenged by our most objective measures that place us deeply lost in a cosmic wilderness still in creation.  In this vast cosmic terrain, we have barely appeared in its time-scale, and the Earth itself has been reduced to far less than a dust speck.  Now, we look at and measure the whole Earth as an ecosystem.  And we find the Earth ecosystem to be the expression of the evolution of one obscure star, and the Milky Way galaxy in a local galactic cluster that is interrelated with myriad other clusters.    The biotic Earth is not something in it own right, but rather, a niche where macromolecules can exist in the outer reaches of a star that is still in its own evolution.  The capacity to step out of this context or rise above it becomes farcical.

Still, our measures have not caught up with our much slower-paced perspective that continues to describe post-modern life as separate from wildness.  In our most “real,” rational scientific reality, human life occurs in the deep abyss of a cosmos that essentially operates on a strategy of wildness.  Now, when looking at “wildness,” we find ourselves deep inside a landscape of stars within galaxies that are inseparable from the dynamics of other galaxies, and all of those galaxies, perhaps within a tapestry of many universes—a “multiverse”—that are all based on a strategy of wildness—alertness to changing conditions of existence in a vast, ongoing process of creation.

So, when we look at a city-form, with its hard architecture and high consumption (“massive eco-footprint”), it can appear to us (with a 19^th Century or 20^th Century perspective) to be irrevocably lost from “wildness” as nearly the antithesis of wildness, and to many, of nature in general--artificial.  But, when we begin to look from a cosmic perspective, we begin to see both the impossibility of being separate from wildness and the reality that the city, cybernetics, astro-physics, and even plastic, are the expressions of the Earth ecosystem.  And we also begin to discover that they are not fundamentally “intrusions” upon wildness, as much as they are features of wildness—some maladaptive and some ecologically adaptive.

Everything around us and within us is a living miracle, down to every atom and wave.  The nucleus of each atom spins at perhaps 150,000 mph, and was born in generations of nuclear fission within exploding stars.  We sit in a “skyscraper” that seems remote from rainforests, but on a dust speck moving at many speeds through space:  the rotation of the Earth, the rotation of the sun around the galactic center, and the movement of the Milky Way galaxy through space at well over a million miles-per-hour.  Once presuming the center of the universe to be inside our skulls, we can’t even begin to make ourselves visible in the universe or to really describe the parameters of the cosmos.

Since literacy, our description of wildness itself has fluctuated wildly.  We have gone from referencing dangerous forces that we have had to overcome to complex resources that we now damage and abuse.  But since literacy, wildness has consistently remained either nostalgically or rationally on the outside of human life—now cultural rather than creatural.   This view is destructive and drives inappropriate design.  It is an attitude more than a reality.

Post-industrial, cybernetic culture continues to express the creatural; is totemic, talismanic.  The rich diversity of opinions—even in their irrationality in the face of information, or in either their narrowness or holistic reach, or in their scientific precision—and the rich diversity of interests and skills are wild responses.  The spontaneous, unthinking action of global urbanization is a spontaneous expression of wildness.  For all of the nasty eco-footprint that the city provokes, it is also accomplishing adaptive features such as a reduction of the rate of global population and decreased consumption of resources [primarily driven by population density] as compared to other forms of human habitation that every bit of nature writing, environmental advocacy, and legislation has failed to achieve.

Our astonishing technologies still crude and built from Earth elements and energies.  And all of our customs still archetypal, far more than personal—still mythic—and still fundamentally serving creatural functions of nutrition, shelter, territoriality, reproduction for continuance.  All of our eco-costly shopping and consumption is still gathering and hunting.  They are not that different from the magical thinking of First World societies that are extremely culturally structured—“domestic”—that tends to produce far higher homicide rates than post-modern societies.  Our bodies are still evolving in response to fundamental conditions of existence that are themselves still in creation.  Far more than leaving wildness behind, we are perhaps still neotenic—still immature and imbalanced—but richly wild. 

No matter of how much we aspire to degenerate modern life as eco-destructive (and we should as a eco-healthy measure of alertness), we are lost deeply in a cosmic Oceanus that operates on a strategy of wildness.  Were we to begin to really understand everything we do as an expression of the larger Earth ecosystem, we would begin to encounter adaptive features in that which we believe to be the antithesis of “wildness” that we might optimize. 

Being fond of unsettled landscapes such as rivers and forests and wild grasses and deserts, to begin to approach components of modern life such as urbanization as wild was a direction that I did not want to go.  But pressed to understand “wildness,” modern human life as wild, the context of Hubble’s “red shift,” and DNA, and quantum physics, and even exquisite flora/fauna orientations such as “the Wallace Line” or the implications of Darwin’s “Galapagos,” was unavoidable.  Unsettled landscapes and “post-modern,” “post-industrial,” “cybernetic” built environments are profoundly different.  But in the cosmic landscape where wildness is the core dynamic, differences markedly diminish.  And similarities between settled and unsettled landscapes can be found, especially ecologically adaptive features as well as similarity in such things as overturning of forest trees and housing stock. 

It is remarkable that we can imagine human life as having somehow leapt out of the process of the Earth, the sun, the Milky Way, the universe, and perhaps a multiverse of universes.  Not leaving wildness behind, we are likely gradually developing our eco-literacy that is still in its infancy.  We still do not know well how to say just who it is that we are, or where we are from, or where we are going.  Still, our eco-literacy is expanding. Intellectually, we read deeply in geo-time and have expanded our environment from a planet under a ceiling of stars to a universe of galaxies, and have even begun to knock on the possibility of a gateway to a multiverse.   And practically, having peopled the Earth with no vast remaining physical frontiers from which we can feel separated, we are more on the inside of the Earth ecosystem.  Now, human migration is primarily toward urbanization rather than outward, and environmental feedback nearly immediate. 

We find ourselves in a new, infinite context of nature where wildness is abyssal rather than relegated to dwindling remnants.   We begin to acknowledge that the ongoing conditions of existence continue to involve living in a wild state of alertness and adaptation.  With our widening view, we begin to find an inherent wildness in all our actions no matter how civil or domestic or even artificial that they may have appeared to us to be.  Finding this, we can begin to optimize those actions—those ecologically adaptive features of modern life—rather than aspire to remove ourselves from wildness, as if we could. 

We begin to understand that there is no way out of nature.  We begin to understand that this offers an opportunity, that the way forward is within, and that this way forward is renascent, not retro, and our destiny.  It offers a way to listen deeply and respond—to express whom we are, from where we come, and where we are going. 

It will appear apologist and dangerous to reference modern human life as wild, and to not reference “wildness” as nonhuman.  However, our stance of separation from wildness is no longer accurate, and such a stance is threatening to the fundamental health of the Earth ecosystem and human life to continue to design for modern life as if we are separate.

Balancing And Increasing Earth's Resources

A DISCUSSION OF URBANIZATION and environment focuses almost exclusively on resource consumption and pollution, with energy consumption by the built environment and transportation being the primary environmental locus for intervention.  Rather than an expression of nature, the city is envisioned to be like a vehicle that takes in energy and exhausts it.  Environmental actions are primarily technological—energy-reducing actions.  Thomas Berry encourages an expansion of our technological focus to a macro-scale or “the integral functioning of the entire complex of biosystems of the planet” instead of our emphasis upon the micro-scale or local scale.[i]  Designing for a micro-scale, we may incorporate green technology into larger structures that can deceptively negate a positive gain.  However, designing for the macro-scale, we need to examine our essential nature and revision our lives to be natural or ecological rather than just environmentally sensitive.

We need to continue to explore a conversion to green (“slurping-only”) architecture and vehicles and alternative transportation as a start, and to aspire to become energy-neutral and even energy producing as the cost of alternative technology drops [e.g., solar paint and hydrogen fuel and nuclear].   The city offers a technological opportunity because of its specialized technical skills.  Even without increasing innovation, we could incorporate existing technology to dramatically reduce our ecological footprint and even complement our use with the production of energy and recycling “pollution/waste” as a resource.

Increasing the efficacy of our technology primarily requires a non-technical vision.  Innovation that drives technology is essentially driven by an innovative vision of human nature.  We rely on technological solutions, but the heart of the solution is an avant-garde way of looking at the dilemma.  The key innovative non-technical design element will involve an overall orientation toward integration rather than toward exploitative extraction.  And this drive to integrate is driven by the experience of ecological inclusion.  We find that we are not simply “like” nonhuman creatures, but rather, we are creatural.  And that which we need to do does not need to be invented—it is already occurring automatically, and needs to be optimized.

The “automatic” functions of urbanization that impact positively on material resources that are not explicit technological actions first need to be recognized to then be capable of being enhanced. We can begin from a posture of strength and function.  For example, Richard Register notes that New York covers less land, uses about one-third of the energy than the Western average despite more extreme weather, has very few cars and much smaller square foot per person in streets/freeways/interchanges/parking structures/vehicles.[ii]  And globally, the popular sense of consumption as being nearly synonymous with comfort has begun to shift to environmental quality as “comfort.”  We begin to experience consumptive-based comfort as degrading environmental quality as well as making life seem frenetic and feeling like a half-life of going through the motions rather than being vital.

Green technology is not enough in itself.  Material technology alone does not challenge the vision of human nature to provoke a broad scale change.  With a sense of the living city guiding our actions, we begin to base our material technology on an emotional technology.  Material technology responds to a new sense of the city as ecological, and to increase our integrative actions and reduce our functional yet deconstructive actions.  And it expands our activities beyond the built infrastructure.  Myriad eco-friendly choices exist that involve a change in actions rather than a new technology.  Changes such as water reuse and recycled products, lawn care—rain gardens utilizing native flora, bike and car sharing and public transportation, no-idling policies and free bus passes and priority parking for hybrids, sales tax exemptions for energy efficient products, four day work weeks and tele-working, as well as extremes that explore possibilities that may even become the norm such as vegetated architecture [“vegitecture”] or solar paint or even illuminated umbrellas powered by rain.  Myriad “micro-changes,” such as favoring mugs over paper cups or bottled water or even using pizza boxes for seed gardens, represent the capability of positively modifying nearly every human action. 

Rather than technology, envisioning the city as an ongoing ecological adaptation prioritizes both affection for biota and landscape inclusion.  If we are separable, we will prioritize actions based on a strategy of separation.  Material technology is driven best by natural sensate experiences such as environment being walkable [e.g., “pedestrianism”] and by clean air and water and open space.  As evidenced in eco-vills, consideration of technologies such as wind turbines are, first, driven by an aspiration to be “ecological.” 

There are myriad “micro-eco-technologies” awaiting a vision of the “living city” that are evident in any Internet word search.  Solar plastics, smart cars, wildlife highways, bio-retention, urban farms, energy rebates, landfill mining, biodegradable materials and de-manufacturing represent a few of many micro-eco-approaches that are only just beginning to be described.  There is a natural evolution of building materials that is described as taking forty years for new materials to spontaneously appear as the norm. With a transformational view of the nature of the city as organic rather than artificial, new infrastructural materials might be expedited. 

Urban design can emphasize adaptive reuse.  It is not just new green technology that will “green” the city-form.  It is primarily how we use the materials that we have.  Adaptive reuse is typically applied to product design but it can be applied to everything built, including that which is popularly defined as the city—its architecture.  It is important to consider in building construction, for example, where new construction is estimated to consume forty percent of a contemporary landfill.  And new buildings replacing old buildings rather than restoring old buildings can also take decades to recover the energy lost in using new material.  It has been suggested that European design for new buildings tends to anticipate decades of use while American design tends to anticipate far less time before replacement.  And while they exist, buildings may produce 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, 65% of landfill waste, and consume 70% of electricity produced.  In Germany, buildings may use one-half of energy of American-designed buildings.  And an orientation toward “urban modernization” can threaten local networks and their participation in design.  Finally, building design aspects such as “landscaping” for buildings can become “green skirts” or “building parsley” rather than landscaping that produces resources such as “vertical gardens.”

“Adaptive reuse” can and is emerging to some extent without a sense of the city as a natural ecosystem, but it remains secondary.  A sense of the city as natural and even wild rather than artificial and maturing out of nature can prioritize adaptive reuse and drive an even deeper vision of the possibilities of the city.  Like a wilderness ecosystem, the city can aspire to completely recycle and find ways to increase energy rather than consume energy.  But rather than simply inventing a new technology, the city as a producer of energy and material will require an underlying vision of the city as an ecosystem more than as an artificial machine that only consumes external resources and that can “run out of gas.”  Total recycling will involve initial product design for recovery, increasing the value of “waste” to the point of payment for waste resources to value it, as well as efforts to produce resources such as energy and food within and near the city.

Along with an emphasis on adaptive reuse design, we can also look at developing habitat that can be altered by inhabitants.  The living city will also be optimized when urban activity and technology can be increasingly participatory.  Participation is essentially driven by an “emotional” process such as the wonder of immersion and inclusion rather than isolation that come from an expanded sense of identity.  The street grid and the lawn and food and personal use of water and energy are immediate points of interface that can incorporate a personal change that is not simply material but also emotional.

Importantly, the living city explores and borrows technology from all of the potential approaches to wildness, from the feral through sustainability.  But each “technology” needs to be “mined” for aspects that are functional in an urban setting.  For example, the functional efficiency of an eco-vill of single-family dwellings will not match the functional efficiency of a large apartment building.  But the values and the technologies of the eco-vill can be adapted to the denser urban built environment. 

Traditional areas within urban environments, especially built environments that have been traditionally consumptive such as suburbs and industrial areas and city centers, can be explored as potential eco-producers.  Elements within suburbs such as “dead malls” can be explored for retrofitting.  Rather than approach buildings in a piecemeal fashion, whole landscapes such as suburbs can incorporate elements of eco-vills and the livable qualities of New Urbanism as well as elements of sustainable society models and even denser urban habitation (e.g., that produce perhaps 7.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases in New York City as compared to a per person American average of 24.5 metric tons) to not only reduce consumption but also produce energy and food and material resources.  These efforts can be expedited regionally through “green” loans and lines of credit and public emission goals.  Green neighborhood coops that mimic the eco vill, participation in “cool cities” programs, more dwellings per acre, location of routine services that form a “walkable village,” bike paths, food production, lawn modifications comprise a growing list of thousands of existing green modifications that increase daily as these priorities grow.  

Again, from the perspective of the city as “living,” the overall directive for future urban technology is an integrative emphasis for the species-specific purpose of enhancing health.  The needed breakthroughs to optimize public health are not technological as much as they are psychological and cultural.  It is not the technology itself, but rather why we use the technology.  Rather than continue to try to integrate by solving a problem, we can aspire to enhance health to optimize human life.  Enhancing health is always a process of enhancing connectivity, and human health is just beginning to be understood to be, inescapably, as Thomas Berry states, “a subsystem of the Earth’s health.”[iii] 

Essentially, as residents in a peopled Earth, we are increasingly aware that urbanization is ecology and not just technology.  We have feared nature because to be natural meant to be primitive and to become natural meant to take a step backward.  We changed forever upon viewing Earthrise over moonscape.  The static globes and maps dissolved upon seeing the biosphere and we found ourselves in an animate living Earth.  And now in the contemporary moment where we people the Earth, we are directly experiencing our immersion in nature, and that the way forward is affiliation rather than isolation. 

Urban sustainability comes down to this: It is not primarily a technological response that drives sustainability.  The city can promote technological improvements to the degree that it can articulate an expanded eco-literacy that acknowledges an eloquence in all landscapes, affection or “topofilia” and “biofilia,” an inherent or “automatic” deep and complex functioning urban dynamic, usufruct, a sense of homeland and indigenousness, quality as comfort, self-as-landscape, subtlety, and affiliation with the Earth as human life as optimal human development.

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[i] Thomas Berry, “The ecozoic era,” www.schumachersociety.org/publication.html, 1991, p. 2.

[ii] Richard Register, “EcoCities: Making cities sustainable is a crucial challenge,” p. 5.

[iii] Thomas Berry, “The mystique of the earth,” Caduceus,Issue 59 [http://www.caduceus.info/archive/59/berry.htm.

Urbanization Reducing The Rate Of Global Population Growth

AN UNANTICIPATED ENVIRONMENTAL benefit of increasing global urbanization is the remarkable reduction of the rate of population growth that intentional socio-political efforts could not achieve.  Stewart Brand suggests that urbanization provides the global tipping point in stopping the “population explosion.”[i]  This decreasing rate of population growth may have an astonishing effect upon human development by eventually addressing the rapid growth of cities so that they gradually become more manageable.

Urban birth rates decline because the child that is an asset in underdeveloped countries becomes an economic liability in cities.  While this may seem to demean the child, the child in underdeveloped countries is valued as a social security resource rather than for purely intrinsic value.  A child in underdeveloped countries contributes to the reduction of available resources and increases competition for those resources rather than eases those economic pressures.  Further, this child personally experiences major economic and health barriers that compromise nutrition and life expectancy. 

All countries have lower rates of population growth than their 1960 rate.  An ecologically optimistic view is that global population may plateau at 8.4 billion (up from the current 6.9 billion) within twenty-five years, and potentially not reach a United States Census Bureau estimated population of 9.224 billion persons in 2050.[ii].  Globally, every 110 hours, a million more human beings are born than die,[iii] with 220,000 births daily.[iv]  However, the “exploding” population appears to be leveling off from a peak rate of 2.2% in 1963-64 to the current global rate of 1.14 %.  Ecologically optimistic views speculate that this current rate is anticipated to drop to .91% by 2020 and .46% by 2050.[v]  Less optimistic population statistics suggest a population of 13 billion by 2067 should the current rate of 1.14% continue.  The global population estimates vary from 7.5 billion to 10.5 billion by 2050. And eco-optimistic trends also suggest the possibility that the global population might decrease to 3+ billion people by 2150.

There is an “urbanization explosion” [rate of urbanization] that is reducing the “population explosion.”  It has been posited that there is around an eighty-five percent chance that the global population will stop growing before the end of the century, and a more guarded probability that the global human population may be lower at the end of the century than it was in 2001.[vi]  The highest rates of population growth are in developing countries, but developing countries also have the highest rates of urbanization that are likely to reduce population growth.  Also, the population is older, with the current percentage of persons over age 60 is anticipated to increase to 34% by 2100.[vii]

Stabilizing human population and having the majority of the population now shifted to the city may provide the opportunity to address the fundamental cause of urban blight—the very rapid expansion of the city through migration.  While the rapid rate of urbanization has created major ecological problems, urbanization itself might be seen as creating a concentrated opportunity to address ecological concerns more comprehensively than we have done in the past.

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[i] Stewart Brand, “Emerging technologies and their impact.”

[ii] “World population,” United States Census Bureau, [www.census,gov].

[iii] Annie Dillard, For the Time Being. New York: Knopf, 1999, p.109.

[iv] “anthrosphere,” [http://ess.gelogy.ufi.edu/ess/Notes/020_Intro_ESS/anthros.html]

[v] “World population,” United States Census Bureau.

[vi]  Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson and Sergei Sherbov, “The end of world population growth,” Nature, Vol. 412, Number 6846, August 2, 2001, pp. 543-545.

[vii] “Global population estimates are revised downwards,” Sept 01 2001, Stats at George Mason University, [www.stats.org/record.jps?type=news&ID+145].

Urban Design For Thriving Vs. Sustaining

DAZZLED BY VERY real achievements of material technology, design has the problem of succumbing to a focus on parts.  It is not unlike the fable of erroneously describing the elephant and misunderstanding it by focusing on its parts and never looking for the whole.  And in an ecological context, “looking for the whole” when looking at the city requires looking even further than the fable goes, to include the city’s integration with other events beyond it that shape it.   For example, new concepts such as the “ecological footprint” dramatically demonstrate urbanization’s huge consumption of external resources that threaten the internal urban landscape by diminishing the external landscape. 

Recently, there has been a constructive shift in urban environmental concerns, moving from “livability” to “sustainability” due specifically to degrading environmental feedback that is global in scale and compromising global public human health.  With sustainability in mind, environmental quality has become a more visible priority.  “Sustainability” implies a growing concern that environmental dilemmas not only limit the quality of life but also have become a threat if resources are not available.  

Positively, sustainability fits with the crucial shift that is occurring in cities, that of migration toward the city as a place of residency.  Sustainability is a natural concern of residents rather than pioneers.  Negatively, sustainability does not envision the city itself as ecologically adaptive.  “Sustainability” continues to be viewed as an essential environmental action, but it is envisioned as limiting human development due to costs of retrofitting infrastructure.  “Sustainability” in urban design is nearly synonymous with green technology.  In the intentional eco-vill, sustainability is viewed differently than in traditional urban planning and design.  There, traditional and alternative technology offer important adaptations, but they are secondary to a large objective, that of thriving in an organic habitat.   

Positively, sustainability challenges the city to be environmentally sensitive, but it does not challenge the city to be “living,” only less damaging.  Sensitivity to the environment identifies the environment as separate, rather than including human life and seeing human life as a natural expression of the Earth ecosystem as in a view of the city as ecological.  Excising the “disease of excess use” without a larger goal of thriving as a living system may lead to a redirection of consumption and often to increased consumption rather than reduced consumption.  In the name of sustainability, for example,  “green” architectures are promoted as more energy-efficient but that still use more energy because they are often larger structures.

As a major beginning point, thriving focuses on optimizing health while sustainability tends to focus on the problem.   We are good at identifying problems but we are very poor when it comes to identifying health.  We become so focused on problems that there is always the danger of seeing everything as a problem.  We do this with cities and miss their health—their adaptability—that offers us an opportunity.  We presume health to be the absence of problems when this is not the case. We tend to settle for surviving and compensating and define this as “sustaining.”   But there is no real optimal future in this approach.  Events can sustain for a time on life support, but not thrive and be healthy and endure. 

Design for the living city needs to shift dramatically to reach beyond traditional problem solving if it is to move from being environmentally sensitive to be authentically ecological.  While design and planning can be beneficial in any human settlement, thriving cannot be designed because design can never account for all the variables, and may overlook important ones by focusing on a problem such as increasing energy efficiency.  In the uncertain context of any contemporary “conurbation,” aspiring to solve problems presumes a degree of certainty that is both not present and not the way that a city-form ultimately develops.  Such design misses the inherent forces that have contrived the city and continue to design it in response to the changing conditions of existence.

Contemporary urban design tends to be problem solving or “solution-based.”  Design for thriving is design for uncertainty because it aspires to create options rather than solve a problem.  Designing-for-thriving tends to begin by “un-designing” or by exploring what we overlook.  Shifting from problems to opportunities requires a shift to explore existing inherent health and to then enhance it.  For example, to create satisfying housing in global urbanism, we might end up doing something radically different than creating comprehensive human-scale communities if we were to first explore what is happening in urban living that seems satisfying to inhabitants. 

Thriving aspires to exceed rather than reduce, to increase our options.  It aspires to look at the city from different and/or broader perspectives.  Thriving requires expansive thinking “out of the box—“thinking like a mountain” [i]—or in a “new key” to overcome the way that we overlook or even proscribe experiences that are not yet reflected in language[ii] to optimize perception.  Thriving is a natural perceptual orientation as conditions of living change and inhabitants look to new ways of adapting.  Degrading global environmental feedback begins to draw attention to creatural dimensions of human life.  And it is primarily occurring without intentional design or in spite of urban design.

We aspire to see a species such as eagle thrive rather than just survive or sustain as a species, or else the eagle really wouldn’t be fully alive.  We would not design a landscape for an eagle.  We would see what the eagle chooses and then try to optimize “an ecology of thriving.”  Were we to design an optimal landscape for urban inhabitants, we would begin by trying to describe an inherent urban health and develop literacy with regard to the components of a healthy city.  We would explore optimal, satisfying human activity patterns that are already operant that soften the grid as well as reframe the city as the living system rather than as a machine to see what this perspective might reveal.

Wildness in any species is focused on survivability rather than livability or sustainability.  And “survivability” really involves a focus on subtle thriving and optimizing rather than maintenance of the status quo.  Thoreau’s “Wildness is the preservation of the World” remains the prime directive for any species, and preservation is fundamentally a process of keeping alert to change, and an emphasis upon a strategy of integration rather than a strategy of exclusion/separation or a strategy that aspires to achieve permanent stasis.

A major problem with the term “sustainability” is the problem that nothing really sustains.  That which predictably sustains across the long run of events is change. Events are always in a process of succession in any landscape whether it is built or not.  In For the Time Being, Annie Dillard writes,

New York City’s street level rises every century.  The rate at which dirt buries us varies. The Mexico City in which Cortez walked is now thirty feet underground.  It would be farther underground except Mexico City itself has started sinking.  Digging a subway line, workers found a temple.  Debris lifts land an average 4.7 feet per century….  

Scratching under a suburb of St. Louis, archaeologists recently found thirteen settlements, one on top of the other, some of which lasted longer than St. Louis has. [iii]

If the city is organic and not mechanical, an authentic sustainability in the city can be different from sustainability in a rainforest or desert, but not an opposite.  Like “designing for a rainforest,” urban design should not be “easy.”  The city, like the rainforest, is multi-influenced and a complex process of succession.  Interesting, urban designers might visit designed rainforest environments in zoos to develop an appreciation of the difficulty of intentional design and its failure in those attempts.  In such zoo environments, most species are contained in small enclosures hidden by the design of a vast open ceiling, leading visitors on pathways through elaborate unwalled cages.  The rainforest design is primarily a display rather than anything approaching even a meager sustainable ecosystem.

In a discussion of the dynamics of the city, such accretions of human culture as described by Annie Dillard might be suggested as evidence that culture is both well developed and sustainable by building on top of the existing human habitation, and so deep in time so as to have become primarily cultural and no longer natural.   What tends to be missed is the enduring dynamic of change as the key design element, as well as human accommodation to the change rather than an unchanging human settlement through time.

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[i] For example, Aldo Leopold, “Thinking like a mountain,” A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949, pp. 129-132 .

[ii] Susan Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957 [1942).

[iii] Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, pp. 123 and 124 respectively.

The Urbanologist: A New Naturalist

The urban landscape offers a listening point for a new naturalist—an urbanologist—where heretofore there was a hard inorganic wall.

IN MODERN LIFE, we have two cities in each city—the one we perceive based on our beliefs and the one in which we might dwell.  We have the separable city that we believe in, and we have the ecological habitat in which we concretely live.  It is remarkable that we find it difficult to envision the city as an ecological event. Our illusion of “two cities” is like the Zen admonition stating that we see two moons, with our image of the moon veiling the living moon.  Immersed within an oceanus of nature, we have become astonishingly capable of believing that we look out at nature. 

To authentically design especially in the face of global environmental dilemmas, we need to see where we are before taking a step.  As we did not imagine air as a substance until very recently, we need to look at the city “impossibly,” to encounter what is it that we proscribe from our awareness.  As Thoreau did on Mt. Katahdin when he came to the realization that human life was “not the highest thing in nature, but merely one—admittedly important—part of it,”[i] we are beginning to ask,  “Where am I at?”  Then a gate begins to open that produces a renascent leap in human development.

Imagining post-industrial life as continuing to be an expression of the ongoing development of the Earth can seem to be the epitome of Romanticism.  It can also be criticized as a dangerous white-washing of the ecological destruction to fragile unsettled ecosystems that are in need of our attention and protection.  And yet, the absence of identity with the larger Earth ecosystem might perpetuate and even accelerate human activity that is destructive to both the unsettled landscape and public health.  In the face of very real scientific measures, maintaining a vision of post-industrial life as apart from nature may be the epitome of Romanticism. 

To shift from what we believe to that which is, we need to enter the dynamics of the the city.  What we need to do is be curious, and wonder about, and listen for grace in the city instead of approach it as a known and over-old phenomenon.  We find wildness, for example, in a river because we go looking for it there and anticipate its presence there.  Whether we resist it or not, our still-young experience of ecology has begun to tatter the veil we hold before the city.  When we begin to approach the city as we might approach a river, we begin to approach the city as if it has something fresh to offer us rather than as something completely known.  In the city, we stand to discover natural process at its core in a way that is not unlike our revision of unsettled landscapes from inactive wastelands to creative ecosystems. 

We might approach the city as we now approach a field of wild grass, creatively and more open-ended and without presumption that we know and understand it.  As we have tried to be naturalists in unsettled terrains, we might go now as new form of naturalist—as an urbanologist, a term that is still open and not restricted to planners or to something that is only cultural or psychosocial.  As urbanologists, we might begin to do something new, to include the human life in our subsequent accounts of the “natural history of the city” rather than simply describe the nonhuman events—flora and fauna, climate and geology. 

We cannot authentically design for an “eco-city” by attempting to solve a technological puzzle that is in need of our invention.  While it is natural and essential to be inventive, the city-form is already an eco-city in its most built form that is alive and responsive.  We can realistically go as natural species sapiens, which is to say, as that which we inherently and enduringly are, as “Earth tasters” [Homo, from the Indo-European root of ghom, from ghthm, a reference to Earth, earthling, and sapiens, a derivative of the Indo-European root of sab, a reference to taste].

We have responded environmentally to the city as if it were static and even more negatively as if it was a necropolis—a city of death—when environmental feedback now immediately and persistently presses back on us, saying urban space is habitat, Habitat, HABITAT. In imagining the term “city,” we might begin to associate it with the term “habitat.”  In the negative environmental feedback provoked by our consumption, we directly taste our inseparability in a way that we never did in the early industrial city when the world seemed to be an open frontier.  Our natural and very curious migration into now-diminishing vast physical frontiers can turn our curiosity toward a new frontier opening all around us.   Encountering this new frontier, there are positive adaptive features in urbanization, ranging from general features such as a reduction in the rate of population growth to personal experiences of human activity “softening” the hard infrastructural grid.  We would then begin to talk from the vision of continuums of habitats ranging from uninhabited to settled, rather than mutually-exclusive opposites of unsettled habitats and settled non-habitats.  Shifting to explore the city-form as a habitat would reveal a richer diversity of non-human urban habitat that would be expanded as well as challenging us to begin to look at human habitation as being on a continuum. 

As if entering a river ecosystem or prairie ecosystem, we aspire to explore the inherent, automatic, spontaneous design that is occurring in the city-form.  We begin to look for a process that is diversifying and softening urban space, and to consider enhancing this rather than impose a design on the city.  And we also explore the adaptations of nonhuman flora and fauna to urban space.  In their “Airoots” blog, Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove explore creative ways of beginning to experience the city and uncover automatic design.  They describe the “grid” of the city as the master plan and the “gutter” pushing against the lines of the grid.  They write of “the primal quality of New York. …It is this quality that seeps through its grid all the time and treats it for what it is—a convenience—not the maker of its identity.”[ii] 

Srivastava and Matias describe an approach to “experience” Tokyo--“the largest urban agglomeration” and “also the deepest”—by “diving” into its “depth” that is comprised of population and architectural density, signs, information, culture and history.  They describe Tokyo as dense and intense, yet quick and fluid.[iii]  They describe a functional process of automatic urban design in Tokyo as a “default model” that occurs globally and that is especially evident in developing countries, and that developed outside the planned center.  For example, urban planning in Tokyo developed the city center and provided transportation and water supply beyond the city center where it “defaulted” to local self-reliance.[iv]  Along with “diving,” there is the description of the draining of the city that refers to going under the city into the archaeology and topology/geology that is described as “driving” the city. 

A growing number of internet “blogospheres” devoted to urbanism and urban architecture explore in a more effusive, naturalist sense of the “edges” or architecture and urbanism.  They also aspire to coordinate conferences to revision urbanization, and interface with specific planning and architectural websites or are produced as exploratory websites of academic programs.  Whether biased or even inaccurate at times, the critical eye of this new widespread “urbanology” is to be something sought out as we encounter this new global urbanism and aspire to expand our urban eco-literacy.

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[i] Robert Richardson, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, p. 183.

[ii] Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove, “Manhattan gutter space,” [www.airoots.org].

[iii] Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove, “Tokyo diving,” [www.airoots.org].

[iv] Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove, “The Tokyo Default Model,” November 17, 2007 [www.airoots.org].

"Starchitects" Admonitions On Inherent Urban Design: A Sample

WE HAVE THOUGHT of the city-form as being artificial, or essentially as being a hard, mechanistic form that is above nature and that can invent its own conditions for existence.  Therefore, we have presumed that we could design a new “machine” or modify parts of the machine, and that this is what we would do to update the city to optimize it.   But the “star-architectural” philosophers and urban planner/thinkers tell us that it is not that simple.

The city is chance-like—a “culture of congestion” suggests architect Rem Koolhaas.  We cannot control the effects of our “solutions.”  Like all living processes, Constantinos Doxiadis suggests that the city-form is an “entopia,” building from the bottom up to fit with the conditions of the immanent landscape rather than building uniformly from the top down as if external to the local place.  It may be illusory to imagine that the city can become be a “perfected ecotopia” designed from the top down.

Appearing almost over-old, the city has barely appeared in the history of the Earth.  Further, the majority of its citizens might be living in a community built in the last fifty years.  Being this new, the city is both incomparable and incomprehensible in the sense of being completely knowable and predictable or reducible or designable.  And beyond being new, the inhabitants do not operate like cogs in a machine, nor is the inflow and outflow of resources uniform, which quickly becomes apparent in applied urban design. 

The city is essentially dynamic rather than static, so that what is detailed today is quickly modified by myriad factors.  Change continues to happen accidentally as well as from a variety of intentions that are neither uniform nor even competitive.  Accordingly, efforts to describe any model for a city are sensed to always fall short, due to the natural complexity of the city.   Due to complexity, efforts to describe a prairie or woodland also fall short, but the city amplifies the difficulty of prediction since it is far too young to have the stability of an established climactic, “residential” ecosystem. 

While essential, “urban planning and regional planning” are, in a very real way, oxymorons.  Restrictions and opportunities and design can be set, but a comprehensive end-goal design cannot be attained.  Looking at architectural and planning theory, there is a broadly shared sense of the city’s deep complexity that naturally modifies design across time.  This can be both a problem and an opportunity.  It is a problem of control, but it is an opportunity to optimize a rich, borad-based spontaneous design process.  The absence of uniformity in urban dynamics is also mirrored in professional urban design, where there is argument over the directives to be taken in design objectives and goals.

In testy metaphors, Rem Koolhaas suggests that the city-form is nature out of control.  This perhaps implies an opportunity for freedom, but perhaps more of a sense of threat.  Looking more explicitly, the “nature” that Koolhaus describes is, paradoxically, an “addictive machine from which there is no escape.”  And looking even more closely behind the metaphor, Koolhaus is really to describing the addictive draw of cultural comfort and stimulation rather than an infrastructure or machine. In later writing, Koolhaas has described the unpredictability of a city as being caused by the degradation of once-functional subsystems into “orphaned” subsystems that function without relationship to each other.  This has resulted in modern space becoming “junk-space” that has taken on a life of its own with a primary drive to mindlessly expand “like a web without a spider.” 

Koolhaas seems to be describing the dominance of the machine that is disconnected, not participatory, and unnatural.  It is anarchical and has a sort of freedom but that is ultimately a tomb because it isolates and separates rather than integrates.  Life in this junk-space is delusional in the sense of being a landscape where “a TV is a substitute for a window” and where “cyberspace becomes the great outdoors.”[i]  The concepts of “urban sprawl” and “megalopolis” and “urban blight” are older terms that wear Koolhaus’ new clothing.  They draw attention to what is wrong rather than any sense of health being expressed in these “problems,” as well as divert attention toward “diving” into the vital life of the city-form. 

Koolhaas appears to find the chaos in urban life as having become largely dysfunctional. However, Koolhaas does describe a conurbation such as Lagos as something perhaps less modern where the “chaos” is powerful and inspiring and brutal in the positive sense of being perhaps cleansing—more natural and less machine—rather than dysfunctional.[ii] Many urban designers/planners have come to accept the idea of the city-form as still in creation—emergent—rather than being a set structure like a machine.  And it is almost a design commandment, as Koolhaas suggests, to first deal with places as they are, rather than operate from a set of identifiable goals that aspire to know what a city is and then design it.

Perhaps more explicitly and more controversial, Koolhaas seems to reach a point in his architectural philosophy that does not identify any inherent process that naturally regulates urbanism either within or outside planning and control that might sustain the future city.  Koolhaas stresses not focusing on a big scale intervention because of this lack of pattern.[iii]

In contrast, Andres Duany suggests that we attend to the largeness in urban design. Critical of Koolhaas’ sense of the city as nearly beyond design, Andres Duany considers largeness as a fact of urbanization and one that makes urban planning essential.  However, rather than aspire to completely design the city, Duany explores creating “elements” or programs that create personal participation within largeness.[iv]  Duany suggests that because of largeness as a dynamic of the city-form, we have not yet transformed quantity into quality. In fact, he suggests the need to also look at an even larger landscape than the vast mega-city and recognize the influences and forces impinging upon the city from beyond the city. 

Duany challenges the vision of chaos that Koolhaas describes as illusory. Duany describes interlocking practices of marketing and engineering and codes and financing that are both precise and controlling, and that this control becomes evident when actions deviate from the established practices.  And yet, he acknowledges that building codes that can limit design can also stimulate out-of-control spontaneous design.[v]  In finding pattern in the city-form, Duany feels that there is a range of activity that is non-professional and that has occurred throughout the ages.  And rather than being destructive, he sees it as a dynamic that can make “great places,” but that is typically dismissed as unimportant in design.  He feels that this quality is captured professionally by a sense of the New Urbanism orientation where, for example, the street and the front porch of proposed “new towns” are envisioned as capable of promoting “community” rather than being a barrier, as well as effective large public space that promotes a personal affectionate experience of civic pride.  While New Urbanism aspires to recover the humane, it has been strongly planned design that fairly large-scale, costly, unsuccessful as a model, and increasingly outdated as a post-industrial model of urban habitation.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs writes that the city is complex and not completely knowable and therefore not a simple linear problem for planners.  But rather than presume that urban design must repair failure, Jacobs suggests that there is a deep organized complexity in the city-form that is successful, from which we can learn and with which we can work.  This challenges a sense that a radical new professional design must be invented.[vi]  Interestingly, she emphasizes identifying positive elements rather than focusing primarily on problems, with a particular focus on human-scale as positive and a key focus for urban design, specifically in the form of the interactive “new urbanism” neighborhoods.  In looking at the ecological potential of the city, Jacobs suggests that the city of the future will assume the role of producer of resources rather than be only the consumer of resources.[vii]  While considering environmental dilemmas, her focus is primarily an architectural emphasis rather than an ecological one.

Looking from the perspective of a “living city,” Ian McHarg pioneered a vision of urbanization as occurring within nature.  His design philosophy challenged the popular sense of urbanization as anti-nature.  Further, he suggested that design should be primarily design for the nature of the planet and not just for human habitation.  Frederick Steiner writes that McHarg “sought means for peacefully inhabiting the planet by greening and healing it.”[viii]  McHarg admonished design to utilize Western arts and sciences in a residential form of “ecological determinism”[ix] to challenge the predominant pioneering morphology of economic determinism that he felt aspired “to multiply and subdue” nature. 

With environmental dynamics having become public health issues, there been a shift in urban design to prioritize attention to nature in the city.  This has taken the form of a discussion of “livable cities” and sustainability.  But this change aspires to address environmental degradation without looking at the city as a natural process.  Michael Hough argues the “task is one of integrating the concept of urbanism into nature.”[x]  In designing cities, Hough writes, “…traditional design values have contributed little to their environmental health, or to their success as civilizing, enriching places to live in.” [xi]  Again, we become our words, and Hough suggests that there is “the alienation of urban society from environmental values and cultural connections with the land”[xii] and so in design, “little attention has been paid to understanding the natural processes… .[xiii]  This results in the very real, negative consequences of the city placing “unsustainable pressures on environmentally sensitive landscapes,” and becoming “sterile landscapes replacing complex environments,” and creating “pollution loads” by not capitalizing on the value of water, energy and nutrient by-products.[xiv]  Hough notes that urban soil is sterile and non-productive despite the enormous concentrations of nutrient energy. 

In Gray World, Green Heart, Robert Thayer shares the observation that urban design involves many different pieces rather than an aspiration to develop one whole design.  Focusing more on environmental planning than on general urban planning, he suggests that it is not enough to focus on pieces of technology that address organic, wind, solar, recycling and wildlife issues because a greater transformation is required.  He encourages attention to enhancing natural process in the city, and encourages attention to an attitudinal shift to “topofilia” or enhancement of an existing public affection for nature.[xv]

Similar to Thayer, Susannah Hagan stress the need for a new contract between architecture and nature, suggesting that such a contract is not a sentimental position that is anti-urban or opposed to advanced technology.  She suggests that rather than eco-sentimentality or a response by efficiency experts, “…environmentalism is a vast new intellectual project, nothing less than the redirection of material culture…”.[xvi]  Still, the emphasis is primarily upon alignment with nonhuman nature to explore, for example, non-linear forms, with less emphasis upon urban human activity as being inherently natural.

Efforts to create “new town” human-scale communities to address the dehumanizing aspects of both central city and suburbia have declined.[xvii]  Similarly, comprehensive city designs such as Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti that involve city designs for 100,000 or 1,000,000 persons covering only tens or hundreds of acres are simply not pursued, even when argued that the costs would be dramatically cheaper than other approaches.  Looking at how Arcosanti would function as well as fail can be helpful, since it aspires to produce virtually no pollution, to recycle wastes as new resources, and to save solar and waste heat energy as well.[xviii]

Integrating human-scale and “topofilia” and large-scale infrastructure are very valuable directions to explore.  However, what has not been nearly absent from urban design is attention to an inherent “automatic” design that occurs broadly in cities.  Overall, urban design for the living city acknowledges an inherent or “automatic” design process that occurs without any intentional planning.  However, this automatic process is often envisioned as something that undermines design efforts.  It might be described as anti-design or chaos or as urban blight and urban dysfunction.  And yet, the emergence of cities is likely due to the wild, automatic process of inhabitants’ efforts to adapt to the conditions of existence that are changing and enduringly “chaotic.”

While always a secondary movement, architects and planners have explored the city as a living organism.  For example, looking more specifically at architects, Kisho Kurakawa, who co-founded the Metabolist Architectural Movement in 1960, described the city-form as a living organism.  And in Kurakawa’s urban organism, the automatic design that emerges from inhabitants’ activity was emphasized.  This orientation was derived from observing the self-reliance of inhabitants designing their local environments.  Kurakawa envisioned the city as being built from the bottom up on its own terms by “multivalent, heterogeneous elements” that both involved the “noise” or “messiness” and the more artistic ne or “music” rather than top down.  Kurakawa described a process of recycling and “metabolism” that creates mixed use habitats of dwelling, commerce and industry.  The “messiness” of the city and the ne is the overlooked authentic life of the city under its “hard skin.”[xix]  However, Kurakawa described the aliveness or naturalness primarily as cultural interplay between the local and the whole, with secondary attention to environmental sustainability or as a process of ecological adaptation.

Kurakawa’s Metabolist view of urbanization is a minor view with the generalized activities of urban inhabitants typically envisioned as not only messy but chaotic and dysfunctional.  The negative view of “automatic” design is due in part to the fact that urban issues have been articulated by urban planners rather than by inhabitants themselves who intuitively rather than intentionally design.  And these intuitive actions have only recently began to be articulated due largely to the emergence of an internet “blogosphere” that explores urbanization in new ways. 

The global electronic “World-Wide Web” has expanded professional interdisciplinary and general public discussion and has created a new phenomenon, an “urbanologist.”  The urbanologist is somewhat like a naturalist of old, inhabiting and exploring the urban landscape as an avocation rather than as a specific profession.  The exploration is more of an intuitive process rather than a rigorous process guided by longstanding concepts.  This “urbanology” is driven by a sense that major aspects of the urban ecosystem that are important for the future directions of the city have been overlooked and proscribed.  It can be anticipated that urbanologists will emerge from a broad variety of experiences, from urban planners to non-professional urban inhabitants who are drawn to a new unanticipated vision, perhaps somewhat like divinity-trained Charles Darwin.  This new “urban naturalism” aspires to develop an open approach to the city that encourages an unfocused, blurred, peripheral vision[xx] to explore and to identify and overcome biases.

From Koolhaus to Kurakawa, urban design clearly identifies the presence of significant unpredictable, not completely knowable or controllable dynamics inherent in cities of which urban design is admonished to be cognizant.  However, these dynamics are generally “built around” rather than explored and engaged as primary design elements, or, in the case of urban sprawl, minimally “channeled” to favor growth to expand in a preferred direction.  These dynamics are approached as costly to the point of diverting resources that could be used for human development, maladaptive rather than adaptive and healthful, and something to constrain as much has possible.  In a very real way, urban design aspires to counter “natural” inherent dynamics rather than optimize them, even though these dynamics might be the very living heart of urbanization that “softens” the hard urban grid to become more adaptive. 

The absence of attention to this “automatic,” inherent urban design is remarkable because it can be argued that this inherent design process may be the primary design force that is creating the city.  Inherent design is consistently acknowledged by starchitects and urban planners as a critical process to address in planning, primarily through observation and public feedback.  However, the planning may then take on a life of its own that is typically far beyond being participatory, and that may reflect the designer’s interests more than the communities.  Design tends to be driven by culture more than by nature, even though the “automatic, inherent design may be more “creatural” than cultural, in response to changing natural conditions. 

It can be argued that this automatic design is the living process of urban human life that occurs intuitively in reaction to the conditions of existence and brings cities together.  Further, it can be argued that this inherent process might be generally adaptive rather than oppositional and destructive or only chaos that is a consequence of the artificiality of the city.  It may be that intentional design efforts can be dysfunctional rather than always corrective because they are guided by beliefs that describe culture and nature as separate and the city as a machine, or by serving the longstanding strategy of exploitation and extraction of resources.  Inherent, automatic design aspires to challenge the designed “grid” to “soften” and be humane and, as such, is to be explored for its functions rather than proscribed as dysfunction. 

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[i] Rem Koolhaas’ cynical vision of modernism having deteriorated to “junk-space” is derived from a variety of sources related to googling the term “junkspace.”

[ii] Deyan Sudjic, “He likes brutality and shopping.  He’s going to be the next big thing.”

[article on Rem Koolhaas], The Observer, Sunday, November 26, 2000.

[iii] Rem Koohaas [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rem_Koolhaas].

[iv] Andres Duany [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9s_Duany]. [See also, Michael Mchaffy, “A conversation with Andres Duany,” www.katarxis3.com/Duany.htm], and Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Robert Alminana, The New Civic Art: Elements of Town Planning. New York Rizzoli Publications, 2003.

[v] See Benjamin Aranda’s and Chris Lasch’s presentation at “Postopolis!” in summertuning.wordpress.com/2007/06/07/postopolis/.

[vi] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1992 (Random House,1961).

[vii] Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1970.

[viii] Ian McHarg and Frederick Steiner, Eds. To Heal The Earth: Selected Writings of Iaqn L. McHarg. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998, p. 3.

[ix] Ian McHarg, “Ecological determinism.” In E. Fraser Darling and John P. Milton, eds. Future Environments In North America. Garden Ctiy, New York: The Natural History Press, 1966, pp. 526-538.

[x] Michael Hough, City Form And Natural Process: Towards a New Urban Vernacular. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1984, p. 6.

[xi] Michael Hough, 1984, p. 1.

[xii] Hough, 1984, p. 1.

[xiii] Hough, 1984, p. 1.

[xiv] Hough, 1984, p. 2.

[xv] Robert Thayer, Gray World, Green Heart. New York: Wiley, 1994.

[xvi] “An interview with Susannah Hagan, author of Taking Shape,” [http://books.elsevier.com].  See also, Susannah Hagan, “Five reasons to adopt environmental design,” in Building Nature’s Ruin?, Number 18, Spring/Summer 2003 [www.gsd.harvarad.edu/research/publication/hdm/back/18_hagan.html] and Susannah Hagan, Taking Shape: A New Contract Between Architecture And Nature. Oxford; Boston: Architectural Press, 2001.

[xvii] Michael Hough, 1984, p. 3.

[xviii] Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti: The City in the Image of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969.

[xix] See Kisho Kurokawa [www.kisho.co.jp/] and Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove, “The metabolic city,” 10/17/2007, [www. airoots.org].

[xx] See the philosophy of Finish architectural theorist, Jahani Pallasmaa, The Eye of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester, West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2005/1996.