Ecological Urbanism (2010)

ECOLOGICAL URBANISM Edited by Mohsen Mostafavi with Gareth Doherty Harvard University Graduate School of Design Lars Müller Publishers Contents 12 Why Ecological Urbanism? Why Now? Mohsen Mostafavi COLLABORATE 130 Art Fieldwork Giuliana Bruno 132 Ecological Urbanism ANTICIPATE 56 Advancement versus Apocalypse Rem Koolhaas 72 Zeekracht OMA 78 Mumbai on My Mind: Some Thoughts on Sustainability Homi K. Bhabha 84 Urban Earth: Mumbai Daniel Raven-Ellison and Kye Askins 94 Notes on the Third Ecology Sanford Kwinter and/as Urban Metaphor Lawrence Buell 134 Black and White in Green Cities Lizabeth Cohen 136 The Return of Nature Preston Scott Cohen and Erika Naginski 138 Urban Ecological Practices: Félix Guattari’s Three Ecologies Verena Andermatt Conley 140 Retrofitting the City Leland D. Cott 142 Productive Urban Environments Margaret Crawford 106 Social Inequality and Climate Change Ulrich Beck 110 For a Post-Environmentalism: Seven Suggestions for a New Athens Charter and The Weak Metropolis Andrea Branzi 114 Weak Work: Andrea Branzi’s “Weak Metropolis” and the Projective Potential of an “ Ecological Urbanism” Charles Waldheim SENSE 146 The City from the Perspective of the Nose Sissel Tolaas 156 Urban Earth: Mexico City Daniel Raven-Ellison 164 CitySense: An Urban-Scale Sensor Network Matt Welsh and Josh Bers 122 From “Sustain” to “Ability” JDS Architects 166 Eat Love Marije Vogelzang 124 Forty Years Later — 168 Self-Engineering Ecologies Christine Outram, Assaf Biderman, and Carlo Ratti Back to a Sub-lunar Earth Bruno Latour 174 There’s More to Green than Meets the Eye: Green Urbanism in Bahrain Gareth Doherty 184 Play Me, I’m Yours Luke Jerram 186 Mapping Main Street Jesse Shapins, Kara Oehler, Ann Heppermann, and James Burns CURATE 190 Curating Resources Niall Kirkwood 194 The Sea and Monsoon Within: A Mumbai Manifesto Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha 208 Transcendent Eco-cities or Urban Ecological Security? Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin 268 Local River: Home Storage Unit for Fish and Greens Mathieu Lehanneur with Anthony van den Bossche 270 Soft Cities KVA MATx 274 The ZEDfactory Bill Dunster 280 Logroño Eco-city MVRDV 218 New Waterscapes for Singapore Herbert Dreiseitl 282 The Big-Foot Revolution Kongjian Yu 222 To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond Zhang Huan 292 La Tour Vivante, Eco-tower soa architectes 224 Envisioning Ecological Cities Mitchell Joachim 230 Return to Nature Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Eyal Weizman 236 Harmonia 57 Triptyque 238 Grounding a Sustainable Urban Strategy Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates 240 Center Street Plaza Hood Design INTERACT 312 Urban Ecology and the Arrangement of Nature in Urban Regions Richard T. T. Forman 324 The Agency of Ecology Chris Reed 330 New York City Infrastructure Christoph Niemann 332 Redefining Infrastructure Pierre Bélanger Transformation: Organizing to Learn Amy C. Edmondson 298 Air Purification in Cities David Edwards 300 Social Justice and Ecological Urbanism Susan S. Fainstein 244 Energy Sub-structure, Supra-structure, Infra-structure D. Michelle Addington 252 Wave Farm Pelamis Wave Power Ltd. 254 CR Land Guanganmen Green Technology Showroom Vector Architects 256 Aux Fermes, Citoyens! Dorothée Imbert 304 Underground Future Peter Galison 420 Oil City: Petro-landscapes and Sustainable Futures Michael Watts 356 Situating Urban Ecological Experiments 428 The Upway Rafael Viñoly 364 A Holistic View of the Urban Phenomenon Salvador Rueda 430 GSD RESEARCH Nairobi Studio Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron 370 Gwanggyo New City Park System Yoonjin Park and Jungyoon Kim (PARKKIM) 372 A Methodology for Urban Innovation Alfonso Vegara, Mark Dwyer, and Aaron Kelley 374 Greenmetropolis Henri Bava, Erik Behrens, Steven Craig, and Alex Wall 302 Governing the Ecological City Gerald E. Frug PRODUCE 416 The SynCity Urban Energy System Model Niels Schulz, Nilay Shah, David Fisk, James Keirstead, Nouri Samsatli, Aruna Sivakumar, Celine Weber, and Ellin Saunders 425 Niger Delta Oil Fields Ed Kashi Alexander J. Felson and Linda Pollak 296 Management Challenges in Urban 412 The Political Ecology of Ecological Urbanism Paul Robbins 350 User-Generated Urbanism Rebar in Public Space COLLABORATE 406 A General Theory of Ecological Urbanism Andrés Duany MEASURE 444 Five Ecological Challenges for the Contemporary City Stefano Boeri 454 Revolutionizing Architecture Jeremy Rifkin MOBILIZE 306 Temperate and Bounded Edward Glaeser 380 Mobility, Infrastructure, and Society Richard Sommer 308 Bioinspired Adaptive Architecture 382 Sustainable Urban Mobility and Sustainability through Light Electric Vehicles Donald E. Ingber William J. Mitchell 398 Sustainable Mobility in Action Federico Parolotto 402 Sustaining the City in the Face of Advanced Marginality Loïc Wacquant 456 The Canary Project Susannah Sayler 458 “Performalism”: Environmental Metrics and Urban Design Susannah Hagan 468 Nature Culture Kathryn Moore 472 Investigating the Importance of Customized Energy Model Inputs: A Case Study of Gund Hall Holly A. Wasilowski and Christoph F. Reinhart 476 Perception of Urban Density Vicky Cheng and Koen Steemers 482 London’s Estuary Region Sir Terry Farrell 526 Old Dark John Stilgoe 584 Bank of America Cook + Fox Architects 488 Urban Earth: London Daniel Raven-Ellison 528 Religious Studies and Ecological Urbanism Donald K. Swearer 588 GSD RESEARCH 496 Sustainability Initiatives in London Camilla Ween 530 Ecological Urbanism 500 Moving beyond LEED: and East Asian Literatures Karen Thornber in Sustainable Architecture Thomas Schroepfer 504 GSD RESEARCH Half a Million Trees: Prototyping Sites and Systems for Sustainable Cities Kristin Frederickson and Gary Hilderbrand 506 SlaveCity Atelier Van Lieshout 510 EcoBox/Self-Managed Eco-urban Network atelier d’architecture autogérée 512 Temporary Urban Scene: Beach on the Moon Ecosistema Urbano COLLABORATE 516 Comfort and Carbon Footprint Alex Krieger 518 Ecological Urbanism and Health Equity: Anja Thierfelder and Matthias Schuler ADAPT 536 Insurgent Ecologies: (Re)Claiming Ground in Landscape and Urbanism Nina-Marie Lister 548 Performative Wood: Integral Computational Design for a Climate-Responsive Timber Surface Structure Achim Menges Antoine Picon 522 Sustainability and Lifestyle Spiro Pollalis 524 Ecological Urbanism and the Landscape Martha Schwartz 600 Wangzhuang Eco-city of Agriculture Arup 606 Ecosystemic Master Planning, DISEZ Region, Senegal ecoLogicStudio 608 Vegetal City: Dreaming the Green Utopia Luc Schuiten 610 Verticalism (The Future of the Skyscraper) Iñaki Ábalos 560 Adaptivity in Architecture Hoberman Associates, Ziggy Drozdowski and Shawn Gupta 616 Urban Prototypes Raoul Bunschoten 568 GSD RESEARCH 622 Taiwan Strait Climate Change Incubator Chora Architecture and Urbanism Climate Change, Water, Land Development, and Adaptation: Planning with Uncertainty (Almere, the Netherlands) Armando Carbonell, Martin Zogran, and Dirk Sijmons Nancy Krieger and the Urban Condition 598 Progetto Bioclimatico Mario Cucinella 554 Shrinking Gotham’s Footprint Laurie Kerr An Ecosocial Perspective 520 Nature, Infrastructures, Christian Werthmann, Fernando de Mello Franco, and Byron Stigge 590 In Situ: Site Specificity Evaluating Green at the Urban Scale 502 Landscapes of Specialization Bill Rankin A Place in Heaven, A Place in Hell: Tactical Operations in São Paulo 629 THE CITY Ian McHarg 630 ECOLOGICAL URBANISM INCUBATE 572 Balances and Challenges of Integrated Practice Toshiko Mori 578 The Luxury of Reduction: On the Role of Architecture in Ecological Urbanism Matthias Sauerbruch CONFERENCE BLOG APPENDIX 642 Contributors 648 Acknowledgments 650 Index 654 Illustration Credits There’s More to Green than Meets the Eye : Green Urbanism in Bahrain Gareth Doherty As a color, green does not exist by itself: it is a mix of blue and yellow. Colors, though, have subjective boundaries, and the point at which what we consider blue becomes green, or green becomes yellow, depends to a large extent on the culture and language of the perceiver, as well as the context. Anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, writing in 1969, speak of the relativity of color across cultures; still, they found that a word for green almost always exists, even when a word for blue does not.1 Philosophers grapple with color, and there is no consensus as to whether an object is actually colored or not. Alex Byrne and David Hilbert outline four main positions on color in philosophy: eliminativists say color is not part of an object and see color as a sort of illusion; for dispositionalists “the property green (for example) is a disposition to produce certain perceptual states: roughly the disposition to look green”; physicalists, such as Byrne and Hilbert, regard green as a physical property of an object; and meanwhile, primitivists agree that objects have colors, but do not agree that the color is identical to the physical property of the object that is colored.2 But green is more than color; it is vegetation, open space, a type of building or urbanism, an environmental cause, a political movement, “the new black.” The color of photosynthesis and chlorophyll, green is mostly regarded as life-giving, bountiful, and healthy (except when referring to the tone of human skin). Talk-show hosts relax in “green rooms” and doctors’ scrubs are often green (to contrast with red). As an adjective, green can mean naiveté, or something not yet ripe. The Bahrain islands are the smallest, densest, and proportionately the greenest of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Ten miles wide by thirty miles long, the kingdom is smaller than London or New York and just about the same size as Singapore. As the city-state transitions to an intensely urban landscape driven by the demands of a growing population and limited land mass, the hues of Bahrain’s greenery are changing and with them the ecologies of society, politics, and infrastructure with which green is inherently intertwined. The gray-greens of the native date-palm plantations are being replaced with bright grass greens of roadside shoulders, SENSE 174 The rich greens of gardens and orchards contrast with the whites and browns of the desert. roundabouts, and the lawns of new residential and leisure developments. To have greenery in such a markedly urban environment is not very green from an environmental perspective, given the resources often required to sustain it. Bahrain represents an extreme example of the impulse for urban greenery, an impulse that is both global and local to Bahrain. Bahrain literally means “ Two Seas” in Arabic. One sea, the Gulf, separates Bahrain from Iran on the east and Saudi Arabia on the west (to which it is linked by a 20-mile causeway). The other freshwater “sea” springs up from the Damman aquifer, which originates aboveground in Saudi Arabia and flows eastward, running under the sea and perforating the seabed around the Bahraini archipelago, as well as the land, with a plethora of springs.3 As a result, Bahrain gained its regional importance disproportionate to its land area largely due to these sweetwater springs that sustained its greenery and its urbanism. Though often considered an antidote to the urban, in arid environments green, through cultivated areas, often indicates the presence of human settlements. The villages that punctuated Bahrain’s greenery were sustained for millennia by the freshwater springs and orchards and vegetable gardens that existed between and within the gray-green date-palm groves, until the pressures of increasing population and development of the latter part of the twentieth century upset that relationship. Today Bahrain uses much of its water reserves on irrigating its remaining agricultural areas, which produce only 11 percent of the country’s food and less than 0.05 percent of the national income. This agriculture is a remnant of a time when the country was self-sufficient, albeit with a much smaller population; Bahrain has grown from 70,000 in the 1920s to more than 1 million residents today. A complex system of irrigation channels, qanats, were fed by the freshwater springs and water distributed according to detailed customary irrigation laws that ensured fair access to water by farmers.4 “ The Adhari Pond starves the nearby and feeds the far beyond” goes a Bahraini proverb referring to the irrigation system that because of topography and the pull of gravity supplied distant gardens rather than those close by.5 The proximity of the springs to the greenery was further disrupted by the artesian wells drilled during the 1920s and 1930s (leading indirectly to the discovery of oil), which led to a rapid increase in greenery in Bahrain—by some accounts almost doubling green areas between the 1930s and the early 1970s 6 —but eventually contributed to the overextraction and subsequent depletion and salination 175 Map of Bahrain, 1901–1902, showing the date-palm groves of the north coast > Some of the many hues of green in Bahrain of the underground water reserves. Some of the gardens that are still irrigated from the depleted and saline springs bear exceptionally pungent fruit. Groves of date palms are the most iconic and distinctive, yet rapidly diminishing, green spaces of Bahrain. Planning laws allow for the development of only 30 percent of agricultural areas (as opposed to all of nonagricultural areas), so many landowners seek to have land declassified as agricultural to be able to develop it. If the land is no longer green, it is no longer considered agricultural, so green must become as white as the desert sands through active neglect. One property developer told me that it is easy to reconstruct the greenery of the palm groves—that even though date palms are cut down for villas, green areas can be replanted with trees and greenery to regain the same effect. I wish it were that easy. There is something very green about these spaces that is an indispensible part of their appeal: the richness of the hues of green, the range of textures, and the variety and intensity of the shadows. The allure of green is more than the pull of nostalgia, much more than the resonance of a bygone era that can never be recovered. Many of these spaces, whether maintained or neglected, feel timeless and dignified. They take much of their value from their history gathered over millennia of farming and gardening, as well as the microclimates that the plantations produce. The urbanity of that greenness cannot be recovered; it can be imitated, but not regained. Writing about the social life of the Bahraini date palms, Fuad Khuri states that the culture of palms in Bahrain used to be as elaborate as the culture of camels among the pastoral nomads in central Arabia.7 There are more than 1,000 words for a camel in Arabic; I am not sure how many words there are for date palms or for greenery, but one Bahraini farmer told me that he gave the date palms close to his house names, like his children, and in this way they are treated like family members. It is considered a great honor for a visitor to be served dates from these trees. It was common for farmers to plant trees to commemorate their child’s birth. Shaikh Isa, the previous ruler, is credited with the saying, “The Palm tree is our mother, we can live under it.” 8 Date palms provided building materials for traditional summer housing called barasti. Indeed every part of the palm had a use: the leaves, the trunk, and the dates all had particular roles. A diet of dates allegedly provides the basic nutrients the human body needs. The date season starts in May and extends to October or November, depending on the variety. The date palms offered just one layer in gardens with multiple levels of produce including pomegranates, bananas, mangoes, and alfalfa, all sheltered from the blazing sun by the trees. The date palms have the capacity to be urban in that they penetrate so many aspects of Bahraini life, providing food, shelter, building materials, social spaces, and social status as well as facilitating ancillary industries and produce, while serving as a focus for poetry and folklore. While the date-palm groves offered sources of food and employment, they were also recreation grounds for the elite. With the shade they give from the scorching sun, the palm groves create attractive spaces for social gatherings, especially during the summer months. Owning greenery in Bahrain had, and still has, complex social meanings. Large date-palm plantations were owned by city merchants, who invested in them not for income but for the status of ownership. Farmers were contracted to look after the gardens, supplying a couple of baskets of dates a week to the owners. Wealthy merchants from Manama, the capital, would bring their families to the palm groves on Friday afternoons and issue invitations to relatives and friends to join them there until the maghrib prayers at sundown. Sometimes visiting cards would be distributed, granting friends of the merchant permission to visit in their absence.9 It is important to note that the date-palm gardens of the past were not very profitable, as is the case today. One large property just outside Manama near Ain Adhari (a formerly important spring that has since dried up, to be replaced in 2008 with an artificial pool) was sold in 1943 for 40,000 rupees (about $1.2 million), while a shop in the souq in the center of Manama at that time cost 4,000 rupees. This land was then rented out at a rate of 27.5 rupees a month, thereby netting SENSE There’s More to Green than Meets the Eye 176 177 SENSE 178 There’s More to Green than Meets the Eye 179 The date-palm groves were in the past punctuated with villages where farmers and fishermen lived—note the shallow green waters of the sea. Now villas replace the date-palm groves with other less varied greens. an annual rent of 330 rupees, or approximately 1 percent of the value of the property. This was not a good financial investment, and thus it seems fair to deduce that the purchase must have been made for the social prestige that ownership of the greenery would confer. 10 While the owners of the gardens historically belonged to an elite group of ruling family members and merchants, the farmers who worked in them invariably belonged to the Baharna, the local Arab Shi’i community, who by and large lived in nearby villages. Green is also finely ingrained in Shi’i identity. During the commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, on the first ten days of the month of Muharram, the center of Manama is clothed in green banners and flags and the streets strewn with sweet basil, mashmoom, since green is considered the color of Hussein, and Islam. Every Thursday evening it is still common to bring green shoots of mashmoom to graves in Shi’i cemeteries. Those Bahrainis old enough to remember the mosaic of date-palm groves often lament their destruction. It is important, however, not to overly romanticize the past and to recognize that the destruction of the date-palm gardens is not just a recent phenomenon, although the scale and pace of destruction has certainly accelerated. Curtis Larsen, in Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands: The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society, cites E. L. Durand, the British Political Resident in Bushire, who made the following observation when visiting Bahrain in 1879: “Foremost amongst the trees is of course the date, and some of the date gardens are extremely fine. Many, however, are going to ruin, the result of bad Government, and indeed in some places that were once flourishing gardens, not a bearing tree remains.” 11 Although the villages were intertwined with greenery, the center of Manama was not very green. Walking though the souq there today, one will not find much greenery apart from the odd tree or weed pushing its way through cracks in the pavement.There are many green shutters and occasional green doors, in partial compensation perhaps for the lack of soft greenery in the city. It was in the urbanization period of the early 1970s, right after full independence from the British, that greenery and city really started to mesh in Bahrain. Nelida Fuccaro links this to the oil crisis triggered by the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.12 It was during this period, when the green countryside with its villages and the gray and white city subsequently become one in the popular imagination, that city people stopped going out to the gardens at weekends. The garden was no longer “the other ” and instead became “corrupted” SENSE There’s More to Green than Meets the Eye 180 181 and considered part of the city. The special greeness of the gardens was disrupted by the extensive development that has taken place over the past thirty years. Bahrain’s limited land mass makes the demand for land and the continuance of the past uses of greenery untenable. At the same time, the extensive distribution infrastructures for water and treated sewage effluent bring the possibility of greenery to much of Bahrain today. Contemporary green residential compounds in Bahrain, with names such as Green Oasis, are partial compensation for the lost date-palm groves. Together with the date palms of roundabouts, roadside shoulders, and median strips of VIP roads (roads designed for extra-verdant greenery but also with security in mind), they signify the green of contemporary Bahrain. Such residential and transportation infrastructural spaces are important because they are the greenery that most people encounter in everyday life. These green roadsides represent not so much the past —although the palms do symbolize this past—but speak more about Bahrain’s present, its place in the world, and its aspirations for the future. Typical ads for new developments, often on billboards positioned beside highways, will show most of an image as green rather than featuring the buildings they advertise. At weekends and in the evenings, it is not unusual to see expatriates picnicking on the roadside shoulders despite the passing traffic. (I am told that Bahrainis would never do this.) The roadside palms, although of typically different species and hues of green than traditional plantings, still retain some of their social and agricultural value. The date palms at the Bahrain Financial Harbour, built on reclaimed land on the site of the former port in the center of Manama, are pollinated in the spring and the dates harvested in the fall by low-income expatriate workers for their personal use. The date-palm gardens and the roadside shoulders and roundabouts have similar social values. Roadside greenery can be seen as the date-palm groves of the present era. Both have a certain type of production, although those productive qualities are obviously different: the palm groves are agricultural, whereas the green roadsides indicate economic productivity, a production of development, a landscape of transformation. The plethora of green roundabouts and median strips lined with petunias of the national colors of red and white celebrate the power and benevolence of the state. As seen in the multitude of roadside billboards with pictures of the king, the prime minister, and the crown prince, invariably situated beside greenery, the rulers are happy to be associated with green. SENSE 182 “Together let us make Bahrain Green,” urged the organizers of the 2008 Riffa Views Bahrain International Garden Show, who also sponsored a garden design competition among Bahraini schools called “The Riffa Views Eden Challenge.” The International Garden Show, which runs for three days every year, is one of just three organizations in Bahrain under the direct patronage of the king, Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa. Green retains its position as a social catalyst, with the Gardening Club reflecting increased interest in things green and beautiful and, by association, royal. The transformative power of turning desert to green is extraordinary. To convert desert into luscious green is to prove that dreams do become reality, to achieve the impossible, to show that paradise can be constructed on earth. Writing in The Social Life of Trees, Maurice Bloch, invoking Claude LéviStrauss, maintains that to be effective, a transformation needs to be of a certain magnitude.13 For instance, turning arid desert into gravel or concrete is not as potent a transformation as changing desert into green. The presence of the desert, however, is not easily forgotten. This text is adapted from my doctoral research at Harvard Graduate School of Design. 1 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms : Their Universality and Evolution ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969 ), 2 – 4 . 2 Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, Readings on Color : The Philosophy of Color, Vol. 1 ( Cambridge : MIT Press, 1997 ), xi – xxv. 3 The sea-based springs induced a particular coloration of the green waters of the sea, as well as a particular luster on pearls, a mainstay of Bahrain’s economy until the 1930 s. 4 See R. B. Serjeant, “Customary Irrigation Law among the Baharnah of Bahrain,” Bahrain Through the Ages : The History, edited by Shaikh Abdullah bin Khalid Al-Khalifa and Michael Rice ( London and New York : Keegan Paul International, 1993 ), 471– 496 . 5 Ali Akbar Bushehri, personal communication, April 21, 2008 . See also Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2009 ), 23 . As Fuccaro suggests, the saying also cynically refers to the appropriation of Bahrain’s resources by foreigners. 6 See Mustapha Ben Hamouche, “ LandUse Change and Its Impact on Urban Planning in Bahrain : A GIS Approach,” Proceedings of the Middle East Spatial Technology Conference, Bahrain, December 2007. Retrieved on June 26 , 2009, from : http://www.gisdevelopment.net/ proceedings/mest/2007/RemoteSensingApplicationsLanduse.htm 7 Fuad Khuri, Tribe and State in Bahrain : The Transformation of Social and Political Authority in an Arab State ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1980 ), 39. 8 Fareeda Mohammed Saleh Khunji, The Story of the Palm Tree ( Bahrain : 2003 ), 45 . 9 Ali Akbar Bushehri, personal communication, April 25 , 2008 . 10 From the archive of Ali Akbar Bushehri. 11 Curtis Larsen, Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands : The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1983 ), 22 . 12 Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf, 229. 13 Maurice Bloch, “ Why Trees, Too, Are Good to Think With : Towards an Anthropology of the Meaning of Life,” The Social Life of Trees, edited by Laura Rival ( New York : Berg Publishers, 1998 ), 39 –40 . Bloch cites the example of the transformation of wine to blood in the Catholic mass ; the transformation would not be so intense if it were wine to whiskey. There’s More to Green than Meets the Eye 183 On ethics : “ I don’t believe in good intentions.” GSD: ecologicalurbanism On infrastructure : “ Infrastructure is the catalyzer of a new architecture.” GSD:ecologicalurbanism is an online platform created by students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design ( GSD ) to accompany the Ecological Urbanism conference and exhibition that took place on April 3– 5, 2009. This platform was meant to document, react, criticize, and debate the panels and discussions that occurred during the conference. Elaborating and reflecting on the issues raised at the event, students from the various departments used GSD:ecologicalurbanism as an informal platform for building their agenda toward ecological urbanism: what is it now and what it might turn out to be. Some extracts follow, in reverse chronological order. For more critical reflections on ecological urbanism, see: http://gsd-ecologicalurbanism. blogspot.com/ The GSD Blogging Team: Matthew Allen, MArch I Ilana Cohen, MLA Yonatan Cohen, MAUD Dan Handel, MArch II Zakcq Lockrem, MUP Quilian Riano, MArch I AP Guest Bloggers: Kazys Varnelis Orhan Ayyuce Javier Arbona On Informality SUNDAY, APRIL 5 , 2009 Boeri on Autonomy Stefano Boeri, in his morning lecture, gave an efficient presentation that seemed to me to be echoing Branzi’s lecture from yesterday in the sense that he was trying to shake the environmentalist notion of nature as exterior to human activity ( e.g., the city ). He went through three main trajectories for reconciliation: mimesis ( that is, copying natural forms by technological means ), confinement ( which he interprets as increased control over nature ), and autonomy, for him the more promising trajectory. Boeri described autonomy as nature reinhabiting cities, creating a curious, essentially ecological condition of shared spaces between humans, animals, and plants without moral or evolutionary hierarchies. For me this notion of autonomy plays a dual role: on the one hand it is presented as a positive, pragmatic way out of current failures in sustainable thinking, while on the REDUNDANCY! other it maintains the I was just talking to a Leslie, a Californiadystopian imagery ever based landscape architect visiting for present. In this sense the conference, about my thesis when Boeri collapsed the REDUNDANCY came up. She was saying that since I can never be 100 percent two lines of human hissure of how water flows and other ecotory: the apocalyptic logies will work, I need to build in reand the progressive, dundant systems to make sure it works. I liked that idea a lot because redundanpresented by Koolhaas cy is another “humble” design tactic. It on Friday, into a single, makes us accept that we cannot control perversely irrational, it all, we can just try to mediate it. I like post-technocratic view it because in systems that are predetermined and completely engineered, there on the future of cities. is little to no room for design. Redundancy allows design to come in and mediate indeterminacy. In short, redundancy can make sure that ecological urbanism is not about top-down efficiency. On aesthetics : “ To reach a new idea of beauty, we have to pass through ugliness.” — Iñaki Ábalos By Guest Blogger Kazys Varnelis Kazys Varnelis is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. With Robert Sumrell, he runs the nonprofit architectural collective AUDC. POSTED BY ILANA COHEN AT 1: 01 PM Quilian Riano asked me to participate in the blogging revolving around the GSD event on Ecological Urbanism. Although Quilian is live-blogging the event ( like the live blogging for Postopolis going on simultaneously ), I think it makes much more sense to the participants than to those of us listening in at a remove, observing highly compressed fragments of the conversation. Even if I take my knowledge of the event secondhand, I thought I’d offer a response, prematurely broaching a topic that I’ve been engulfed in for the first part of this year. I’ll begin with the event’s statement of purpose, the core of which reads as follows: “The conference is organized around the premise that an ecological approach is urgently needed both as a remedial device for the contemporary city and an organizing principle for new cities. An ecological urbanism represents a more holistic approach than is generally the case with urbanism today, demanding alternative ways of thinking and designing.” In ecological urbanism, the informal seems to crop up repeatedly. Instead of “green architecture” and its outworn advocacy of LEED to design our way out of a global ecological crisis, the conference proposes an urbanism produced bottom-up, in a natural way, like an ecosystem. Sanford Kwinter’s keen observation that New York’s culture has come to a crashing halt under the weight of capital, overdevelopment, and hipsterdom serves as a setup to ecological urbanism. Instead of a vital urban realm, we have a stuffed animal ( to use a phrase Peter Eisenman once applied to European cities . . . and let’s just be clear that today cities anywhere in the developing world don’t fare any better than Manhattan does ). In the face of this collapsing formal urbanism, then, Quilian observes, informality is thriving. We’ve heard this before, in the recent fascination with favelas and their capacity for self-organization. When Rem Koolhaas spoke, he brought out Lagos, his exemplar of such a self-organizing city, a nightmare condition that nevertheless he feels somehow works. In doing so, he replays Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas as well as Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, but in going to Africa, Koolhaas is not so much flipping the valence on a “low,” pop phenomenon as replaying the modernist obsession with the primitive ( to be fair, in the East, the West is often seen in terms of the primitive ). The modern obsession with the primitive suggested that in such contexts we would identify the next modernity. So Koolhaas hopes to do in Lagos . . . POSTED BY GSD: ECOLOGICAL URBANISM AT 10: 20 AM POSTED BY DAN HANDEL AT 8: 57 PM POSTED BY QUILIAN RIANO AT 3: 03 PM 630 631 Andrea Branzi Videos If you were not there for Branzi’s lecture, you can catch up by watching the videos on his site. The following are my favorites: No-Stop City Concorso Agronica Vertical Home I had not seen the videos before Branzi presented them last night. The music, editing, and collage gave me new insights into his work. I now see clearly the connections to minimalist music and biological processes, and he even gave hints at these being set within real landscapes. The hints of real landscapes bring up some questions I have always had for Branzi: First, what is your site, your landscape? From No-Stop City to my personal favorite, Agronica, the site seems like an abstraction and a real place at the same time. In Agronica the video is edited with images of a real landscape organized in perfect rows. Where is that? Is that “ the site? ” Does it matter? Second, why has the “ language” developed in No-Stop City never been deployed in a mountainous site? The language looks like it wants to be universal, yet as deployed right now it would work in very few places in the world. Does it matter? Would it be a fruitful exercise? Third, the projects with their extreme horizontality seem very American. More specifically, midwestern. Agronica reminds me of the agroindustrial fields from Missouri to Iowa. Is that intentional? Architecture Imagined as Ecological by Guest Blogger Javier Arbona Javier Arbona is a University of California, Berkeley, PhD candidate in geography with a background in architecture and urbanism. POSTED BY QUILIAN RIANO AT 8: 55 AM Defining Moment Andrea Branzi’s lecture was probably the highlight of the conference. After severely attacking environmentalism and environmentalists for creating problems as much as offering solutions and for simply making ugly things, Branzi was challenged by Matthias Schuler, an environmentalist himself, as to whether humanity should not prioritize, at this stage, survival over aesthetics. Branzi’s simple “ no” contrasted a progressive positive worldview, MS A question as an environmentalist: You said environmencharacterizing much of sustainable talists are missing the point. Don’t you think that to find a way thinking, with an utter negation of of sustainable living is a question of survival in our society? AB Till now the solution proposed can . . . impoverish the society both technology and rationality as means and the environment. of improving the human condition CW You made a very pointed critique of environmentalism . . . AB Environmentalism has of course the chances but it has to and offered a crisp, pristine moment of deal with also the aesthetical qualities . . . So environmentalism reflection saved for rare occasions doesn’t work if the projects are worse, uglier, than what there was before . . . It is a big problem. This is the problem! of great intellectual clarity. MS If it’s a question of survival, isn’t environmentalism better? AB Not so sure! Not so sure! Maybe better to die. POSTED BY DAN HANDEL AT 12: 04 AM MS – Matthias Schuler AB – Andrea Branzi CW – Charles Waldheim, moderator Velib! A question from the audience during the “mobility, infrastructure, and society” panel brought up the bicycle. The panelists hadn’t really mentioned its role in mobility and infrastructure. The Velib program in Paris is a great example of how the bicycle can become an integral part of urban transportation infrastructure. All cities should have this sort of program and at this scale. It’s brilliant: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week you have access to a free bicycle, available at stations spaced approximately every 300 meters throughout the city. The all-encompassing discourse of sustainability is tangled up with global geopolitics at every turn, but that discourse hides its tail. What’s worse is that “sustainable architecture” can be the proPOSTED BY ILANA COHEN AT 6:11 PM verbial “greenwash,” as I think has become more than evident. We would only have to do a roll-call of all the eco-resorts done in years of economic fluidity. Thinking about a sustainable practice is ( still ) supposed to arouse in us a moral instinct of how to satisfy our needs without “compromising the needs of future generations.” The small-house movement serves as a good example of an architecture informed by notions of what is said to be “basic.” Our “needs,” however, are a mirage. We know that they are essentially malleable. They’re subject to crass marketing manipulation. They evolve through the sieves of culture and desire. They’re hard to pin down and it’s no accident that capitalism pulls the rug out from under us as soon as we try. Besides, unless the global economic crisis ends up destroying capitalism, we satisfy our so-called needs through an increasingly global economy, despite the localist and nationalist fantasies some may have. Even if we didn’t have capitalism, we’d still have trade, and subscribers to notions of Malthusian natural limits fail to adequately take this i nto account. Sometimes the sustainability talk sounds to me even xenophobic in its suggestions that a certain number of citizens will have a right to the city ( blurring further the notion of what is natural: Numerical limits? Naturalization, as in citizenship? ). The ideologues of sustainability might deny that it is an issue of power and not morals, but it is. It has to do with who determines how much is a reasonable need for some and not others, both at a local and global level. By the way, I’m sorry for even using these terms like “local” and “global” because they pertain to imprecise scales, especially when ecological processes are involved. But none of this has slowed down the field of architecture. As oftentimes is clear in the works of architects like Michael Sorkin and other adherents to the “ecological footprint,” design indexes how much nature is judged to be fair and balanced according to some metric of consumption. POSTED BY GSD: ECOLOGICAL URBANISM AT 5:43 PM — Ecological Urbanism conference, Saturday, April 4, 2009 632 GSD: ecologicalurbanism 633 Ruralization of Urbanism? According to Andres Duany, the environmental movement is elevating the value of greenspace and is ruralizing cities. And when you ruralize a city, it becomes a suburb. And suburbs, as we all know, are the root of all evil. I am skeptical. McHargian environmentalism, while still alive and relevant, is not the only strain of environmentalism. Those that emphasize environmental health and/or environmental justice tend to be more encompassing and less critical of the fundamental value of the city. While Sustainable South Bronx and Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice might be advocating for the “ greening ” of the Bronx, I don’t think they fully embrace the McHargian disdain for the city. These environmentalists love their neighborhoods and want to make them healthy and sustainable. They understand that their neighborhoods cannot promote public health or support healthy economies without being ecologically sustainable. They are making the Bronx more “ecological ” and the suburbs have nothing to do with it. SATURDAY, APRIL 4, 2009 Why Informal? Informality seems to be coming up more than I anticipated. We have heard it from Koolhaas, Bhabha, Kwinter, Mostafavi, Kirkwood, and others in different contexts. In fact I think it is being used as often, and with more focus, than ecology. I want to share my first impressions as I try to find reasons for the focus on the informal in a conference about ecology. POSTED BY ILANA COHEN AT 5:42 PM A Way In Designers seem to have a hard time getting into ecology as a way of working. The informal allows us a way into the discussion. The word “ informal ” seems to stand in for the larger economic, political, environmental, and social contexts that designers cannot fully account for and thus control. This condition then produces many products, including built environments. We can strategically choose some of the systems to act upon and be flexible to account for the rest. This is what I think Koolhaas means when he talks about the formal and informal growing together. Koolhaas says that he learned that lesson after going to Lagos. However, his design for La Villette was already trying to design such a condition. The design provides the minimum infrastructure required while allowing major sections of the park to change as economy, community, and political will allow. Western Anxiety Kwinter officially declared New York City dead last night. He says that it is a boring place now. Such a strong statement has to have a cause larger than a few porn shops turning into Disney stores. Maybe the statement has to more to do with anxiety around the failure of the formal structures in the West. Populations are dropping, immigration increasing, manufacturing and economic strength shifting to other nations. Western nations are facing a changing culture at home and a shifting power structure abroad. As formal structures fail, informal systems take over. This anxiety was partially on display last night. Koolhaas, Bhabha, and Kwinter talked about Lagos and Mumbai with excitement and interest, about New York and Europe with a measure of pessimism. Studies in the informal are a way to then anticipate and mediate changes in Western cities as well as in developing nations. Preempting Top-Down Ecological Solutions I think that all the talk about informality is partly about the humility by designers that Koolhaas and Kwinter called for last night. They are telling designers that they will really never know everything about a condition, there is no reason design as if you do . . . there are intelligences out there as great as your own. Farming the Horizontal Plane I was delighted to hear members of the panel on productive urban environments seriously discuss urban agriculture in the context of a design conference without obsessing over the potentials of vertical gardens and mega farm towers in the city. It was an exciting discussion, which mentioned the work of brilliant community-based organizations such as Growing Power and New York City’s Council on the Environment’s New Farmer Development Project. Vibrant communitybased organizations are not designing tower farms in the sky. They are BUILDING them on the ground. While designers are fantasizing about pigs floating high above us, community organizers and educators at East New York Farms!, Added Value, The Food Project, the People’s Grocery, and many other organizations are making food-system change happen right now. What is the role that designers can play in this bottom-up movement? As my interviews with Deborah Greig and Owen Taylor, two urban farmers, educators, and local food advocates, about the Work AC installation at PS1 illustrate, there is wary enthusiasm among the local food community around designer input into urban agriculture. This morning Nina-Marie Lister outlined for us some opportunities for designers and planners. We can map interstitial spaces in cities and facilitate growth of these community-based, bottom-up systems. But is that all? Can’t we do more? POSTED BY ILANA COHEN AT 2: 00 PM I have to disagree with Ilana on the first panel and with Matthew’s characterization that “ecology is approached . . . as a matter of existential praxis.” I felt that the first panel, in fact, tended to reinforce what Kwinter later called the “ false dichotomy,” negating much of its value in my opinion and showing just how deep the diametrically opposed Thoreauvian conceptions of nature and city run. During the keynote, on the other hand, many of the issues that I hoped would be raised during this conference were, from the role of capital to showing alternatives to the nature/ city dualism. As the sole planner writing about the conference, I have to admit that I was a little concerned about having an architect and a literary critic delivering the keynote at a conference that is specifically urban. For someone who studies the city full time, architects’ presentations on urbanism can, at times, seem woefully naive. Setting aside the ( admitted ) irony of Rem Koolhaas declaring an end to starchitecture, I was extremely impressed by the nuance and depth of his presentation, as well as the ease of his movement between the architectural and urban scales with clarity. I especially enjoyed the short look at the California Academy of Sciences building as well as the characterization that we have too often “equated literal greening” with ecological sustainability. I recently saw a project that included significant introduction of northern American foliage to a park in Albuquerque with the goal of “greening” the city. Yes, perhaps the color green will abound, but only at a huge environmental cost to create the necessary ecosystem for it to exist in that climate. This, as Koolhaas said, is the “artificiality to which we’ve become accustomed.” POSTED BY ZAKCQ LOCKREM AT 1: 30 PM POSTED BY QUILIAN RIANO AT 3: 52 PM 634 GSD: ecologicalurbanism 635 Good Quotes from the Day Here are two quotes from the day’s proceedings, entirely out of context and intended to perhaps provoke and certainly amuse: “Sustainable urbanism should not mean green cities for wealthy white people.” Excluded Thirds We continuously bring up the city-nature dyad only to lament the exclusion of a third term. Practically anything can be framed as the excluded third of a dialectic pair. This is how post-Enlightenment thought works. Sanford Kwinter, in his opening address to the keynote, argued that what is excluded by the “false dichotomy” of technology and nature is nothing less than the “social and cultural dimension” itself. I would argue, to the contrary, that ecology is typically approached today as a matter of existential praxis even by those technocrats and hippies that in the end address ecological problems within the narrow means of the technology-nature dyad. The problem is one of feasibility: a technological or naturalist scope each yield results that are implementable in our liberal/capitalist world, while an “existential ecology” yields unbuilt utopia. I would argue that the blind spot Sanford points out does not in fact exist; scratch a technocratic or hippie environmentalist and you will find the sensibility of a deep ecologist. Rem Koolhaas thankfully presented a resolutely hybrid interpretation of ecology. His argument incorporated a narrative of “reasonable progress” and a narrative of “disasters,” each of which contained a social/cultural dimension. Rem’s excluded third was the pairing of knowledge with ambition: he lamented the “devastating effect on knowledge” of ways of working with informal architecture that occurred during the growth of the market economy post-1970. The ways of quantifying ecology developed during the 1960s were not advanced beyond a touchingly naive stage. The ambition to carry out large-scale projects with serious ecological impact exemplified by Buckminster Fuller imploded during the same period. Both Sanford and Rem argued in a way that carved out a niche for themselves, one as a practitioner of the formal where it intersects with the informal, the other as a theorist working on the specific social and cultural dimensions of the science of ecology. I thought it was interesting how in the opening panel of this weekend’s conference, “Good cities are like French cheeses. the terms sustainable, green, and ecology were used so The worse they smell, the better they are.” interchangeably. Different — Homi Bhabha panelists latched on to different terms for their own purposes, and in this smashingly interdisciplinary panel there were a multitude of agendas and positions. Are these terms identical in meaning? If not, what is the difference between them? Is one more inclusive than another? And is this disparate conversation useful for defining a clear agenda for a new sort of urbanism? Or is it impossible to have a single agenda for something as abstractly defined as ecological urbanism? As for the French cheese comment, it certainly elicits visceral reaction, though it strikes me as a rather romantic notion of the city. Smelly cities may be more complex and implicitly more exciting than the sterile or “dead” city ( Sanford Kwinter just killed New York tonight, by the way ), but isn’t this just the sort of excitement that lends itself to a touristic voyeurism and encourages a view of the city as place exclusively of voyeurism and vice? Maybe New York was more “alive” in the 1970s than it is today, and we can have a nostalgia about that time, with some very good reason, but I must say that the quality of life can be much higher in a city with a more refreshing and neutral smell. Personally, my parents ( longstanding NYC residents ) are much happier that the neighborhood whorehouse has been converted to condos and that the subways are safe at all hours. Maybe the city is more sterile, but we shouldn’t forget that sterility too has its charms. — Lizabeth Cohen POSTED BY ILANA COHEN AT 1:42 AM POSTED BY MATTHEW ALLEN AT 11: 20 AM 636 GSD: ecologicalurbanism 637 THURSDAY, APRIL 2 , 2009 Landscape Provocations While it was not technically part of the conference, I thought it appropriate that the first dialogue in the Landscape Provocations series was today, leading up to the conference. Contemporary issues of practice, research, and representation in landscape architecture must confront ecology at all levels, and the event was an exciting prequel to the weekend. The conversation between Gary Hilderbrand and Chris Reed touched on the economic value of ecology in the urban environment, addressing the ever-increasing value of defining ecosystem services and the potential for urban ecology to provide an infrastructural role in the city. As Gary hinted at this afternoon, a street tree is not just a tree, but a critical element of our city, cleaning air, sequestering carbon, diminishing the urban heat-island effect, and providing countless other environmental and economic benefits to the city. Indeed, a city of trees therefore would be a more livable city ecological or otherwise. Chris spoke of the potential of landscape to function as a water-filtration mechanism, and to be both more cost-effective and attractive than traditional systems of civil engineering. In the examples they raised, landscape functions as infrastructure — an idea that fits nicely into the more abstract ecological urbanism. A landscape always contains ecology. So it would follow that the more landscape you have, the more ecology. Landscape infrastructure should therefore be a fundamental component of the Ecological City. The thing that I like about the exhibition, and what I hope to discover through the conference, is the notion that ecological I just picked up the exhibition guide urbanism includes not only this infrastructural landscape and found myself reading the line, “Urbanism is clearly no longer the approach but that it goes beyond the landscape. If more pluralsole domain of cities . . .” What does istic and encompassing of multiple disciplines, it says that that mean? Is it what Roman Polanit isn’t just us landscape folks who can green the city, and you ski said about Chinatown? Is that don’t have to pretend to be a landscape designer to be a why, as Ilana pointed out, a chair part of this movement. What I can ascertain from the exhibition and a coffin belong in an exhibition on Ecological Urbanism? is that ecological urbanism is design that impacts the city at all its scales, and attempts to do so in a way that learns from POSTED BY ZAKCQ LOCKREM nature and /or is harmonious with its principles. That’s exciting. AT 3:43 PM When Ecological Optimism Gives Way to Fear The discussion around ecology and how it can influence design often turns into a discussion of efficiency and economy of resources. We seek to use the latest in technology to design more efficient buildings and cities. We hope that by saving resources, we will be able to maintain our lifestyle and produce more things for a longer period of time. In other words, cut costs to eventually make more profits. A city designed for efficiency requires “ rational ” systems, where everything and everyone does something beneficial according to some standard. In the exhibition, Atelier Van Lieshout takes this premise and gives us Slave City. What at first may have been a beneficial system takes on a sinister tone, utopia giving way to dystopia. I was amazed to see this project in the exhibition. It is there as a preindictment of designs that may have the impulse to go too far. Though we know that no one would intentionally go this far, dystopia comes in small steps. That is why I was even more amazed TUESDAY, MARCH 31, 2009 to see the work of Senseable City lab just in front of Slave City. Don’t get me wrong, I like their work, but have to admit that I am afraid of it. I am not sure, for example, if I am comfortable with a government office having the technology to track my bike or cell phone. Today’s cool tool of urban study is tomorrow’s way to track dissent. As the discussion of ecological design ( whatever that turns out to mean ) continues, it seems that issues of privacy, appropriate use of technology, and even freedom will have to join the discussion of efficiency. Furthermore, ecological design should include a larger social agenda that does not allow it to be coopted as a mere marketing and political tool. Or as the “ Trays ” zine editorial put it, Ecology, INC. POSTED BY QUILIAN RIANO AT 11: 55 AM Two questions : How is Ecological Urbanism different from Landscape Urbanism? And what is Urbanism, anyway? I thought that urbanism implied an urban ( i.e., large scale ). That doesn’t implicitly mean a giant intervention into the city — tactical insertions into the city are urbanism as well — but it does imply an approach that examines design at a city scale. The exhibition is provocative in that it suggests that the design of a chair is urbanism. The design of a coffin is as well. Landscape urbanism doesn’t address chairs and coffins. Is that the difference ? POSTED BY ILANA COHEN AT 10: 01 PM POSTED BY ILANA COHEN AT 6: 24 PM 638 GSD: ecologicalurbanism 639 Ecological Urbanism Edited by Mohsen Mostafavi, with Gareth Doherty Harvard University Graduate School of Design Design: Integral Lars Müller, Lars Müller and Martina Mullis Lithography: connova GmbH, Appenweier, Germany Printing and binding: E & B engelhardt und bauer, Karlsruhe, Germany © 2010/ 2013 Lars Müller Publishers and the President and Fellows of Harvard College No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Lars Müller Publishers Zürich, Switzerland www.lars-mueller-publishers.com ISBN 978 -3- 03778 -189-0 Printed in Germany Related titles in our program: R. Buckminster Fuller Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth Reprint, edited by Jaime Snyder Lars Müller Publishers, 2008 , 2010 ISBN 978 -3 -03778 -126 -5 English ISBN 978 -3 -03778 -188 -3 French Petra Kempf You Are the City: Observation, Organization and Transformation of Urban Settings Lars Müller Publishers, 2009 ISBN 978 -3 -03778 -159 -3 English Sense of the City An Alternate Approach to Urbanism Edited by Mirko Zardini and the Canadian Centre for Architecture CCA Lars Müller Publishers, 2005 ISBN 978 -3 -03778 -060 -2 English ISBN 978 -3 -03778 - 061- 9 French