Ecological Urbanism: The Nature of the City

Susannah Hagan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317645313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Stadtentwicklung

Ecological Urbanism: The Nature of the City asks the questions that are important inside and outside the built environment professions: what are climate change, urbanisation and ecology doing to the theory and practice of urban design? How does Ecological Urbanism figure in this change? What is Ecological Urbanism?

In answer, this book is neither definitive – impossible when a subject is still in motion – nor encyclopaedic – equally impossible when so much has been written on almost every aspect of these essays. Instead, it seeks to rebalance the ecological narrative and its embryonic modes of practice with the narratives of urbanism and its older, deeply embedded modes of practice. It examines the implications for cities and the designers of cities now we are required to again address their metabolic as well as social and formal dimensions, and it explores the extent to which environmental engineering and natural systems design can and should become drivers for the remaking of cities in the 21st century. Above all, it argues that sooner rather than later, urbanism needs to become environmentally literate, and environmental design needs to become culturally literate.

PART 1

What is it?

1

ECOLOGICAL URBANISM

New strategies are required. Contemporary urbanism needs procedures and concepts capable of holding together coherence and discontinuity in productive new mixtures. It needs to engage the real complexity of the contemporary city, as the technologies, politics, social life, and economic engines of urbanism continue to change. It needs to be aware of the very real environmental crises of our time, and to pay close attention to change and adaptation, recognising all the dynamic intricacies of the natural and social ecologies at work in the city.

(Stan Allen 1997)

Are new strategies really required? ‘Nothing comes of nothing’, and Ecological Urbanism most certainly didn’t spring fully formed from an architect’s forehead. Some of its DNA comes from other disciplines, and much of it comes from architectural concepts and practices that are now over a hundred years old, and in some instances, many centuries old. On the other hand to be properly effective, Ecological Urbanism has need of innovative conceptual models, design methods, professional alliances, environmental technologies and a much greater degree of articulation. But what is it? Most people have never heard of the term, and by no means all those who do it use it. At its most basic, it names a design practice that is already underway and culturally under-examined, just as environmental architecture was underway and under-examined before it in the 1990s. It has to be called something, in part to distinguish it from the vast and noisy discourse on the ‘sustainable city’, in part to distinguish it from the conventional practice of urban design. The term ‘Ecological Urbanism’ has begun to serve that purpose, mouthful though it is.

If, in epistemological terms, knowledge produces architecture (for ‘architecture’ read ‘architecture and urban design’), then this knowledge takes different theoretical forms, more precisely an implicit and an explicit form. Implicit theory is largely pragmatic: it is knowledge old and new sufficient to permit a professional to practise, and usually full of unexamined assumptions, conventions and formation. Explicit theory is reflexive: aware of itself and its relation to other explicit theory. It resides in language, and at its best holds a light up to what is implicit, making it visible to itself and its culture in a way it wasn’t before. The word ‘theory’, after all, derives from the Greek theoria: ‘to behold’, ‘to contemplate’. Theory is thus essentially a way of seeing, and this book is essentially a way of seeing more about an emerging design practice (non-discursive production). It works backwards from what is there, both in terms of theory and practice, and tries to understand more about the built product, the producer of the product, the producer’s knowledge (or theories) and the producer’s context (where this knowledge comes from in the culture).

In this case, the cultural context is one in which, over the last generation, a new metanarrative has risen out of the ashes of postmodernist relativism – ‘ecologism’ – which has come to dominate conceptual models in the sciences, social sciences, cybernetics and urbanism. It has provided practitioners with an ethical and/or practical framework within which to act, not least of which is a ‘new’ version of materialism founded, not on Marx’s all-pervading economic laws, but on ‘ecosystemic’ ones – on nature, or rather an ecological view of nature. As a result, although there is much explicit theory feeding Ecological Urbanism, most of those practising it aren’t aware of these many discourses, some of them from deep within architecture, some from far outside. And so we have a situation in which Ecological Urbanism barely figures in architecture or urbanism’s theoretical discourse at all, while that of ‘ecology’ on the one hand and the ‘sustainable city’ on the other, are ubiquitous and have been for a generation.

So again, what is it? Like the discourse on the ‘sustainable city’, the ‘resilient city’ and ‘environmentally led urban design’, Ecological Urbanism foregrounds a view of the city as literal and metaphorical ecosystem. On a material level, the environmental goal is to create some version of ‘artificial ecosystem’: cities that achieve the same interdependent efficiencies and life-preserving redundancies as natural ecosystems. This emphasis on environmental systems is a very different way of thinking about the city: its metabolic processes are assessed before its economic cycles or demographic patterns, though on one level they are obviously indivisible from them. In the ecosystemic view, urban sites are seen as locations of demand for, and supply of resources, as potential generators of energy, captors of water and recyclers of wastes. It is an engineering model, vitally important, but isolated from conventional urban studies, theoretical writing and urban design practice. The cultural (including design) implications of this ecological model for cities remain largely unexplored, and even fragments of its complex provenance rarely appear in publications addressing the subject.

In one way, Ecological Urbanism is simply a late entry into a line of ecological subfields that engage literally or figuratively with the built environment. In another way, it has the potential to be a new bridgehead between urbanism and ecology, one that projects and defends design as a vital element in the necessary transformations of our cities. Theories about the urban condition are useless without the ability to deploy them, and design incorporates both the framing of an intention to intervene and then guides the intervention itself. It isn’t a replacement for the very rich contributions on the city and its ailments from geography and social science, but it insists that the discipline of architecture has its own – central – contribution to make.

Why not then simply call it ‘eco-urban design’ or something equally ghastly, in order to indicate the importance of design? Because urban design is, or must be if it is not already, more than simply the design of streets and buildings at a certain scale. The word ‘urbanism’ was imported into English from the French ‘urbanisme’, and refers in France much more to planning, and the politics and sociology of planning, than it does to urban design. Why then use it in English? Because we don’t have a word that suggests to designers they ought to be thinking more comprehensively and more critically beyond the task in hand – that is, beyond ‘giving form’. The task in hand sits within sliding scales of social and environmental implications, and architects/urban designers and the schools that train them can no longer indulge in the usual myopia if they want to remain of the slightest relevance in the future. There are practices, great and small, that engage in Ecological Urbanism, whether they call it that or not, from the august Arup Associates to the tyro Relational Urbanism, but their intelligence has not thus far catalysed a global outbreak of same. If it transpires that climate change is less of a catastrophe and more of a manageable metamorphosis, Ecological Urbanism would nevertheless remain an essential model for the future production of cities, as cities become increasingly our species’ only habitat.

If one goes any more deeply into environmental discourse as it addresses cities, the mitigation of global warming and other environmental uncertainties is always mentioned in the same breath as adaptation to them. They are undoubtedly intertwined, but mitigation concerns trying to stop or reduce something that is happening, and adaptation concerns trying to live with it when it has. There is, then, an element of progression in the two terms, though not in the cheery sense of ‘progress’. It is now evident, after thirty years of trying, that the majority of people and nations haven’t the slightest interest in seriously pursuing mitigation – CO₂ levels have risen as the contradiction between the economic need to stimulate consumption and the environmental need to reduce consumption remains entirely unresolved. Even if CO₂ production levelled out or dropped, and/or we developed a source of endlessly available and easily distributed renewable energy, our cities’ drag on the biosphere as more and more of us crowd into them, would require the attention of designers for generations to come. We can’t live with a nineteenth century urban metabolism under the pressures of twenty-first century urban demographics.

With mitigation of our effect on the planet almost impossible to achieve, adaptation to our effect now needs to be the focus – of design as much as governance. If, in turn, adaptation meets the same lack of commitment as mitigation, then we may well experience a third stage: repression, to control violent competition for natural resources like water, or more pessimistically, to assert control over them for ourselves. It is all very well to claim there is no such thing as resource scarcity, that it is instead a question of the unequal distribution of ever-adequate resources, but even if this were so, equal distribution is as much of a pipe dream as equal consumption. We live, and will always live, in a world of scarcities because there is little inclination on the part of nations to share, not now and certainly not as environmental pressures increase.

We’re not there yet, however, and doomy scenarios do not sit well with design, which is predicated on a viable future – viable enough for designs to be realised. A design-centred Ecological Urbanism is essential to integrate necessary environmental engineering with the city-as-culture. In the copious analysis of the unsustainability of cities from the UN’s Brundtland Report (1987) onwards, a commentary dominated by urban geographers and social scientists, the vital importance of design is neither understood nor acknowledged. It is ‘the failure of effective governance within cities that explains the poor environmental performance of so many cities’ (Mitlin & Sattherthwaite 1996), and also the absence of an environmentally literate urban design, that is, urban design hand-in-glove with environmental engineering. Governance can create the opportunity, but cannot deliver more sustainable urban fabric. That fabric needs to be not only (re)engineered but (re)designed. Despised though the definition may be, an architect is indeed someone who ‘gives form’, regardless of the overtones of divinity that have clouded the description. Remove these absurd accretions and we still need an agent to give form to new requirements and desires in the built world, in this case, to translate ecosystemic performance into urban form. This assumes that the architect/urban designer is able to converse with the environmental engineer, and able to see the design possibilities within performative environmental targets, to make the urban lead and the ecological follow. The urban project of the twenty-first century needs to be couched, not in terms of what the city can do for ‘nature’, but what nature can do for the city on the city’s own terms. To both render cities more environmentally sustainable and celebrate their urbanity, their designers have to negotiate a difficult path between metabolic profligacy and the abomination of the eco park (utilitarian vegetation, depressed ducks), or more simply, between (ecological) performance and (urban) form.

What then, is urban design to deliver? The city historically constructed is no longer lived and is no longer understood practically. It is only an object of cultural consumption for tourists, for aestheticism … The prescription is: there cannot be a going back (towards the traditional city), nor a headlong flight, towards a colossal and shapeless agglomeration. (Lefebvre in Kofman & Lebas 1995)

Henri Lefebvre’s ‘city historically constructed’ is in fact not only experienced on a daily basis, but is continuously reproduced by conventional urban design: in contextual urban regeneration projects, and in new developments that rely entirely on historical typologies of street, square, boulevard, block etc. There has been a very deliberate ‘going back’, however inauthentic, typified by the nostalgia of ‘The New Urbanism’, and codified in manuals of urban design best practice. As for a ‘headlong flight towards a colossal and shapeless agglomeration’, it is not the future, but the present in São Paulo, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Mexico City, Beijing, Lagos, Mumbai and many other cities. If Lefebvre’s ‘prescription’ is to avoid both these fates, then what stands between? Do we now have a reply? And if the reply is Ecological Urbanism, then a global transfer of knowledge, in both academia and practice is a prerequisite. There are few practices and even fewer schools of architecture equipped with either the conceptual frameworks or the technical specialisms necessary to put design at the forefront of the push for more resilient cities. Still less do architecture’s professional bodies insist that not a student passes nor a practitioner gets licensed until they have mastered the requirements of delivering environmental design on the ground. If the central importance of design has gone largely unremarked in the global discourse on sustainable and resilient cities, it is at least in part because the architectural establishment is ill equipped to make it heard.

Origins

The term ‘Ecological Urbanism’ seems first to have appeared in Spanish, as ‘ecourbanismo’ in the 1999 book Ecourbanismo, entornos humanos sostenibles: 60 proyectos (Ecourbanism, sustainable human environments: 60 projects) by Miguel Ruano. The publisher’s blurb describes this as ‘sustainable planning’, but the emphasis on design is quite clear in the choice of sixty somewhat unlikely projects: ‘The list includes both architects and planners from pioneers like Sergio Los, Peter Calthorpe and Lucien Kroll to prestigious international offices such as Norman Foster, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Rogers, SITE, Renzo Piano and Giants-Zengelis.’ The term also appeared in 2006 in a paper by Jeffrey Hou: ‘Hybrid landscapes: toward an inclusive ecological urbanism on Seattle’s central waterfront’. More importantly, Mohsen Mostafavi used the term in 2007 in a short essay on Islamic cities called ‘Ecological Urbanism’:

[A]n Ecological Urbanism needs to incorporate an ethics of size, of social mix, of density and of public space. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that the wealthier portions of the population are continually expanding the size of the areas they inhabit. These supposed ‘improvements’ in lifestyle have a significant impact on the consumption of resources; they also aggravate the long-standing inequalities between the rich and the poor. (Mostafavi 2007)

Mostafavi is an important figure, as he has contributed to the emergence of both Landscape Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism into mainstream architectural debate. This double involvement was perhaps inevitable, as once Landscape Urbanism proved to be more about landscape than urbanism, a change of emphasis was needed to more comprehensively include the built without repudiating all that landscape urbanism had brought to the table in the way of ecological expertise, and the valuing and activation of the horizontal plane.

Mostafavi helped to develop Landscape Urbanism as an academic discipline while Chair of the Architectural Association, and is now contributing to the emergence of Ecological Urbanism as Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. A conference called Ecological Urbanism¹ was held at Harvard in 2009, an elaboration of the conference proceedings appearing in book form in 2010 (Mostafavi & Doherty 2010). The book brings together a great many disparate theories and practices under the banner of Ecological Urbanism, raising its profile, and challenging the reader to impose some sort of order on often contradictory entries. Through such public exposure of differences, a more reflexive practice should begin to coalesce, a consensus emerging over time on what should and should not be codified. This is a fruitful time for Ecological Urbanism, but not an effective one, as no one yet knows the precise extent of its coordinates.

As usual with a new ‘ism’, the emphasis is on the newness, but is there in fact any need to talk about new models for this theory and practice? In what way would they have to differ from existing models to render these obsolete? What, as model, supplants Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City or Leonidov’s Magnitogorsk to such a degree that it merits the distinction ‘new’? If one extracts the organisational ideas and ideological positions from the outdated architectures and graphics of these examples, what have we added in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century? In other words, is Ecological Urbanism simply a new term rather than a new theory and practice? Are present urban conditions worldwide even new? And why, if nothing is new, the compulsion to make it seem so? In order to ‘own’ the newness by ‘inventing’ it?

We need to view the fragility of the planet and its resources as an opportunity for speculative design innovations rather than as a form of technical legitimation for promoting conventional solutions. By extension, the problems confronting our cities and regions would then become opportunities to define a new approach. Imagining an urbanism that is other than the status quo requires a new sensibility – one that has the capacity to incorporate and accommodate the inherent conflictual conditions between ecology and urbanism. This is the territory of Ecological Urbanism. (Mostafavi & Doherty 2010)

As with all emerging practices, there is much to debate here. Architects (and others) have confronted the depredations of the city before, and confronted them with ‘speculative design innovations’, so innovative, in fact, they remain influential today, particularly within environmental design practice. Nor can the technical be so easily dismissed. Technology is one of the great drivers of change in cities, from the underground to smart phones, with urban design limping after. An understanding of environmental technologies is essential to address ‘the ...