Cities After Crisis

Reinventing Neighborhood Design from the Ground-Up

Carlos Vazquez

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367673284
• eBook ISBN: 9781000440492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Nachhaltigkeit in der Architektur

Cities After Crisis shows how urbanism and urban design is redefining cities after the global health, economic, and environmental crises of the past decades. The book details how these crises have led to a new urban vision—from avantgarde modern design to an artisan aesthetic that calls for simplicity and the everyday, from the sustainable development paradigm to a resilient vision that defends de-growth and the re-wilding of cities, from a homogenizing globalism to a new localism that values what is distinctive and nearby, from the privatization of the public realm to the commoning and self-governance of urban resources, and from top-down to bottom-up processes based on the engagement and empowerment of communities.

Through examples from cities around the world and a detailed look at the London neighbourhood of Dalston, the book shows designers and planners how to incorporate residents into the decision-making process, design inclusive public spaces that can be permanently reconfigured, reimagine obsolete spaces to accommodate radically contemporary uses, and build gardens designed and maintained by the community, among other projects.

1 ON VALUES From Modernity to Anti-Progress

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130857-1

This chapter deals with the change in values which has supported the reinvention of the city after the environmental crisis, from modernity to anti-progress. The thread of the argument starts in philosophy, more specifically in “ecosophy”.

The Synthesis of Ecosophy and Eco-capitalism in the “Eco-lifestyle”: The Slow City Movement

This section traces how the change in values evolved from a nineteenth-century philosophical tradition, Romantic thinking, towards ecosophy, the main source of these values nowadays. It continues by focusing on the social groups that have assumed them as their own, the “neobohemians”, and their way of life, the “eco-lifestyle”. Lastly, it addresses one of the first spatial expression of the latter, the Slow City movement.

Richard Tarnas (1991) argued that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Western thought was nourished by two different sources: the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The goal of the Enlightenment was the emancipation of the people from ignorance and servitude through science. To reach this objective, the world of knowledge had to leave symbolic thinking behind and reformulate it on the basis of the dictates of reason. The precursors of Romantic thought, on the other hand, distanced themselves from Descartes’ ideals, and embraced Rousseau’s as catalysts to the voices that accused the Enlightenment of placing humanity in a purely materialist context.

Those same decades saw the advent of the Second Technological Revolution, with its electric and gasoline powered motors, which propelled the economic period known as “monopoly capitalism”. A new political and business elite that belonged to the bourgeoisie set in motion the modernization project, an ambitious rationalization program that began in the realm of industry but that ended up engaging society and culture. It was led by Enlightenment thinking, which contributed notions that led to efficient production and management methods, such as Fordism and Taylorism. It also provided the modern project with an ideological vector, the idea of “progress”, around which a metanarrative was constructed that ran through all areas of knowledge. This idea promised a more prosperous future for all, an aspiration which was very hard to question and that quickly became a universal discourse: those who opposed this were discredited and deemed reactionary, archaic, or obscurantist.

Among the latter were those who defended Romantic thinking, a minority of intellectuals and artists closely related to bohemian circles. Their mistrust in progress was based on a reality that became patent shortly after the modernization process began: the deterioration of living conditions in the large industrial metropolises. Overcrowding, poverty, disease, and pollution called into question the promise made by the Enlightenment of welfare for all, opening a rift in the consensus around the idea of progress.

This led to a cultural war between the bourgeoisie and the bohemians that would last a century. David Brooks summarized it as follows:

The bourgeois realm was the realm of business and the market. The bohemian realm was art. The bourgeois preferred numerical and mechanistic modes of thought. The bohemians preferred intuitive and organic modes of thought. The bourgeois liked organizations. The bohemians valued autonomy and regarded the bourgeoisie as conformist herd animals. The bourgeois loved machines; the bohemians preferred the intimate humanism of the preindustrial craftsman.

(Brooks, 2000, p. 69)

These two world views responded to clashing value systems, leading to opposing lifestyles: the bourgeois was an urbanite, individualist, materialist, pragmatic, and believed blindly in the future; the bohemian was a ruralite, communitarian, spiritualist, idealist, and yearned for the past. The latter’s reference was David Henry Thoreau, the representative of American Transcendentalism, a group of intellectuals that strived for an existence in accordance with these values in nature. There, in a cabin next to Walden Ponds (Massachusetts), Thoreau retired to fish, gather wood, and write Walden (1854), a book in which he put forward the concept of “voluntary simplicity”.

In short, at the end of the nineteenth century, a group of Romantic bohemians confronted the modernization process that the bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment had set into motion around the metanarrative of progress. As an alternative, they proposed a new value system inspired in the past, which derived into a lifestyle driven by simplicity. This chain of events would repeat itself a century later. The onset of the ecological crisis, or to be more precise, the dawn of its awareness, is usually set in the 1960s, coinciding with the rise of what is known as the “counterculture”. A series of natural disasters occurred at the time, such as the Cornwall oil spill (1967), which favored the study of pollution. Some scientific journals announced, in often apocalyptic terms, what was then called the “environmental crisis”. In response, in academic circles, activists organized into groups calling for the implementation of environmental protection policies. Taking the same cues used by the Romantic thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century, they warned against the dangers of the prevailing economic model—industrial developmentalism—and the consumer habits that sustained it. The environmental movement began to utter its first words.

In the 1970s, two oil crises occurred, in 1973 and 1979. Books written by scientists, such as Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962) or Barry Commoner’s iconic The Closing Circle (1971), became best sellers. Environmentalism expanded beyond the borders of university campuses and spread a troubling feeling of scarcity throughout society. The two mentioned crises were closely linked to the depletion of a natural resource, oil, and had sowed economic insecurity throughout a world with less work, fewer opportunities, and less welfare support. The brilliance of environmentalism lay in the way it made a virtue of necessity by presenting frugality as a moral value. This is how the “ethics of scarcity”, that is, the ideological exaltation of austerity, burst onto the scene. Pier V. Aureli detected its original source in the medieval tradition of asceticism, the practice of abstinence from mundane pleasures through self-discipline (Aureli, 2013, location 46). Thoreau had recovered this tradition by choosing an austere but happy and fulfilling lifestyle on the shores of Walden Ponds. Thus, Romantic thinking converged with environmentalism around the ethics of scarcity.

This synthesis was intellectually articulated by “ecosophy”, a term coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in 1973 but provided with epistemological content by Felix Guattari, the author of Les trois écologies (1989). Ecosophy was presented as a non-anthropocentric line of thought that proposed overcoming 500 years of humanist thinking. It considered people as part of the environment, but not hierarchically above it. In accordance with this vision, its goal was to achieve a harmonious relationship between humanity and the environment, in which the former simply co-inhabited with the latter. This understanding was incompatible with the unhinged consumerism that marked the decades of industrial developmentalism (1950–1970), which became responsible for a global commerce that used a vast amount of energy resources and produced tons of polluting waste. In order to change these habits, Western society needed to supersede the Enlightenment values that had governed it up until then. In opposition to materialism, ecosophy claimed the precedence of ethics, or rather, bioethics, encouraging the citizenry to overcome the desire to own goods and become a “post-materialist” being.

Guattari did not postulate ecosophy as a philosophical theory in itself, but as a form of wisdom addressing how to inhabit the planet in the context of an environmental crisis. All wisdom is descriptive and prescriptive, expressing a system of values that derives from an ontological conception and laying out a set of norms accordingly. That is, ecosophic values had to be translated into a way of life. In this sense, it proposed redefining the notion of “quality of life”. Humanity’s well-being could not be mistaken with “standard of living”, a merely quantitative parameter that only tallies consumption and the accumulation of goods. In contrast, true well-being emanates from a simple, austere, and empathic existence with nature.

The ecosophic way of life had begun to be sketched out in the 1970s. The New Age movement triggered an interest in spirituality. Meditation techniques with their origins in Buddhism and Hinduism became a fad, along with secular methods such as transcendental meditation, Gestalt, and hypnotism. Alternative therapies, both physical and psychological, also sprang up everywhere. Some came from tradition, such as Chinese acupuncture, Indian Ayurveda, or Perso-Arabic Yunani. But others did not, like homeopathy, herbal medicine, scent therapy, reflexology, chiropractics, bioenergy, or Reiki.

Once again, ways of life and social groups were closely linked. The cultural war between the bourgeoisie and the bohemians continued with the baby boomers. In the decade of the 1980s, the globalization process began, neoconservatives reached power, and the Third Technological Revolution took place. The former became known as “yuppies”, a term applied to the young professionals that worked in the financial sector. The latter were left-wing activists that watched over the legacy of the counterculture movements. They advocated peace, social justice, minority rights… causes to which they added the protection of the environment. Therefore, it could be said that towards the end of the twentieth century, the bourgeoisie-Enlightenment, bohemian-Romanticism binomials were still standing. However, during the 1990s, and once the devastating economic crises of the 1970s had been left far behind, this framework crumbled. A new generation of young people, which Richard Lloyd calls “neobohemians” (2006) and David Brooks “Bobos” (“Bohemian-Bourgeois”) (2000), began the process of merging bourgeois and bohemian values. The hipster movement is a good example of the transition from a purist bohemia to a hybrid neobohemia. Mark Greif divides their history into two periods: that of the “white hipsters”, from 1999 to 2003, and that of the “primitive hipsters” or “ecohipsters”, from 2004 onwards (Greif, Ross, and Tortorici, 2010, p. 4). The first were young, white, and educated members of the middle class that maintained a connection with counterculture groups (anarchists, punks, anti-establishment, etc.). After 2004, the bourgeois soul of the hipster came to light. Physical appearances turned into something meaningful. The bushy beard became a masculine emblem while clothes and accessories were codified: plaid shirts, hunter blazers, proletarian scarves, skinny jeans … all of which had been the mark of the working classes up until then. This is how the ecohipsters came to be, softer and friendlier creatures than the white hipsters who reconciled the post-materialist values of ecosophy with a brand of consumerism that hoped to demonstrate their adhesion to said values.

The hipster phenomenon shows something unprecedented: the neobohemians managed to harmonize two forms of thought that, for over a century, had been immersed in a cultural war. As we have seen, the key lay in the reconciliation with consumerism, albeit with a special type of consumerism. On the one hand, it incorporated an ethical dimension: fair trade stores managed by NGOs or businesses committed to supporting vulnerable social groups (local farmers, Amazonian tribes, or political refugees, for example) conveyed this. On the other, it respected the environment and health. In this sense, organic food (whole wheat bread, basmati rice, radish sprouts, Fo-Ti roots) led the way. Ultimately, it was a conscientious and engaged type of consumption. It was never compulsive, it fled from luxury and ostentation and chose simplicity, turning economic well-being into something spiritual a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 On Values: From Modernity to Anti-Progress
• 2 On the Environment: From Sustainability to Resilience
• 3 On Scale: From Globalism to Localism
• 4 On Resources: From Privatization to Commoning
• 5 On Agents: From Top-Down to Bottom-Up Processes
• Conclusion: Cities After the Covid-19 Crisis
• Index