After Zero From wacko hippy-esk ideology, ‘sustainability’, or ‘eco-friendly’, or ‘green’ has now become globally accepted. But, as what? As an environmental urgency, as a political issue, as a technical problem, as a historical destiny, or as a new world order? And with which consequences? The sustainability consensus is dangerous, since the concept has no political content and can be used for any cause. Carbon neutrality and zero emissions are like magic formulas, cover ups for complicated ethical questions about the inequalities in our societies. Yet, striving for zeros or hiding in neutrality does not lead to a better life, in a better house in a better city for all. After Zero is not be inspired by the fear of tsunamis or Katrinas, but by the thought that a better future depends on responsible design today. Let’s go beyond the zero point through a real understanding of the design of our society. As a kick off, VOLUME discusses two perspectives: sustainability in a post capitalist city and the potential of urban agriculture.
Content
Post-Capitalist City
Editorial
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Arjen Oosterman
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Clare Butcher and Joost Janmaat
Sustainable is Good, Sustainable Luxury is Better
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Christophe Catsaros
Detroit Unreal Estate Agency
94
Andrew Herscher
Beyond Zero
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John E. Fernández Next Nature
Tagging Cloud
Glossarial Comments on the Post-Capitalist City
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Mireille Roddier 13, 17, 41, 55, 97, 115
Koert van Mensvoort Counter-Histories of Sustainability
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Panayiota Pyla The Enterprising Civil Engineer
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Tokyo Genso Get the Balance Right!
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The Complex History of Sustainability
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Censorship Today
122
Aetzel Griffioen DIY 2.0
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Interview with Dorothea Seebode Untying Cradle to Cradle
Amir Djalali with Piet Vollaard
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Aric Mayer Disruptive Innovation
Ronald Sean Wall
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Interview with Peter Blom Aesthetics of Catastrophe
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Marjetica Potrc Investing in the Quality of Live
Interview with Adriaan Geuze Destroyed Japanese Welfare
Survival Strategies and Community Building in Post-Capitalism
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Interview with Sherry Lassister
Slavoj Žižek Afterculture
44, 50
Urban Agriculture
Scott Hocking Down from the Stand
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Stefano Boeri Food not Bombs
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Monica Nouwens Population Thinking in an Age of Bio-Politics
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Peter Trummer Yes We Can… Up to a Point
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Interview with John Roberts Back to the Future: the Edo Biosphere
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Thomas Daniell Pig Story
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Christien Meindertsma Oil Story
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Harriet Russell Prison Break in a Ruined Tower
Gianluigi Ricuperati
Cultured and Landscaped Urban Agriculture Metropolitan Agriculture and Global Food Problem
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Steef Buijs Continuous Productive Urban Landscape
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Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen Food and the Randstad Metropolis
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Van Bergen Kolpa Architects Loisaida Gardens
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Michela Pasquali Sustainability in Practice
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Vanitas. Venice Biennale 2008
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Michael Stanton Colophon
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132
Debra Solomon
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Editorial
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VOLGT
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VOLGT
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4
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Sustainable is Good, Sustainable Luxury is Better
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Christophe Catsaros
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The decommissioned toxic aircraft carrier Clemenceau was part of a controversy in 2005. It was sent to be broken up in India and was called back, halfway there, after a campaign was launched. French architect Patrick Bouchain suggested transforming the carrier into an art and fun platform during the 2010 expo in Shanghai. His proposal, initially retained, was finally rejected. Instead of a highly symbolical gesture, the choice was made to build a pavilion that would bring together sustainability and luxury. The French national pavilion will be a prominent, innovative structure reflecting, as much in its form and composition as its content, our country’s dynamism and art de vivre. From this point of view it will stand as living proof of France’s capacity to break new ground in the fields of sustainable development and cultural outreach. The
pavilion will draw on the latest advances in architectural design, building materials and environmental protection. It will be a shining example of recycling techniques. Sustainability is no more the prerogative of boring academics, hippies and underfed vegetarians. Glamorous living and ecology can merge together! Cities will be built according to this principle. The future, sexier than ever, will be made of sustainable constructions exemplifying innovative design.
Beyond Zero John E. Fernández
In recent years – and only just recently in the United States – there has been an enormous swelling of interest in the idea of limiting the use of critical resources and reducing the effluent resulting from our contemporary consumption. This interest, a by-product of concern for the environment, has surfaced at every level of society. The rate of interest, as manifest by the saturation of the media with these issues, has increased at a surprising rate – though possibly more surprising is the lateness of our concern. Today there is an enormous intellectual and cultural gap between those who believe we can do something transformative about global climate change (usually involving new technologies) and those who have resigned themselves to the possibility that we have missed our chance; the techno-optimists versus the end-of-the-world-pessimists. Both camps seem to be aware of the situation, though each has taken to forming their version of reality based on their own tendencies, be they positive or negative. On the one hand, the techno-optimists can point to a number of examples of the ways in which technology has stayed ahead of crisis in the modern era. They can point to the fact that the last few decades have not born witness to the Malthusian collapse of food stocks and massive global famine predicted by what some consider to have been the populationbomb alarmists led by Paul Ehrlich and others. Ehrlich predicted deaths numbering in the hundreds of millions in the 1970s and 1980s. Food technologies have intervened and the great famines did not materialize. Although there is now some cause for concern that the most dire effects of population increases are yet to be seen, technology did intervene and massive collapse was averted. The techno-optimists can also enlist examples from improvements in global health, especially in the accuracy of diagnoses, reductions in infant mortality and even the extension of lifespans as successes attributable to technology. And of course even the most expansively positive views on the powerful and diverse consequences of innovation and the boom of information technologies must be taken quite seriously. Improved renewable photovoltaic, wind and hydro technologies, new hybrid and non-combustion transportation options, less environmentally destructive materials for products of all sorts and more efficient systems for high performance are only a very few of the very real benefits of an age of technological development. On the other hand, it is possible that the situation we now face is truly unique – unique enough at least to make the technological hurdles higher than ever before. This is the story told by the doomsayers – those who believe we are headed inexorably toward societal
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Now serious CO2 reduction, even zero emission is on the top of the political agenda it is about time to confront ambitions with factual tendencies. John Fernández drafts them out and takes the IPAT equation as starting point for a method to assess results and influence developments. Leveling the playing field is essential to develop realistic and fair policies for this world.
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collapse. Unfortunately, on this side of the debate there is deep and sustained scholarship. It is true that for years now scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been emphasizing the prospect that we are likely critically late in our response to the inevitable warming of the atmosphere.1 The fourth assessment makes very clear that given even the most optimistic projections it is very likely that our current situation will steadily worsen. ‘The IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES, 2000) projects an increase of global GHG emissions by 25 to 90% (CO2-eq) between 2000 and 2030 …, with fossil fuels maintaining their dominant position in the global energy mix to 2030 and beyond.’2 Also, the latest reports of the Global Carbon Project (GCP) shows that GHG emissions have not been reduced, but are increasing at an accelerating rate. Upwards of 70 percent of this increase can be attributed to China. Some reductions can be seen, especially in Europe where there has been a reduction of 7.7 percent in the EU-27 between 1990 and 2006.3 However the overall trend is not good. In fact, the rate of emissions increase exceeds many of the worst business-as-usual scenarios most likely to create irreversible climate change. Carbon emissions since 2000 have been increasing approximately four times faster than the rate of the previous decade. And now more than half of global emissions are attributed to developing countries. The global effects of contemporary consumption are clear now. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 18th century and the commencement of major anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased 37 percent – the highest in the past 650,000 years and probably longer. This is not all. Using a diverse set of metrics to attain an understanding of the current state of and probable future conditions for critical resources, the latest report of the IPCC is a sobering read.4 Using their scale for certainty, the IPCC clearly states that it is very likely that global warming will result in an increase in the frequency of hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation, an increase in heavy precipitation events, and likely increase in cyclones and other extreme weather events. Contemporary annual demands now exceed the earth’s regenerative capacity by 25% percent, if not more. Energy resources are heading into an era of limits, resource depletion and increasing market pressures. Global construction of buildings and infrastructure contributes to this consumption at staggering levels of fossil fuel extraction, energy use, emissions of greenhouse gases and the waste stream. In industrialized countries construction materials amount to approximately 75 percent of national mass balance flows, buildings consume approximately 40 percent of available energy and produce approximately 40 percent of national carbon emissions, and demolition waste reaches between 20 and 30 percent of the total municipal waste stream. Worldwide production of concrete alone demands 5 percent of total industrial energy consumption and produces a full 5 percent of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions annually. In the United States and many industrialized countries, construction has accounted for the largest consumption of materials of any industry for the past 100 years, while today US extraction of virgin materials for construction amounts to 40% of the domestic mining mass, a twentyfold increase during the 20th century. Furthermore, the intensification of global trade, the development of massive new market economies and the accompanying expansion of cities and infrastructure – especially in China, India and Russia – promise to accelerate the extraction of resources and promote evermore deleterious environmental impacts in the coming decades. China alone now accounts for half of all new building construction globally and through 2030 China and India together will likely account for half of the increase in residential energy use of non-OECD countries. Balancing the views of optimists with those of less sanguine perspective is tantamount to attempting to predict the future – in the long term, a hopeless task. There is a third way. In his 2006 book The Prosperous Way Down the American ecologist Eugene Odum describes what is essentially a roadmap for a long, slow process of societal acceptance and adaptation to reducing consumption. He proposes that the most positive scenario for reaching a sustainable level of equitable and humane resource consumption globally will be a slow economic descent that will nonetheless necessitate a dramatic change in cultural and social attitudes.5 The alternative is crisis of one sort or another – or many: war, famine, political strife, economic collapse, etc.
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Zero emissions
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Nice idea, zero emissions. Beyond zero presupposes some almost inconceivably dramatic changes to current trends. But let’s look at zero first. Today, the per capita rate of carbon emission (using CO2 as the prime indicator) from people living in cities varies greatly. A resident of Hong Kong is responsible for approximately 5 tons of CO2 per year. This compares to 14 tons in Toronto, 19 tons in San Diego and Los Angeles and as much as 32 tons in Oklahoma City and Memphis.6 Yet possibly more disturbing than the large numbers of American cities is that fact that between 1970 and 1990,
Hong Kong’s per capita CO2 emissions more than doubled. We will see below why carbon emissions attributable to the urbanization of non-OECD countries is possibly the most challenging issue we face. In any case, it is clear today that the vast majority of cities are increasing their rate of per capita carbon emissions. So how can anyone be optimist about the prospects for a zero emission society? Well, generally discussions of zero carbon, and certainly the goals of beyond zero are carefully bounded. Some major assumptions are made and the boundaries of assessment are carefully drawn. As a result, much of the possibility of reaching these physically challenging goals within tightly bounded areas rests in the details. The arguments made frequently depend on how one frames the particular scenario. Take Masdar city as one example. The Masdar project, located in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates has been conceived of as both a new working city of 50,000 inhabitants and a massive national economic development program in the form of a wellspring for the next generation of innovation in renewable technology research and development. Much has been made of its radically aggressive targets some of which are 100 percent renewable energy, 80 percent recycled water, zero material waste and zero emissions. That would be a per capita emission rate of 0 tons of CO2 per year – less than that of the most resource-scarce city in any developing country in the world. In fact urban living of zero emissions does not exist.
‘If civilization is to progress a growth culture will have to change into a culture of descent’ The Masdar project can be regarded as an exemplary commitment to an enlightened set of economic development priorities through the design and construction of an entire city. However, it is very clear that there is no possibility of avoiding enormous material and energy inputs into the construction of the city’s many buildings. There are also the significant resources that must be dedicated to the making of all of the devices that will eventually contribute renewable energy to the city. In the end, the resource consumption devoted to the operation of the city will likely be a mere fraction of a typical city, but it will remain far from zero and likely far above the per capita emissions of many cities in developing countries. It is not useful to state the obvious – that only avoiding the construction of the city would lead to zero emissions. However it is useful to remember that our contemporary cities are arguably the anthropogenic artifact furthest removed from satisfying a thermodynamic equilibrium. Thus every city displaces its thermodynamic imbalance to other parts of the global environment. Masdar will be no exception. One of the ways that the city will purport to reach its target goals will be to import high value consumption. Masdar will certainly cater to high income earners brought to the city from far away. Doing so will entail huge expenditures and carbon emissions due to long distance travel. This is certainly not a part of the vision Odum had in mind when he wrote; If civilization is to progress…a growth culture will be able to change smoothly into a culture of descent. However, history records many systems that crashed instead. Showing a good way down is a call for everyone to think ahead and plan. Masdar cannot be included in this process – nor does it aspire to be included. Its role is incremental, guiding better decision-making, acting as a test bed for renewable technologies but possibly more importantly acting as a decades-long experiment representing the tractability of technologies and strategies that are directly positioned to compete with typical modes of design and engineering. If Masdar retains and improves many of its more radical systems several decades in the future it will be a success whether or not it ever reaches a zero emissions goal.
This is why I called the interest to limit our effects on the environment a ‘by-product’ of concern for the environment. Our approach thus far continues to be incremental improvement because any change more significant than ‘incremental’ is not currently valued. Yet even accepting these hefty assumptions, there is a growing awareness that all is not well with the concept of beyond zero, not to mention the idea of reaching zero itself. First there is physics. Anyone familiar with the primary arguments against the idea of sustainable economic growth has already been reminded of the second law of thermodynamics. While it is obvious that society itself constitutes the counter-entropy ordered
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‘The idea of sustainable economic growth clashes with the second law of thermodynamics’
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assembly of energy and materials, our financial value system has failed to account for the real costs of this push against the second law. Ecological Economics has grown in stature and established the framework for an economics that acknowledges and internalizes the second law – thus accounting for effects that used to be known as externalities. However we are very far away from a governmental and economic framework that even begins to acknowledge, much less work on the principles of the second law. Second, there is the question of affluence. The IPAT equation is particularly useful here. Formalized in the early 1970s by Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Barry Commoner and others, and host to a number of interpretations and variations, the IPAT equation presents the essential elements of our societal consumption that effect the environment.7 This effect can be positive or negative depending on the actual values of the variables. The equation takes the following form: I=PxAxT I represents the environmental impact attributable to the population (P) times the level of affluence (A) delivered by a specific technology (T). The equation has been used in a number of ways from the initiation of thought experiments about societal metabolism not requiring actual calculations, to detailed assessments of the impact of specific devices. The portion of the equation most relevant to our discussion here is the A factor. Affluence in urban zones is really the reason people head for cities. It will be the reason why the cities of the non-OECD countries will account for upwards of 95 percent of the growth in urban zones in the coming decades, according to UN-Habitat. There is little anyone will be able to do to stem this powerful tide of rural to urban population movement.
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Urban metabolism
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What then will be the role of cities in the global climate challenge? Again, the world can be coarsely divided between those who believe cities are the location for solutions and those who only see them as the problem. And again, the reality lies somewhere between the two. Take for example the adoption of Kyoto by American mayors. Much of the world has ratified the Kyoto Protocol, limiting emissions of CO2 and five other climate-warming gases (GHG). The US is the only developed country not to have done so, despite the fact that, as of this year, 850 American cities had officially expressed support for the Kyoto Protocol. This commitment amounts to 80 million US citizens. The state of resource consumption and its effects on the environment within a massively urbanizing world begs the question – can we do anything about it? Again, we return to the idea that the world can be divided between the techno-optimists and the advocates for the coming apocalypse. Much points to one or the other scenario playing out within this century, unless some version of Odum’s thinking plays out. And if one believes that a third way is possible, then how do we find it? The upside to the adoption of a prosperous way down is that it is not dependent on a technology fix and it prevents global crisis. The downside is that it requires a level of active planning and commitment rarely achieved in such large-scale efforts. Now suppose that our perspective of the global urban situation – and by extension, of societal metabolism – has been hobbled by an inability to understand the underlying dynamics of the growth and organization of cities. Could this possibly be? Is it conceivable that the policies and planning strategies that have been implemented to create and run our cities are lacking in any fundamental way? As discussed above, there are clearly real needs for the urban future. Equally clear is the historical landscape of failure in coordinating large-scale efforts to direct societal behavior. Let’s discuss the urban project. There has been a call to integrate urban studies that benefit both from a truly multidisciplinary understanding of the contemporary city and provide more useful directions for policy.8 Yet doing so has proven much more challenging than many experts had anticipated. Two streams of work are relevant here. The first comes from the work of a group of economists interested in revealing the rules by which production and labor agglomerate or disperse in actual space. The second was born of the need for better ways to approach complex systems.9 Each of these fields of study necessitates suspending details, including some major portions of the real world (such as some topographical, historical and other local detail). That is, both urban system dynamics and economic geography take essential aspects of the complex behavior of cities and apply them to construct the essential framework for understanding the unique evolution of contemporary urban centers. Both fields are indebted to the use of models as proxies for real-world dynamics. These models are absolutely necessary for getting beyond analytic limitations and provide the means to test theory in ways that are difficult in the concrete city. Some surprising results are emerging. The first of these involves some unique aspects of the scale and ordering of a city. Economic geography has demonstrated that urban growth is one of a number of physical and social phenomena that can generally be described with what is known as the Rank-Size rule – or Zipf’s law – named after the linguist George Kingsley
Zipf who first proposed its use in a wide variety of statistical applications. The rank-size rule states that the size of a value is inversely proportional to its ranking in a listing of the data set from which it comes. For example, within national borders it has been found that the second largest city, with ranking 2, is approximately half the size of the largest. The third is one-third the size of the largest, and on from there such that multiplying the rank times the size of the value will generally yield a value around 1. With some exceptions, the rule has been remarkably consistent in describing the size of contemporary cities within national boundaries. In other words, despite the obvious fact that the growth and sizes of cities is the result of the aggregate of a countless number of individual decisions of many kinds by diverse agents, contemporary cities seem to follow some well-bounded rules that govern their organization and scale. Second, studies in economic geography are beginning to find the system attributes that govern the equilibrium between the centripetal forces that dissolve urban zones and the centrifugal attractions that lead to the growth of cities. While still limited to abstracted spatial contexts with substantial assumptions, these studies are revealing fundamental attributes in the generation and expansion of contemporary urban form. So far much of the work has been limited to a single city or at most two cities and the relationship between them. More work will certainly engage the complexity of multi-polar urban regions. Third, system dynamics makes clear that our current procedures for city planning do not go far enough in assessing the unintended consequences of urban policies. In reality, system dynamics analysis demonstrates that even a broad range of policy formulation processes do not adequately account for the inherent complexity of the real world. The recent global financial collapse is just the latest example. The primary reason for this enduring failure lies in the deficiency of our mental models to understand and predict the behavior of complex systems. This ‘dynamic deficiency’ leads to underestimating time lags, misusing short-term behavior to predict long–term results, and the misattribution of cause and effect. These two fields of study are providing a convergence with the potential to derive a new kind of ‘scientific’ urban planning and design – one based not only on physical form and local conditions, but attuned to the global realities of a changing world.10 What do these emerging fields tell us about a post-zero future? While it is early to say for certain, some clarity is emerging.
Let’s take a sustainable economy to begin with. Using the symbols of system dynamics we can diagram the essential character of consumption today.see figure 1 Consumption drives this cycle by defining improvement in the quality of life primarily in material terms. The quality of life (QoL) improvement then promotes greater extraction of resources, which in turn promotes an even greater desire for another increase in QoL. The cycle is a representation of an endlessly self-reinforcing dynamic. Thus material extraction and consumption are driven endlessly by the open-ended desire for material wealth.
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Figure 1
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Figure 2
If sustainable consumption were the result of a process of incrementally decreasing consumption, the cycle would be interrupted by a counteracting force or forces. That is, the decision whether to consume would be influenced not only by the desire for an increase in material wealth, but also a counteracting feedback loop that would give the consumer information about the state of the world, or more precisely the common good. Such a feedback loop representing the learning process that would take place under increasing resource pressures could take the following form.see figure 2
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‘The net effect would be a society that would no longer consume to maximize quality of life’
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So what does this have to do with urban metabolism? A zero emissions future strongly suggests that we will have already adopted this second set of dynamic relationships and reconciled ourselves to living with the consequences. In particular, the feedback loop related to the influence of the state of the common good would be robust and backed up by a variety of self-supporting mechanisms like a working carbon market, a variety of affluence taxes, product and building rating and monitoring systems and many other feedback loops directed at regulating consumption. The net effect would be a society that would no longer consume to maximize quality of life, but would make decisions based on multiple objectives, including the protection of the common good. Therefore there would be a marked change in the A factor of the IPAT equation. The urban metabolism of a post-zero world strongly suggests that we will be required to significantly diminish the A factor. But how would this be done?
It is useful to begin by organizing our urban consumption by material flow and additions to stock. The methodology of material flow analysis informs this process. First, there are the inputs. Put simply, inputs into the urban sphere include materials (metals, polymers, ceramics, concrete, etc.) energy (that is fuel materials including coal, oil, natural gas, etc.), solar radiation, water, air and biomass (flora and fauna).
‘We will be required to significantly diminish the A(ffluency) factor’ Second, these inputs are put into service as additions to stock – that is, relatively permanent additions to the infrastructure and built environment of the city. This includes everything from the transportation network (including mass transit infrastructure and airport facilities), to the water and power distribution networks and the sanitation and waste removal systems. Third, the metabolism of the city engenders outputs or wastes. This flow takes on the same forms as the inputs. These flows constitute the physical reality of the city and go far beyond the typical understanding of the city as a static construct. Third, these flows would be considered in terms of the density of resources applied to any particular goal, material intensity per unit of travel distance for a worker, for example. Densities would be applied to 3 kinds of city systems and 2 types of consumption nodes: transportation, buildings, infrastructure (water and energy primarily), households and enterprises. Consideration of their contribution to the resource burden of a city would be done in terms of various densities functions.
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Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report: Summary for Policymakers (2007) Idem. European Environmental Agency, Greenhouse gas emission trends and projections in Europe 2008, EEA Report No 5/2008; A.J. Dolman, R. Valentini and A. Freibauer, ‘The ContinentalScale Greenhouse Gas Balance of Europe’, Ecological Studies, vol. 203 (2008). GCP: See www.globalcarbonproject.org IPCC [note 1] H.T. Odum and E. Odum, ‘The prosperous way down’, Energy, 31 (2006) pp. 21-32. D.E. Pataki, R.J. Alig, A.S. Fung, N.E. Golubiewski, C.A. Kennedy, E.G. McPherson, D.J. Nowak, R.V. Pouyat, and P. Romero Lankao, Urban ecosystems and the North American carbon cycle; Global Change Biology, no. 12, 2006, pp.1-11. E.L. Glaeser and M.E. Kahn, The Greeness of Cities: Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development. Harvard University, Discussion Paper Number 2161 (see http://www.economics. harvard.edu/journals/hier2008). M. Chertow, ‘The IPAT Equation and Its Variants’, Journal of Industrial Ecology, no. 4, Vol. 4 (2001), pp. 13-29. D. Coelho and M. Ruth, ‘Seeking a unified urban systems theory’, The Sustainable City IV: Urban Regeneration and Sustainability (transactions of the 4th International Conference on Urban Regeneration and Sustainability, Tallin, Estonia 2006). J. Sterman, Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world. (Boston-New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000). M. Batty, ‘The Size, Scale, and Shape of Cities’, Science, no. 5864, vol. 319 (2008) pp. 769-771.
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Image Koert van Mensvoort
Next Nature by Koert van Mensvoort
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Nature! We all love it, but what is it? And how is our relation with Nature changing?
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Panayiota Pyla
Every socio-political movement needs a history, even if you have to invent one. Panayiota Pyla drafts some possible (pre)histories of sustainability and compares them with current developments. She warns for simple historical legitimizations and proposes to constantly interrogate and contest emerging strategies.
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CounterHistories of Sustainability
Because sustainability as an ethical imperative is widely elevated to the top of the architectural agenda, the objectives of this new ‘cause’ (as well as the meanings of the term itself) become even more multivalent. To the technically minded the emphasis on sustainability means that architects need to completely reconceptualize their profession’s priorities in order to emphasize energy efficient green technologies and ultimately forge new partnerships with natural scientists and engineers. Many new books have recently appeared offering tangible architectural design lessons and their warnings about buildings as top consumers of energy are both frightening and convincing.1 To those who emphasize the sociopolitical over the techno-scientific dimensions of architecture, sustainability has a definition which encompasses larger social processes (e.g., recycling policies, land-use patterns, heritage management, etc.) that effect stakeholders, social groups, urban dynamics and regional politics just as much as they influence environmental transformations. Many architectural departments and development organizations are in tune with this way of thinking and with various degrees of sophistication seek ways to integrate social, cultural and economic concerns within a definition of environmental sustainability. To the more cynical, on the other hand, architectural fascination with this new concept has yet another significance: whether focused on social or technoscientific issues, the concept of sustainability gave architecture a new purpose. According to this point of view, sustainability emerged not a moment too soon, just in time to give architecture a new purpose, just when the profession’s search for meaning (e.g., historicist trends of the late 20th c.) or the egocentrism of the signature designer (e.g., the legacy of modernism) had led to dead ends. Truly diverse practices – from William McDonough’s innovations with new materials to Kenneth Yeang’s embrace of high technologies and James Cutler’s polemic about buildings’ ecological footprints – were signals that new types of environmental consciousness was shaping important new worldviews in architecture. As the meanings and goals of sustainability are debated by architects and academics – because the planet’s problems are real and architecture has its share of responsibility – we must also remember a lesson from the history of architecture: a great cause is not enough! However noble, heroic models have pitfalls. The recent history of modernism vividly shows some of these: housing projects that quickly turned the dream of social emancipation into the nightmare of segregation; urban renewal projects that bulldozed the cultural intricacies of peoples and places; and many new cities, colonial and postcolonial, which advanced paternalistic agendas in the name of modernization. All of these remind us that good intentions, however noble, can be misinterpreted, misused or altogether derailed. Even as there are increasingly alarming signs that justify architecture’s focus on sustainability (from ozone holes to vanishing frogs and children’s agonizing pleas at United Nations meetings!), architects also need to be vigilantly aware of possible pitfalls in the strategies developed in the name of the new, ‘just’ cause. This essay argues that an important key to developing this kind of vigilance is a nuanced understanding of history, because such an understanding offers the critical tools to help architects detect the blind spots, anticipate
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the drawbacks or discern the subtexts of emerging strategies. Below is a sketch of some key ideas drawn from critical reflections on the recent past. The goal here is not to offer a systematic overview of history’s lessons about sustainability, but to highlight some reminders that seem relevant today. 1. Techno-scientific managerialism is not apolitical
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The ecological movements of the 1960s that emerged as scientific research revealed problems within the natural world can teach a great deal about the pitfalls of strategies which assumed an unsophisticated view of politics in their zeal to address an emergency. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is perhaps the best representative of that era’s ecological emergency. It exposed the excesses of industrial agriculture and called for the recovering of the balanced interdependence of humans and nature. Alarming in its prophecy of a spring without birds, the book infiltrated public sentiment and became the bible of the modern environmental movement. Yet the subtextual emphasis on quasi-mystical conceptions of an age-old balance that needed to be preserved presumed that the safeguarding of the ecological balance was a task for scientists and managers. This helped cast an apolitical aura over the urgency for the earth’s protection and brushed aside questions of power and inequality, social relationships and priorities that go into regulatory practices, institutional arrangements and other types of environmental policies. A similar ecological urgency infiltrated architectural culture as well and this is evident in, for example, Buckminster Fuller’s Whole Earth Catalogue which emphasized the fear of an ecological crisis as well as in C.A. Doxiadis’s Ecology and Ekistics (1975) which attempted to map out the relationships between built structures and the global ecosystem. Such calls seemed noble at a time when the memory of the atomic bomb was still vivid and when space photos of a tiny earth from space created a new consciousness of its fragility. However these positions were also premised on a notion of a fragile earth that needed the careful management of its resources. Problems in the location of resources and imbalances in technological and economic power or in international trade that shaped decisions of how that fragile ecological balance was to be preserved on a global scale were treated as though they are merely technical, uncontested and beyond political debate. Furthermore, arguments such as those advanced by Doxiadis in Ecology and Ekistics that conflated the notion of the earth’s balance with that of the balance between human needs and natural resources reinforced the confinement of nature to a resource for human use and appropriation as well as the notion of nature as an object of supra-political expert control. The configuration of built settlements and the appropriation of natural resources were automatically transferred to a realm of technocratic management. This type of thinking permeates many current strategies towards sustainability too, as we will see below.
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2. The valorization of low-tech vernacular traditions is not apolitical
Vernacular architecture may be an old theme in the history of modern architecture, but now it is often revived in the name of the new cause of sustainability. The work of architects who contemplated local knowledge
systems and low-technologies of building is no longer being framed so much in terms of modernist debates on local vs. global, or professionalism vs. craft, or vanguardism vs. grass-roots tactics. Now the seminal work of the likes of Bernard Rudofsky, Sibyl Moholy Nagy or Hassan Fathy acquires new meaning – as precursors of sustainable strategies. Let us take Fathy, for example, whose name appears quite often among the ranks of sustainability’s proto-experts.2 The attention paid to Fathy seems logical given that his long career was primarily devoted to reviving old traditions of building with mud bricks and local knowledge systems of passive cooling with wind catchers, indoor courtyards, etc. The iconic example of Fathy’s work is the model village of New Gourna in Upper Egypt, built in the mid 1940s. The project is a particularly interesting example of a precursor of sustainability, because it goes well beyond technical questions of material choices and energy efficiency, preferring to be interpreted as a well-rounded version of sustainability because it combines technical strategies with socioeconomic strategies. For example, the use of mud brick not only minimized the embodied energy and facilitated passive cooling in the buildings, it also dramatically minimized the construction costs, nurtured the collaboration between craftsmen and architects and aspired to revive peasants’ pride in their local heritage. However the reality on the ground tells a different story as the local peasants for whom the model housing was designed opposed its construction and for years refused to move in to the new village. The reasons vary and they have to do with multiple disconnects between the state which funded the project, the architect who designed it, and the users, namely the Gourni peasants. First, the peasants resented a state-sponsored project designed to uproot them from their old homes for the sake of planned and sanitary housing. Second, Fathy may have thought that his reinterpretations of internal courtyards or mud brick domes would revive an ‘Egyptian architectural tradition,’ but his gestures imposed a homogenizing conception of culture/tradition that did not in fact exist. For instance, the Gourni rejected the architect’s choice of Nubian mud-brick domes in residential architecture because in their own region (culturally distinct from Nubia) they associated domes with only the most sacred of spaces: tombs and mosques.3 In other words, Fathy’s zeal to exalt ‘tradition’ separated it from everyday realities and led him to nostalgia. This story is a powerful allegory for the present. Before exalting projects such as New Gourna for their ecological/economic/social sustainability, we should be mindful of the immense complexities of socio-cultural politics. 3. Always Beware of Metanarratives
Soon after the ecological doomsday scenarios of the 1970s which exposed the hubris of the post-WWII drive for economic growth, there were many types of antigrowth movements in many realms of practice which challenged the ethic of growth and development and often echoed the romanticism of various ‘return to nature’ movements. In architecture this sometimes found expression in experimental projects with found objects (tires, glass bottles, or straw and mud), solar houses, etc., which often also advanced alternative lifestyles (with Drop City being perhaps the most famous example). However anti-growth activism was soon
series of small decisions (on materials, energy or feasibility) that will ultimately have less to do with design and more with management or with political correctness. To reflect on the prehistory of sustainability is not to find ‘precedents’ of practices that give us tips for the present. Rather these reflections aim to mobilize critical perspectives on the shifting definitions of the term and on the practices that are advanced in its name so as to guard against absolutes. Can architects have partnerships with techno-scientific fields without subsuming design to managerialism and anti-intellectual postures? Can ecological problems be debated in architectural circles without resorting to eco-determinism? Can architects embrace an ethical imperative without resorting to moralistic prescriptions or grand metanarratives? Maybe, but to walk between these fine lines it is important for both the profession and academia to constantly interrogate and contest emerging strategies.
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See for example, C. Slessor, Eco-Tech (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), D. Lloyd Jones, Architecture and Environment (New York: Overlook Press, 1998), V. Lerum, High-performance Building (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), among many others. See for example James Steele’s Ecological Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), which places Fathy among the pioneers of sustainability; and the website on ‘Green Buildings Fathy to Yeang’: http://www.library.jhu.edu/ researchhelp/engr/structures/greenbuildings.pdf For a more extensive analysis of this project see P. Pyla, ‘Hassan Fathy Revisited: Postwar Discourses on Science, Development, and Vernacular Architecture,’ Journal of Architectural Education no.3, vol. 60 (February 2007): 28-39. See P. Pyla, ‘Gray-areas in Green Politics: Reflections on the Modern Environmental Movement.’ Thresholds 14 (Spring 1997): 48-53, and ‘Planetary Home and Garden’ [forthcoming] Wolfgang Sachs, ‘Environment’, in The Development Dictionary (London: Zed Books, 1992), pp. 26-37. See also A. Biswas & M. Biswas, ‘Environment and Sustainable Development in the Third World: A Review of the Past Decade’, Third World Quarterly no. 4 (1982), pp. 479-91; M. Redclift, Sustainable Development: Exploring the Contradictions (London: Methuen, 1987); F. Sandbach, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Limits of Growth Debate’, Social Studies of Science, no. 8 (1978), pp. 495-520. It is outside the scope of this paper to offer a detailed critique of this concept, but some key texts include Wolfgang Sachs, ed., Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1995); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995); and Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed Books, 1989). David Harvey, ‘What is Green and Makes the Environment Go Round?’ in: Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds.), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1998), pp. 327-355, quotation on p. 332.
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overpowered by another line of thinking that aspired to revise rather than reject the production ethic of the industrialized world by forging connections between environment and development. This approach was initially advanced by a series of the United Nations meetings in the 1970s – notably the UN conference on the Environment in 1972 and the UN conference on Human Settlements in 1976. These conferences had a great impact on architectural culture at large and on architects like Fathy, Fuller and Doxiadis.4 As their critics have suggested, the approach advanced at these conferences was rooted in the managerial outlook of development institutions during the 1950s and 60s.5 The idea of a marriage between environment and development was further advanced by the influential 1986 report ‘Our Common Future’ (often known as the Brundtland report) and was embraced by international institutions and governmental organizations.6 Current practices that seek partnerships with industry to develop materials or new thermal control technologies can be seen as a continuation of this kind of thinking. Similarly, the emphasis on eco-tourism and eco-development shares similar premises. The very term ‘sustainability’ makes evident the connections to the logic of the Brundtland report on sustainable development. To simply lament current experiments (eco-development projects, the innovation of high-tech materials or the emergence of international green consulting companies) as little more than the co-option of environmental consciousness by capital-motivated interests would come dangerously close to the romanticism evidenced by some movements of the last century. It may be useful to watch for the reduction of sustainability to a gesture of political correctness (for example, how big business has appropriated the term either as a mere marketing tool or in order to legitimize its grip on global resources). But the crucial question here is not whether money and the environment might be in opposite camps. This may be a false dilemma given that by now, as David Harvey puts it, ‘the circulation of money is a prime ecological variable, and the continued circulation of money is essential if the material qualities of the environment are to be maintained.’7 Perhaps the key issue here is to be vigilantly aware that as a concept and as a practice sustainability is constantly running the danger of turning into a totalizing doctrine that subsumes critical thinking. Wolfgang Sachs made a general comment about current trends with exactly this warning: ‘As governments, business and international agencies raise the banner of global ecology, environmentalism changes its face. In part, ecology – understood as the philosophy of a social movement – is about to transform itself from a knowledge of opposition to a knowledge of domination…’ Adopting this warning to the terms of the architectural debate could mean that sustainability should not become a totalizing concept that subsumes crucial design questions about the social, the cultural, the political, the aesthetic and the physical, which, incidentally, are not unambiguous categories. Maybe it is good that sustainability does not have a fixed or coherent definition. Maybe it should never have one! Because if the technical questions of energy efficiency or the technocratic questions of efficient resource use or even the questions of socioeconomic management end up constituting the definition of sustainability in architecture, this will threaten to reduce design to a
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Image Karl Grandin
Next Nature
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Nowadays people know more brands and logos than bird or tree species.
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Adriaan Geuze interviewed by Arjen Oosterman
When it comes to making an appointment for an interview, Adriaan Geuze is initially reluctant: ’I get phoned for every landscape symposium on sustainable policy; they are about either sustainability or water.’ But when I indicate that I want to look beyond the threat at the possibilities, he agrees. A discussion on spatial planning in the Netherlands, the traditions of the discipline, and the responsibility of the civil engineer. In fact, there is not really anything new under the sun. Energy certainly is a problem, but that can also be solved with an enterprising approach.
Planning in the Netherlands – which is a relatively recent concept, by the way – has become a sector. It rests on two foundations: policy and procedure. The policy changes every two years and that gets the minister, councillor or member of the executive responsible off the hook. At the moment, for example, the policy is ‘sustainable’. But what that means can be interpreted in all sorts of way. Afterwards the policy is implemented in procedure (the selection of a development location, for example). Nobody can be opposed to that, after all we have a procedure. It may or may not lead to anything, but that doesn’t matter. In that respect spatial planning has become a job creation project: it exists by virtue of an enormous number of planners, policy consultants, memorandum writers, legal experts, interpreters. It is a sector, an industry with 100,000 employees. That is a radical break in the long tradition of this country which is based on pragmatic action: at the moment when it’s necessary to reorganise the land, to defeat the sea, or to implement infrastructure, you make a master plan and carry it out. We did that on a large scale in the nineteenth century and lived to regret it, in the twentieth century we learned to do it in smaller stages, so that you can make adjustments all the time. Tradition has gone and has been replaced by the couple ‘policy’ and ‘procedures’. What this leads to and when, is completely obscure. But it has facilitated the unlimited proliferation of urban expansions and industrial estates. AO
So the design is lacking?
The master plan. That is not the same thing as the design. The master plan is a programme of requirements. Society says, for instance: we will punish the sea for the flood of 1953; never again, every citizen must be protected against the sea. That is a law (the Delta Law) and a master plan, not just a sketch by a few civil engineers. It is also an ambition that has been formulated in social and political terms. It may well be a design for the smaller scale.
AG
AO But how has the master plan been defeated in Dutch history? AG I can’t say entirely, but the large-scale public works were over by the end of the 1960s and a high standard of living had been achieved. People assumed that there was no need to ensure that level of prosperity by means of plans; it had become a natural phenomenon. It was more about how you distribute the money, how you organise education, who has access to culture, questions like that. Physical reality became more or less unimportant, and master plans were created precisely in the socio-cultural field. Among the main catalysts was the demolition of the inner city of Utrecht for the Hoog-Catherijne shopping and office centre, the motorway through the Amelisweerd estate, and the pollution scandals in the province of North Holland (illegal dumping). That’s why the real master plans were devised; and of course a few major blunders were made too. The spatial planning sector had more or less detached itself from the reality of society. And at that time [the late 1960s and 1970s] there was a tendency for civil engineers to condemn capitalism (compare the report of the Club of Rome at the time; we were guilty!). It’s a constellation of a number of factors.
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The Enterprising Civil Engineer
Arjen Oosterman You have been concerned with the decline of spatial planning in the Netherlands for a long time by now. You have been calling for a long time for a return of the civil engineering approach, a logic of acting based on utility and necessity. Adriaan Geuze It’s further away than ever. Spatial
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With giant cows Dutch landscape architect Adriaan Geuze protested in 2004 against the corruption of the horizon of the Dutch meadow landscape. © West 8
But it plays a more important role in the Netherlands than anywhere else. I’m surprised. We are the country of planners and makers; creating land (and then painting it) is our culture. Princess Máxima says that Dutch culture as such doesn’t exist, but that is the soul of Dutch culture. It is very deep-seated. AO To what extent has your training already made thinking in terms of sustainability an essential part of the landscape architect Geuze?
That water is a cycle, that nature has vertical ties with the soil, and that people adapt to nature and don’t destroy it, that’s my background in a nutshell. It’s as evident as it is evident for an architect that a house has a roof and the rain doesn’t enter. There’s no need to organise a symposium on that.
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AO But wasn’t the notion of progress a major component of your training?
Certainly, in fact to an extreme extent. Professor De Jong opened his series of lectures with the words: ‘God created man on the seventh day, and man makes the world’. A great trust in progress. The most important dimension that has been added since then is energy, the fact that it is not unlimited. I take that very seriously too. As students we were already concerned about it, but not in the sense of: everything has to be completely changed.
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AO Has the discussion that has taken place in urban planning about the link between plan and
context, from ‘everything is possible’ to ‘the design is based on the soil and other local conditions’, also been going on in landscape architecture? AG No, I don’t think so. That whole debate on sustainability is meaningful, sure. And it is important for local councillors to put it on their programme. But I can’t help laughing when, to save energy, the Amersfoort local authority stipulates that the air in a house cannot be refreshed any longer but resorts to the heat exchanger, so that you breathe in the gases that you’ve exhaled because technology is not far enough advanced yet. Another example: we want to use granite on the Toronto waterfront. It’s very difficult because Canadian granite is very expensive and Asiatic or Brazilian granite is considered to have a bad ecological footprint because of the transport. Our idea was that granite lasts for two hundred years, so it’s extremely sustainable. Our plan is turned down because of an ecological footprint problem, while it has been devised precisely with that in mind. Those are the kind of misunderstandings you get now. In Arnhem we are confronted with the task of integrating wadis for water management in a residential district. First of all, a wadi is a dry river bed that can accommodate enormous masses of water in the rainy season. That doesn’t seem to be what they have in mind in Arnhem, so it’s not a very clever choice of a concept. Second, the area is in a polder. The water board is in charge there, and pumps all excess water out of the
AO But you can also see it as a transitional problem or part of a teething stage. AG Yes, that’s what I do. But there are a number of misunderstandings regarding sustainability that really annoy me. If you introduce phenomena like social sustainability and cultural sustainability, it becomes a very tricky discussion. Is the Amsterdam School sustainable? I think it’s extremely sustainable, none of it is demolished. But does that mean that you can evaluate it with the sustainability criteria of today? No, that doesn’t work at all. It was a riot of bricks, and in terms of the required energy that is enormously exhausting or wasteful. But it certainly is very sustainable, it stays put, it holds out for very long. They are very difficult issues. I find it fascinating that something like that doesn’t play any role at all in the discussions. AO
Does social sustainability mean anything?
The Palace in Dam Square is a sustainable building. Everybody admires it, every crumb is cherished, it’s been there for a couple of centuries and it is there to stay. So it’s sustainable. But that is motivated solely by sociocultural reasons. Why we preserve something also has a lot to do with what it looks like. Why isn’t Plattenbau sustainable? Because it’s being demolished now. Even if it was built in accordance with today’s sustainability criteria, it still wasn’t sustainable, because it’s being demolished now. OK, you say, but it’s being demolished in a sustainable way, because we use the stuff again. Ok, cradle to cradle, but it’s very hard to get a grip on it. As a Dutchman, I’m involved in the discussion in two ways. On the one hand, I’m a classic civil engineer for creating landscape, and we engineers understand increasingly how the systems work. On the other hand, we have a landscape tradition that confers identity. Because the former goes without saying for me, I tend to talk mainly about the latter.
by train or electric car (apart from the ambulance, we won’t make a fuss about that). I find that an interesting idea. You have to start on a small scale. We can start on that tomorrow, but there’s still a piece of legislation to be put in place. That’s what is good about the Cradle to Cradle movement: they shamelessly present all this as the new reality. The other aspect is the symbolic effect. You make symbols people want to associate with. In the Toronto waterfront project, we projected replacing the doublestrip triple motorway along half of the boulevard with a single-strip double motorway with parking lots. The redundant triple motorway could then be used for pedestrians and cyclists. That went ahead. Then, after an idea of us to raise an ‘Arc de Triomphe’ made from stolen bicycles, the police gave us two hundred from their stock to construct a 20-metre tall Bicycle Arc marking the start of the cycle track. That hit the news. The newspapers, TV, members of parliament and a children’s parade arrived. Architects and designers are in a better position than anyone else to give a face to sustainability, to make the flag with which a broader movement can associate. That’s always very underestimated at symposia and the discussion verges on German Romanticism: anthroposophically back to nature, the cycle of life, the cycle of the earth, our bad conscience. It’s almost never about successful symbols which make people want to belong and to make their own. While these are very important points for discussion.
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AO So as a landscape architect it is natural to go in for sustainable design (natural balances, for example). But as an urban developer, as a master planner of urban expansions, do you also add points to the programme from the ambition to design a sustainable society, irrespective of grey water circuits and keeping water close at hand? AG My hands itch to make an emission-free district. I think that we can take an enormous step forwards in the field of emissions and energy. A district with wind and solar energy, but also with meters that can run backwards – supplying energy to the network instead of only consuming it. Then it becomes fun for the residents, a sport to deal cleverly with energy. But it has to be laid down by law that energy corporations are obliged not only to supply but also to purchase. These are innovations that I’m dying for. Why don’t we declare the Utrecht ridge, where all those idealistic foundations are located, an emission-free zone that can only be entered
AO The Dutch landscape is a production landscape, utility and necessity. But that logic has partly collapsed. No longer monoculture as the organising principle but diversification, not breaking everything up to create big units, but bringing town and country closer to one another and blending them. These are big transformations. Where’s the tradition?
I find that a difficult thesis. It was once thought that dairy farming had to function as small family enterprises. That’s what people thought. But with my background in Wageningen, I can imagine that you can make a hovercraft haymaking machine and make hay on wet land. Then [the famous Dutch skater] Evert van Benthem, who emigrated and now keeps 1,300 cows in Canada, can immediately come back and go in for large-scale farming here. In the past the cows were not put out to pasture before June, because the soil was full of water until then in the peat bogs and meadows, making it too wet for grazing. That has all kinds of advantages. It stops the soil from bedding down, the peat doesn’t dry out and get scorched, and there are plenty of flowers in the spring, as you can still see in old albums. There were at least sixty herbs in the meadow, now there are only ten or twelve. Then you get special flavours in the cheese which are particular to the locality. So a monoculture that yields a sustainably produced, local, high-quality product in a technically advanced way. That story of sustainability is extremely complex. Take our hothouses: you’ve got water, natural gas and Philips (light). Add it all up and you get tomatoes. That’s also what they tasted of. But nowadays that sector is capable of doing it in a much more sophisticated way; with heat exchangers, almost without loss of light, and making optimal use of solar energy. And then in combination with crop improvement. And if there’s a beetle in your hothouse, you bring in a nest of killer wasps. As a civil engineer, I’m thrilled to bits by that. AG
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polder as quickly as possible, otherwise the land will be flooded at the next shower. There’s no way of getting around it, it’s as Dutch as can be. But it’s been decided that the rain water has to be absorbed by the soil, as if there is an aquifer or a deep layer of sand there to do the job. But it’s simply a polder with a pumping station at the end with a float which comes into action to the millimetre if the water level rises. If sustainability ends up in this kind of absurdity, we’ve got a long way to go. I’m not cynical, this is what I experience this week. As a civil engineer, specialised in these sorts of cycles, I can see that it doesn’t always work like this.
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AO You can regard the Netherlands as a mediumsized metropolis. See in those terms it’s not so complicated; it becomes a coherent system that is related to other (urban) systems. AG
I agree entirely. AO Peter Smeets [Researcher at Wageningen University] defines the scale as follows: not the Netherlands, but the triangle comprising the Randstad conglomeration in the West Netherlands, the Ruhr region, and the diamond-shaped region of Flanders comprising Brussels, Ghent and Antwerp, determines the scale. 40 million people, as a system it’s worth studying. It includes a big city, the Netherlands, and that’s what we have to design.
It all sounds very plausible. Look, we have a traffic jam problem. It’s all very tiresome and has serious social consequences. But we don’t turn it into a civil engineering problem and a solution-orientated research topic, no, it’s a political problem. Japan suffers from earthquakes, but it’s still well under control. They have qualified it as a technical problem and civil engineers have come up with viable solutions. There are different solutions, different points of view, even rival schools, but it works. It hasn’t been turned into a political or philosophical problem.
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AO Building a residential estate at the lowest point of Europe, six metres below sea level, is one of those political decisions. You have often said that you don’t think it is a good idea.
That’s due to my training as a civil engineer, right. That’s only too evident. Technically there is no problem in building there, but the expense is unjustifiably high. All the pumping, having to keep reinforcing the dykes, and so on. Those costs are not passed on to the residents in that district near Gouda, but are partly borne by the citizens of Rotterdam who fall under the same water board. Not only today, the pumping will continue forever. I think it’s unfair. So that’s a red light for me. Besides, a district like that is built for middleclass families, the cement of society, to lure them away from the cities which are already suffering severely from the problems of poorly educated, moderately integrated, often immigrant residents. A second red light. And the third red light is my view that if something goes wrong with the dykes because of the water pressure from the sea and the rivers, it will be there. I consider the decision to build there arrogant, even apart from the fact that it will destroy the landscape, but I leave that aside for now. AG
AO You teach in various countries. Do you see different trends or discussions there from in the Netherlands?
I see that the sustainability debate in landscape architecture is assuming extreme forms. Fundamentalism. That will pass, something else will become trendy. Urban planning is much more sensitive to trends. One year everyone is building flats, the next year it’s lowtraffic residential areas. The same people. That can’t be true, can it? It’s surreal.
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Is it just fashion?
That whole sustainability issue is the idea of the ideal city. That went out of fashion long ago, but now there is a new ideal city: there are no energy inputs or outputs, there are no emissions, water is put back into circulation via condensation, and so on. Philosophically seen it’s ridiculous. We aren’t going to chase after that ideal world of Le Corbusier and Simon Stevin again,
AG
are we? What nonsense! A city has 200 or 220 dimensions and sustainability is one of them. You can’t want something like that. That’s a fundamental criticism that I have applied to the Cradle to Cradle idea in urban development. But all the Fosters and Arups literally design the new ideal city. It makes you laugh, it’s a crazy, rearguard action. [Like Le Corbusier’s] Ville Radieuse. We are currently working ourselves on a plan for islands off the Dutch coast. In plain terms, the Netherlands could double in size because we are living on a clod of earth and fouling our nest. My ambition is for a huge piece of the Netherlands to be born from the sea with a Terschelling-like allure, where at least two million families can have a second home in the countryside, as a pension investment. You buy a share. The value of that artificial land is in the order of 30 to 50 euros per square metre. That’s pretty cheap compared with land prices in the Randstad. So the added value is enormous. You can design it as a wind turbine colony which has no energy requirements and where the water is retained. You can take a number of steps there that are not taken on the old land. We’ve developed a plan for that: what it can look like, how you can create it, how you fund it, which ideals you can achieve there. AO You presented this plan earlier in a political discussion programme on TV as a solution to the threat of flooding. AG Yes, but the message didn’t get across. What we wanted to make clear is the fundamental question that in this country we have still made a virtue of necessity. That lesson emerges more clearly from my research on the tradition of polder construction: we’ve created 4,000 polders in the course of the centuries.1 Land reclamation was always triggered by problems and catastrophes – there was overpopulation, or there was a demand for agricultural land, or there was a risk of flooding, or there had been a flood – and these problems were solved by creating new land. That resulted in added value. If you apply that today to the current problems of the Netherlands: the Netherlands has a problem with water – not just the rising sea level, but also the drainage of water via the rivers, the problem of rain water, but also drought and the resulting sinking of the peat bogs. These threats occur at the same time. The approach now is: we collect taxes and call the plumber in to solve the problem. That is in conflict with the logic I mentioned earlier of tackling problems in an enterprising way that yields added value; make these demanded interventions beneficial! So what we are proposing is: take sand from the North Sea – that falls under Domeinen, an agency of the Ministry of Finance, so it belongs to all of us and is free – heap it up, and do something nice on top of the heap. Make sure that the mound stays in place – that’s the job of the coast morphologists – and is in a position to protect the coast during storms. This all has been checked in state-of-the-art computer models, and it seems to work. The removal of the sand creates a deep underwater canyon off the coast which counteracts the whipping up of the sea in a storm. That can bring the sea level down by between 50 cm and a metre – the equivalent of a century of rising sea levels. That island plan is an exercise, not a master plan. But it does show that the Dutch tradition is a far better basis for tackling something like the rising sea level than the plans being put forward at the moment which just cost an awful amount of money, year in year out. So we’re carrying
out a philosophical, academic study of islands off the coast. AO
Dubai is possible here too.
This is much nicer. Singapore and Dubai certainly are good examples, but the cliché that it can be done there because they’re swimming in money is not correct. Those Palm Islands [three man-made palm-tree shaped islands off the coast of Dubai] were made with the deposit from the first sale. Compare the deposit you make if you buy a terraced house here. Construction doesn’t start before 60% of the contracts have been signed and the 10% deposits have been paid. It was just the same there. The whole construction was financed with those 10% deposits. They didn’t spend a single petrodollar. If you ask me: do you want to invest in a bank, on the stock exchange, or in creating new land? No doubt about it: directly in new land. That can’t lose its value, impossible! AG
Adriaan Geuze, Fred Feddes, Polders! Gedicht Nederland (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2005).
Toronto’s ‘Bicycle Arc’ (August 19, 2006), marking the opening of the new eco-friendly cycle path as part of the new waterfront designed by West 8. © West 8
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Destroyed Japanese Welfare
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Tokyo Genso
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Get the Balance Right! Urban network sustainability Ronald Sean Wall
Economics is essentially about the behavior of people, how they interact with each other to survive and the impact of this upon the world’s limited resources; sustainability is primarily about optimizing this phenomenon. The former concerns a self-organized, unplanned process, while the latter is more related to planned, normative interventions. Today, economics has become more global than ever before; the current housing credit crisis clearly underlines the extreme interdependence of our world. The demise of just a handful of banks and multinationals has led to the world’s worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the1930s. Banks worldwide have reported $600 billion of credit related losses and much of the industrialized world is in recession due to tighter credit and surging oil prices. As giant firms like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have gone bankrupt, been swallowed up by other firms or nationalized, their impact on capital and the behavior of consumers, producers and investors is clearly evident, e.g. the recent bankruptcy of Iceland and the Dutch rescue of ABN-AMRO and Fortis. In this light we see that despite the popular theory about the declining importance of the nation-state, in fact governments still play an important role. In just two weeks the US government nationalized its two largest mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and took over the world’s largest insurance company AIG. This makes it clear that globalization has not only led to greater economic interdependence, but also to increased economic vulnerability. The result of this is that the economic performance of nations and their cities are strongly related to the transnational networks of multinationals, international trade and capital flows. In turn, sustainability is about getting this system’s balance right. The word ‘sustainability’ (Nachhaltigkeit) was first used in 1712 by the German scientist Hans Carl von Carlowitz, but the notion of sustainability as a ‘normative’ concept only truly developed during the first phase of the Industrial Revolution with the ‘Principle of Population’ by economist Thomas Malthus (1798). It was in this period that trade and its subsequent intercity networks started to flourish, progressing gradually towards today’s interdependent world city system. The expansion of world trade in the 20th century has contributed significantly to global population rises, escalating consumption and the consequent international concern for social and ecological degradation. For instance, the Limits to Growth published by the Club of Rome argued that the world’s economy ‘could not continue to grow infinitely’.1 This led to the formation of the Bruntlandt Report and Agenda 21, leading to a worldwide perception of the interrelation between equity and ecology. The result has been a sophistication of the concept of sustainability, firstly through awareness of the increasing scale and impact
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Interest in systemic design relations has led Ronald Wall to study global relations between cities and corporations as an indicator of progress and success. In this way he studies global and local development as an integrated system. This approach of competition and performance produces an interesting perspective on the concept of sustainability. In Wall’s view the future of urban development will depend on an integrated approach which connects dynamic urban issues ‘within’ particular cities to knowledge of how they interact ‘between’ each other. The development of this model could serve as a useful tool for decisionmaking at all levels of governance and planning.
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of urban interdependence, secondly, through the gradual development of advanced methods and techniques to measure sustainability, and thirdly, through the increased confluence of science, policy and development. Despite all this, today’s most advanced methods are still unable to empirically measure sustainability as an integrated global urban system. Cities and regions continue to be treated as isolated, unrelated units, devoid of external influences. Luckily, other areas of science, such as macroeconomics and economic geography, have recently developed tools to empirically measure the interaction ‘between’ cities and the overall structure of the global system. My research combines these different scientific fields into a theory of ‘urban network sustainability’. I argue that cities should be considered as parts of an integrated urban system and that sustainability should be measured as the interdependence of social, economic and environmental factors. Lastly, based on knowledge from the first two points the interaction between governments and corporations should become more effective, tying municipal, national and global policies together. As evident in the current credit crisis, the common thread between nations is transnational corporate activity. Because these economic networks concern the production and consumption of a globalizing world, they significantly influence the utilization of resources, the fate of cities and the ultimate impact upon the environment. Contemporary globalization posits that multinational corporations (MNCs) form the basic unit of global production and integration and many are in fact wealthier than most developing countries.2 MNCs are characterized by their power to coordinate and control the operations of other firms in other international cities resulting in direct cross-border investment in which a degree of control over firms and cities is achieved. This trend originated in the 1960s ‘golden age’ of economic growth when foreign direct investment grew at twice the rate of global GNP and 40% faster than world exports.3 It enabled firms to compete to gain access to markets, share costs, risks and uncertainties, gain access to new technologies and pool resources and rationalize production.4 The result was a transnational urban system in which MNC headquarters and their various subsidiaries have been strategically placed at locations on the global transportation and communication networks utilizing external services, labor market skills and proximity benefits. This has produced a ‘world society’ which has legitimized the penetration of foreign interests into less developed countries.5
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Figure 1 Hypothetical model – evenly distributed corporate network
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Although the reach of transnational integration is evident, the distribution of corporate networks remains persistently skewed6; firms create a division of international labor that reflects the hierarchic division of labor within those firms themselves.7 Because MNCs centralize high-level decision-making and advanced production in only a handful of cities, the majority of the world is generally relegated to lower levels of economic activity. The notion of territoriality is best encapsulated by the selective, geographical imbeddedness of capital because it requires the existence of high densities of fixed, secure and largely immobile social and physical infrastructures.8 This means that only well endowed cities will attract MNC headquarters and the consequent financial benefits this brings to these fortunate cities. In this light, it is interesting to investigate the uneven distribution of clustered economic
activities in the world and how these places are interconnected. To better understand the invisible structure of the world economy, it is important to understand how cities are organizationally connected9 by financial power relations and how this determines the individual urban characteristics of each city. In this way the impact of the local upon the global and vice versa can be empirically measured. Several studies have already explored worldwide economic networks based for instance on foreign direct investments10 or inter-corporate directorships.11 I use data concerning the shareholding relationships (investments) between the top 100 MNC headquarters12 and their various subsidiaries across the globe (2007 data) as representing the primary chain of global economic power. By mapping this data the spatial configuration of the world’s economic backbone is revealed Figure 1 resulting in 9243 corporate investment connections. These connections are the financial shareholds (investments) between the headquarters and their subsidiaries and in aggregate strongly determine the total turnover of these firms. By adding up the turnover of all firms depicted in the diagram, it was found that this represented approximately 50% of the combined GNP of OECD countries in 2007. It is evident that the distribution of corporate shareholds investments between nations is still polarized into the three core regions of North America, Europe and Pacific Asia. In fact these regions claim 98% of all outwardly directed power relations over other nations. Furthermore, these areas claim 82% of all incoming relations, revealing the dependency of the world upon these cores. A clear North-South divide persistently exists: Africa, for instance, accounts for a mere 1% of MNC investments. Examining Europe more closely, where Paris and London form the primary cores of the EU economy, we see how complex these economic networks are.
The unevenness of the data is further demonstrated in the graph below Figure 2. On the Y-axis we see the total number of investments held by the 2557 cities in the dataset while the X-axis represents the ranking of these cities. This is known as the Rank-Size Rule or Zipf’s Law. It is immediately clear that only a handful of cities hold the vast majority of global shareholds. The four most powerful cities (top-left) are New York, Paris, London and Tokyo. This statistical phenomenon, known as a power-law, was discovered by Robert Gibrat in 1931 and helped form the first universal theory of how firms grow to unequal sizes12; according to economist Robert Axtell ‘it is the most robust statistical regularity in all the social sciences’.13 Furthermore, a power-law characterizes many complex ‘real-world’ networks, such as social networks, computer networks, neural networks and epidemiological networks. In power-law relationships only a few nodes act as ‘highly connected hubs’ and the more connected a city is the higher its future probability of obtaining new connections. This is known as ‘preferential attachment’ and it means that the likelihood a multinational will form a new business relationship with another firm, is far more likely with a hub city like New York than with a less connected city like Seoul, for example. In the global corporate network 25% of investment connections are held by New York, Paris, Tokyo and London, meaning that these four global cities have extreme authority over worldwide corporate developments. This is remarkable considering that 2557 cities are represented in the dataset. Thus these four cities are both the strength and Achilles’
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Figure 2 Contemporary model – highly disproportionate corporate network
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heel of the world city network, a fact clearly underlined by the recent collapse of stock exchanges in these cities. This conforms to power-law theories which state that if the hubs of a network system are immobilized, the whole system collapses. What does this have to do with the urban sustainability? The table below Figure 3 shows an analysis in which corporate investment connectivity has been correlated with indicators of urban performance. Four urban variable categories are used, namely economic, environmental, social and infrastructural indicators. Each of the 2557 cities has a value for their corporate investment connectivity as well as a value for their urban performance, measured by the thirteen given indicators. In a correlation analysis the statistical coherence between for instance connectivity and GDP per capita of each city is measured. The values found in the table are a measure of the strength between corporate connectivity and one of the thirteen indicators. Statistically correlations between 0.6 and 1 indicate very strong coherence. The scores are exceptionally strong. We see for instance that the more economically connected a city is, the higher is its economic output and subsequent human development. Its ability to integrate with other world cities is noticeably dependent on the efficiency of its local business, the higher education levels of its people, the status of its infrastructure, the attractiveness of the city and its urban communication and technological levels. Furthermore, it is also evident that the more connected cities are, the greater their energy consumption and consequent pollution. Hence strong corporate connectivity is beneficial to a city’s prosperity, but detrimental to the environment. Although correlations do not prove causality between variables, they do exemplify the strong interdependence between urban development and global economic reach. It is therefore arguable that for a city to improve its performance it must improve its global connectivity which consequently means further liberalization of trade and investment. Thus as provocative as it may sound in today’s perilous economic climate, freer and more flexible markets will arguably do more for the world economy than protectionism.14
Economic Indicators GDP per capita Business Sophistication Index Innovation Index Technological Achievement Index Global Competitiveness Index
0.885 0.845 0.837 0.746 0.824
Environmental indicators Energy Consumption Index Nuclear Footprint
0.763 0.748
Social Indicators Human Development Index Higher Education Index
0.737 0.762
Infrastructural Indicators Internet Bandwidth Urban Attractiveness Index ICT Expenditure Infrastructure Index
0.841 0.786 0.901 0.841
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Figure 3 Correlations between a city’s corporate connectivity and its urban performance (data 2007)
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So far it has been demonstrated that a city’s ability to develop socially, economically or environmentally is strongly related to its degree of corporate interdependence with other cities. This means that a city’s capacity to interact with the world enables prosperity for its citizens. Inversely, a city’s level of development ensures its competitive ability to attract international corporate relations. Whichever way you look at it, the more connected a city is, the higher the statistical probability (preferential attachment) that it will continue to provide and sustain future generations. However this only addresses the fate of individual cities and does not take into consideration the sustainability of the entire global urban system. Therefore when discussing sustainability we should be clear about whose sustainability we are talking about. This means defining whether we are discussing ‘relative’ or ‘absolute’ sustainability! Recalling the unevenness of the world economic network, represented in the previous GIS map and the power-law graph, it is interesting to ponder what absolute global sustainability might mean. The diagram below Figure 4 represents an abstraction of our current global economic network (left) and a hypothetical extreme of an evenly distributed network between
Total number of sharehold connections of each city
cities (right). In the first case the majority of inter-urban investments are held by a minority of cities, forming a hierarchic core, semi-periphery and periphery division of the world. Although the core cities are more connected to each other and subsequently have a high level of urban performance, the vast bulk of cities are either poorly connected or not connected at all with the unfortunate result that these generally more populated cities are socially, economically and environmentally deprived. In the second diagram an extreme, hypothetical urban network is postulated in which all investments between cities are evenly distributed. According to the previous results this would also mean that they would all exhibit equal levels of urban development. Although an attractive Utopian model, it is nevertheless not likely that such a completely balanced world could ever come into existence. This is because economic growth is always based on the scarcity of resources and the subsequent competition this triggers between cities in their quest to survive. So even if it were possible to provide for everyone equally, this equilibrium would not last long, as scarcity is not static because human needs are contextually different and continuously evolving in search of novelty. This always leads to urban differences which produces competition between cities. 900
New York 800
700
600
Paris
500
Tokyo London
400
Dusseldorf 300
Munich London
200
100
0 0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
Ranking of cities by sharehold volume
A sustainable world in absolute terms is impossible. Cities and their surrounding regions can never supply equal amounts of physical and social resources. For this reason populations can never be quantitatively, nor qualitatively equalized. The result is continued differences in supply and demand and the consequent variation of trade between cities. However an improved model somewhere between the two given extremes is conceivable in which the diversity and intensity of economic relations to unconnected and weakly connected cities is improved. This means rejecting the contemporary, skewed system and attempting to reach the highest level of evenness possible. There is much current controversy in economic theory about whether world development is diverging or converging. Many developmental economists argue that because poorer economies tend to grow faster than richer ones, that eventually all economies should eventually converge in terms of per capita income and productivity.15 Others stress that economic inequality has not significantly changed over the last forty years16 and that the developed world still overwhelmingly dominates world trade. Recalling the GIS map and statistics above, US and EU hegemony, with moderate Japanese and Chinese activity, is inescapable. The rest of the world simply does not significantly participate in the core global economy. Some economists predict that the rapidly emerging markets in the developing world will lead to a change within the existing world order. It is said that these economies are growing unexpectedly fast and that their consumerism is becoming far more intense; as they get richer demand rises dramatically, particularly for energy and industrial commodities. For instance, in 2007 China alone accounted for one-third of the increase in global oil demand. In this sense these experts expect that the rise of various emerging markets will break the existing disproportionality of our world, creating resilience to the vulnerability of the world’s richer corners. The old-boys hegemony with its free market capitalism, free trade, deregulated domestic finance and its triumph of markets over governments, is supposedly coming to an end.17 Accordingly, Western finance will become reregulated and governments will again become more involved with market activity by extending their global reach, increasing subsidies,
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Figure 4 Ranksize of 2557 cities by corporate interurban investments
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fixing prices, managing food security and banning exports of certain products. Lastly, it is said that the US will lose its key position as economic and intellectual authority in our world. We should be skeptical about such assertions, judging by the evident disproportionality in my own analysis and the fact that emerging economies are suffering equally from the plummet of the developed world’s stock markets.18 Furthermore, even if emerging markets lead to a relative shift in world order, this does not necessarily mean that global sustainability will improve in absolute terms. A rise in the East might simply mean a decline in the West, but the inequality will be roughly maintained. If new emerging markets can expand without doing so at the cost of the already existing ones however, then absolute sustainability in the world will certainly be improved. Thus if there was ever a time for a new multilateralism, then today, the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s, is surely it. Although the often heralded vision of an extremely ‘equal world’ is not likely in absolute terms, the severe unevenness of today’s global economic network can be challenged. This can be achieved by improving relative sustainability which is far more probable, manageable…and even urgent today. Only a handful of cities control the world economy and this has led to an extremely uneven urban system. It has produced a severe vulnerability in the world economy, as our current economic crisis has made obvious. Sustainability, by my definition, is (relatively) a city’s degree of corporate interdependence with the world and (absolutely) the degree of overall interdependence. Unfortunately today’s connectivity is mainly concentrated between cities of similar urban status and this is the main problem! To improve global sustainability powerful cities need to diversify the number of cities to which they connect. This means preparing more cities to collaborate, compete and connect with each other. This will not be detrimental to the already fortunate cities, as they can still hold similar total numbers of total connections. Increasing the diversity of economic activity in the world will subsequently lead to a higher degree of evenness. Seeing that only a handful of cities hold almost all the planet’s economic power, these cities can adjust their trade and investment policies to diversify the number of cities with which they connect. The more new cities that participate in the world economy, the more these cities will reap the benefits for their own citizens. This will enable more and more cities to collaborate, compete and innovate within the global system which will improve the overall social, economic and environmental performance of these cities. This is good for two reasons. First, by spreading opportunity, the skewness of the absolute system decreases; secondly, as cities become more diversely connected they will become far less vulnerable because their opportunities and risks will be far more spread. This might have a downside however. More cities will flourish and urbanization will spread more intensely across the planet. Environmental degradation will rise, as we see now with China’s urban development. Hence socio-economic sustainability clearly remains at odds with environmental sustainability. The only thing that can solve this dilemma is a new form of global policy which attempts to regulate population levels and develop and implement environmentally superior technologies. Thus pursuing a sustainable world is a multidimensional task requiring the development of globally agreeable governmental policies, the adjustment of worldwide corporate interdependence, the management of human demand and resource supplies and the effective innovation and utilization of efficient technologies. The solution therefore requires both technological, but especially sociological breakthroughs. Both are vital to economic growth, prosperity and the dynamic sophistication of human development. Where faith in technology is quite commonplace today, an evolution of trust and cooperation between different nations seems more urgent than ever. A rise in trust will lead to an increase of the variety of our association with others thereby decreasing economic uncertainty and vulnerability. This means engaging with the intricacies of our world and not resorting to protectionism. In this sense I disagree with theories that perceive a sustainable world as a reduced, modest society which mirrors medieval or Edo-ages. Such theories tend to ‘diminish the complexity’ of our world to a static, simplified state of equilibrium, one in which human progress and mankind’s ageold thirst for novelty is numbed. Instead, I believe that humanity has to learn to ‘live with complexity’ and not avoid it. Humanity has been gradually progressing ‘forwards’ since time immemorial – there is no way back! A sustainable future world will become more dynamic and intense than it is today; and it will depend on both social and technological ingenuity to perpetually get the balance right! Understanding cities as interdependent parts of a competitive globalized world economy and how to improve their relative performance within this framework serves as an interesting perspective to the development of the concept of sustainability. In this view the future of urban development will depend on an integrated approach which connects dynamic urban issues ‘within’ particular cities, to knowledge of how cities interact ‘between’ each other. In this way the ‘invisible hand’ of global economics can relate better to the more tangible world of urban planning. In this sense urban planning and economics are both ‘spatially imbedded’ disciplines. The development of such a ‘global’ sustainability model will serve as a useful tool for decision-making at all levels of governance and planning. In this context the future decision-maker will program, plan and design a city with sound knowledge of how this relates to that city’s existing position and relations within the global network. This will increase the
city’s probability of success. Such decisions will concern a future urban plan which should strengthen existing ties between that city and its partner cities. Considering that a future sustainable world will increasingly depend on the diversity of inter-urban relations, the future decision-maker will be equally engaged in seeking new cities with which to connect. This will make her/his city more robust and lead to a higher diversity of novel programs within that city as well. The increased diversity of socio-economic relations will improve trust between cities and nations and hence the level of global interdependence. Thus ultimately the more cities adopt this relative approach to planning, the higher the overall impact will be on the absolute sustainability of our world.
3 4
5 6 7
8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Meadows et al, 1972. United Nations, World Investment Report (New York/ Geneva: United nation 2002). P. Dicken, Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century (London: SAGE Publication 2003). N-H. Kang, K. Sakai, ‘International Strategic Alliances: Their Role in Industrial Globalization’, OECD STI working paper, 2002. J.W. Meyer, ‘World Society and the Nation State’, American Journal of Sociology no 1 Vol. 103 (1997). W.K. Carroll, ‘Global Cities in the Global Corporate Network’, Environment and Planning A 39, 2007, pp. 2297-2323. S. Hymer, ‘The Multinational Corporation and the law of Uneven Development’, in J.N. Bhagwati (ed.), Economics and World Order (New York: Macmillan 1972). pp. 113-140. D. Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Blackwell 1982). P. Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005). N. Driffield, J.H. Love, 2005, ‘Intra-Industry Foreign Direct Investment, Uneven Development and Globalization: The Legacy of Stephen Hymer’, Political Economy no.1, Vol. 24. W.K. Carroll, Corporate Power in a Globalizing World (Toronto: Oxford University Press 2004) L. Sutton, ‘Gibrat’s Legacy’, Journal of Economic Literature no. 40, 1997. R. Axrell, ‘Zipf Distribution of Firm Sizes’, Science no. 293, pp. 118-120. The Economist, October 11-17, 2008. John Matthews, ‘Catch-up strategies and the latecomer effect in industrial development’, New Political Economy. (2006). UNCTAD 2008 Statistics Handbook The Economist, October 11-17, 2008. ‘Into the Storm: How the emerging world copes with the tempest will affect the world’s economy and politics for a long time’, The Economist, October 25, 2008.
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The Complex History of Sustainability
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A timeline of theories, movements and actors Speaking about the environment today apparently means speaking about Sustainability. Theoretically, no one can take a stand against Sustainability because there is no definition of it. Neither is there a history of Sustainability. The Sword seems to point to a universal idea, valid anywhere, at any time. Although the notion of Sustainability appeared for the first time in Germany in the 18th century (as Nachhaltigkeit), in fact Sustainability (and the creative oxymoron ‘Sustainable Development’) is a young concept. Developed in the early seventies, it was formalized and officially adopted by the international community in 1987 in the UN report ‘Our Common Future’. Looking back, we see that Western society has always been obsessed by its relationship with the environment, with what is meant to be outside ourselves, or, as some call it, nature.
Many ideas preceded the notion of Sustainability and even today there are various trends and original ideas following old ideological traditions. Some of these directly oppose Sustainability. This timeline is a subjective attempt to historically map the different ideas around the problem of the relationship between humans and their environment. Amir Djalali with Piet Vollaard
Some earlier attempts to draft a sustainability history Ulrich Grober, Deep roots – A conceptual history of ‘sustainable development’ (Nachhaltigkeit), Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung Berlin (WZB) 2007. M. Held, ‘Geschichte der Nachhaltigkeit’, Natur und Kultur no. 1, vol. 1 (2000), pp. 17-31. Bernd Marquardt, ‘Historia de la sostenibilidad. Un concepto medioambiental en la historia de Europa central (1000-2006)’, Historia Crítica no. 32, 2006 (Bogotá), pp. 172-197. Desta Mebratu, ‘Susinability and sustainable development Historical and conceptual review’, Environmental Impact Assessment Review no. 6, vol. 18 (November 1998), pp. 493-520 Jacobus A. Du Pisani, ‘Sustainable development – historical roots of the concept’, Environmental Sciences, no. 2, vol. 3 (2006), pp. 83-96. Henk van Zon, Duurzame ontwikkeling in historisch perspectief. Enkele verkenningen, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2002.
List of movements
some change in the environment and that change is manifest to the system via information/feedback that causes changes in the way the system then behaves.
Alternative Technology Ecology
This is a group of researchers and designers seeking alternative technologies to cope with the finitude of natural resources. Solutions proposed are based on different approaches to scale, density, material cycles and conviviality. Anarco-primitivism
The anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization. See also Eco-anarchism.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term used in philosophy, literary criticism and the social sciences popularized by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. It is: ‘A strategy of critical analysis...directed towards exposing unquestioned metaphysical assumptions and internal contradictions in philosophical and literary language.’ (OED). Alongside Post-structuralism, Deconstructionist analysis of nature questions nature’s ontological value as a self-standing, metaphysical entity.
Anti-essentialism
These theories do not recognize nature as a selfstanding entity, but as an ideological or discursive construction. See also Deconstruction, Poststructuralism, Eco-feminism, Anti-nature ecologism. Anti-nature ecologism
Proponents of this theory have abandoned any idea of nature, pointing out that they are all ideological. Antinature ecologists argue that our very idea of nature is the cause of the damages we are inflicting on it.
Deep ecology
The branch of environmental philosophy which considers human beings as part of the whole environment. Deep ecology has led to a new system of environmental ethics. The core principle of deep ecology as originally developed is Arne Næss’s doctrine of biospheric egalitarianism – the claim that, like humanity, the living environment as a whole has the same right to live and flourish. Eco-anarchism
A movement contesting economic reductionism and the ideology of development. Antigrowth theorists argue that the very nature of the notion of Western progress is to be blamed for the environment’s destruction. They propose an economy of un-growth (décroissance), a Zero-growth economy or a ‘selfsustainable local development’. Bio-economics (or Ecological Economics)
A trans-disciplinary field of academic research that addresses the metric of interdependence between human economies and natural ecosystems. Its main focus is the ‘scale’ conundrum, or how to operate an economy within the ecological constraints of the earth’s resources. Bio-regionalism
Bio-regionalism’s approach to political, cultural, and environmental issues is based on naturally-defined regional areas consistent with the concept of bioregions or ecoregions. These areas are usually based on a combination of physical and environmental features, including watershed boundaries and soil and terrain characteristics. Bio-regionalism stresses that the determination of a bioregion is also a cultural phenomenon – with phrases such as ‘the politics of place’ and ‘terrain of consciousness’ – and places emphasis on local populations, knowledge and solutions. Cybernetics
Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and (c.f.) Systems Theory. Both in its origins and in its evolution in the secondhalf of the 20th century, cybernetics is equally applicable to physical and social (that is, language-based) systems. Cybernetics is preeminent when the system under scrutiny is involved in a closed signal loop where action by the system in an environment causes
The anarchist school of thought emphasizes the environment. Some green anarchists can be described as anarcho-primitivists and sometimes anti-civilization anarchists, though not all green anarchists are primitivists. Likewise, there is a strong critique of technology among some green anarchists, though not all reject it entirely. Sometimes green anarchism is said to be techno-positive or technonegative to differentiate between those who advocate use of advanced green technology to create and maintain an anarchist society and those who mainly see civilization and modern technology as something negative (see Anarcoprimitivism). Eco-fascism / Eco-nazism
Extreme right-wing movements that incorporate environmentalist positions into their ideology. Nazi and fascist environmentalism is mainly a reactionary and anti-modernist idea of the preservation of nature, seen as a symbol of national and racial identity. Eco-feminism
Eco-feminism is a social and political movement which attempts to unite environmentalism and feminism with some currents linking (c.f.) Deep Ecology and feminism. Eco-feminists argue that a relationship exists between the oppression of women and the degradation of nature. They explore the intersectionality between sexism, the domination of nature, racism, speciesism and other characteristics of social inequality. Ecology
The scientific study of the distribution and abundance of life and the interaction between organisms and their environment. Ecology is not based on the mechanicistic paradigm (see Mechanicism), as life phenomena cannot always be interpreted through cause-effect patterns. On the contrary, by virtue of contributions from Biology, (c.f.) Evolutionism, (c.f.) Cybernetics (c.f.)and Systems Theory, Ecology is considered a separate scientific paradigm.
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Antigrowth
34
GLOBAL TEMPERATURE RECORD
WORLD POPULATION
OIL PRICES
1000
1500
1600
1700
A
1760
1780
VOLTAIRE
ENLIGHTED + 0.8 100 8
ECONOM BIOPHY
+ 0.6
HANS CARL VON CARLOWITZ WILHELM GOTTFRIED MO
GEORG AGRICOLA
MATTHEW HALE WILLIAM PETTY
+ 0.4 80 6
RENE DESCARTES GALILEO GALILEI FRANCIS BACON
+ 0.2
MECHANICIST GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ
ISAAC NEWTON
0
60
BARUCH SPINOZA
4
- 0.2
40 - 0.4
2
- 0.6
POLITICAL ROBIN HOOD
POOR KONRAD
20
ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
1700 ROBINSON CRUSOE (1719)
1600 LA CITTA’ DEL SOLE (1602) THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS (1604) THE NEW ATLANTIS (1627) DIALOGO SOPRA I DUE MASSIMI SISTEMI (1632)
1500 UTOPIA (1507)
°C
BILLION
$
1000
MO
1760
1780
Volume 18
MILLENARIANIST
CANDIDE OU L’OPTIMISME (1759) EMILE, OU DE L’EDUCATION (1762)
- 0.8
35
WELVYN GARDEN CITY (1920)
LETCHWORTH GARDEN CITY (1903)
FOREST HILLS GARDENS (1908) HELLERAU (1914) LIBERTY GARDENS (1915-1918)
PULMANN CITY (1880)
GREAT CONSERVATORY CHATSWORTH (1837)
ARCHITECTURE PRO TECHNOCRATIC MICAL YSICAL
0
1800
1840
1860
1880
1900
POSITIVIST
AUGUSTE COMTE
IVAN LE CO FRANK LL
MALTHUSIAN THOMAS MALTHUS
GIFFORD PI
WILLIAM STANLEY JEVONS
SER
STATIONARY STATE ECONOIMCS
WELFA
JOHN STUART MILL
CECIL PIG
THERMODYNAMIC RUDOLPH CLAUSIUS
PIERRE-SIMON LAPLACE
MAX PLANCK ALBERT EINSTEIN
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL
ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
EVOLUTIONIST CHARLES DARWIN
ERNST HAECKEL ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
D’ARCY W
ECOLOGIST
EUGENIUS WARMING
GEORGE PERKINS MARSH
LIEBERE PATRICK GE
T M
ECO-SOCIALIST WILLIAM MORRIS
ALEKS
LUDDITE GENERAL LUDD CAPTAIN SWING
JOHN RUSKIN EBENEZER HOWARD
RALPH WALDO EMERSON HENRY DAVID THOREAU
ROMANTIC
WOLFGANG GOETHE
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
1900
F DER GOLEM, WIE ER IN DIE WELT KAM (1920)
TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1870)
1880 JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (1864)
1860 WALDEN (1854)
LA GINESTRA (1836)
1840
FAUST (1828)
FRANKENSTEIN (1818)
1800
WILHELM MEISTER’S APPRENTICESHIP (1795)
0
DE KLEINE JOHANNES (1885)
ORAL
1940
1960
1972
1980
1988
LINZ DESIGN CENTER (1994)
LA BOLLA (1992) MENARA MESNIAGA BUILDING (1992)
BIOSPHERE 2 (1991) JEAN MARIE TJIBAOU CULTURAL CENTER (1991-1998)
SKY CITY 1000 (1989)
1976
GREEN BUILDING (1990)
ARK BIOSHELTER (1976)
SPACIAL CITY (1958)
GEODESIC DOME OVER MANHATTAN (1962) INVENTORY OF WORLD RESOURCES (1963) BIOS 1-3 (1965-1972) DROP CITY (1965) GEODESIC DOME AT EXPO67 (1967) WHOLE EARTH CATALOGUE (1968) ARCOLOGY (1969) ARCOSANTI (1970) LIZ CHRISTY COMMUNITY GARDEN (1970) OLDMAN RIVER CITY PROJECT (1971)
SUN SPAN HOUSE (1949)
VICTORY GARDENS (1940-1945)
BROADACRE CITY (1932) SABAUDIA (1934) TALIESIN WEST (1937)
DYMAXION HOUSE (1928) POTATO PATCHES (1929)
OJECTS CAL
1992
TECHNO-UTOPIST
RICHARD BUCKMINSTER FULLER KONRAD WACHSMANN JOHN MCHALE LEONIDOV ORBUSIER OYD WRIGHT
OTTO FREI
RONALD BAILEY
LIBERTA NEO MALTHUSIAN
PAUL EHRLICH
GARRETT HARDIN CLUB OF ROME KENNETH BOULDING STOCKHOLM CONFERENCE JOHN MCCONNELL EARTH DAY BARBARA WARD MAURICE STRONG
BEAUROCR
INCHOT
ARE ECONOMIST
LIVE AID BRUNTLAND COMMISSION
SUSTAINABLE
HANNOVER PRINCIPLES
ALTERNATIVE TECHNO ECOLOGIST
HERMAN DALY
FRITZ SCHUMACHER
GOU
JEFFREY KENWORTHY PETER NEWMAN
KARL W. KAPP
MICHAEL HOUGH
IGNACY SACHS
JEREMY RIFKIN
BIO ECONOMIC
CYBERNETIC
N
RIO EARTH SUMMIT
NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN
METABOLISTS
NORBERT WIENER JOHN VON NEUMANN LUDWIG VON BERTALANFFY GREGORY BATESON MARGARET MEAD
ILYA PRIGOGINE HUMBERTO MATURANA FRANCISCO VARELA NIKLAS LUHMANN
SYSTEMS THEORIST
WENTWORTH THOMPSON
CONSTANTINOS A. DOXIADIS CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER LOUIS LE ROY BARRY COMMONER
HOWARD T. ODUM WILLIAM VOGT
CHT MIGGE DDES
PERMACULTURIST BILL MOLLISON DAVID HOLMGREN MASANOBU FUKUOKA
KENNETH E. BOULDING
LEWIS MUMFORD MICHEL FOUCAULT GILLES DELEUZE
POST STRUCTURALIST
FELIX GUATTARI
THE FRENCH GROUP
DECONSTRUCTIONIST JACQUES DERRIDA ECO-FEMINIST
THEODOR ADORNO MAX HORKHEIMER
CAROLYN MERCHANT
FRANCOISE D’EAUBONNE
HANNAH ARENDT PETER BERG
RAYMOND DASMANN
BIOREGIONALIST LUCIEN KROLL
PAOLO SOLERI
RUDOLF BAHRO
WOLFGANG SACHS
IVAN ILLICH
SANDR BOGDANOV
ECO-ANARCHIST MURRAY BOOKCHIN JACQUES ELLUL
EDWARD GOLDSMITH
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
RACHEL CARSON
LYNN TOWNSEND WHITE
HASSAN FATHI JANE JACOBS
ECO NAZI
WARWICH FOX
HANS JONAS
JAMES CUTLER LEON KRIER GLENN MURCUTT PETER CALTHORPE CHARLES PRINCE OF WALES SYM VAN DER RYN
VERNACULAR
SAVITRI DEVI
JULIUS EVOLA
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ARNE NAESS
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ECOPHENOMENOLOGIST TRANSPERSONAL ECOLOGIST JAMES LOVELOCK
JACQUES ELLUL
DEEP ECOLOGIST
ANAR
NEO LUDDITE
ERAZIM KOHAK NEIL EVERNDEN
STEWART BRAND WENDELL BARRY IAN MCHARG
CHELLIS GLENDINNING JOHN ZERZAN
MIKE REYNOLDS
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1960
1972
1976
1980
1988
1992 WATERWORLD (1995) 12 MONKEYS (1995)
MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN (1994)
MARS TRILOGY (1992-1996)
JURASSIC PARK (1990) SIM EARTH (1990)
DUNE (1984)
EDGE OF DARKNESS (1985)
PALOMAR (1982) BLADE RUNNER (1982)
STALKER (1979)
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1978) CONAN, THE BOY IN FUTURE (1978)
CASSANDRA CROSSING (1976)
ECOTOPIA (1975)
SOYLENT GREEN (1973)
SOLARIS (1972)
DESCHOOLING SOCIETY (1971)
PLANET OF THE APES (1968)
THE BIRDS (1963)
THE WAMTOMG SEED (1962)
GODZILLA (1954) I AM LEGEND (1954)
DOCTOR FAUSTUS (1947)
PETITE COSMOGONIE PORTATIVE (1950) PAINC IN THE STREETS (1950)
FRANKENSTEIN (1931) BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) KING KONG (1933) SAN FRANCISCO (1936)
FICTION MOVIES BO
BIONIC TOWER SHANGHAI (2015)
R128 (2000) DUTCH PAVILION AT HANNOVER EXPO (2000) SHIMZU MEGACITY PYRAMID (2004) LONDON GATEWAY CPUL (2005) THE EDEN PROJECT (2005)DONGTAN (2005-2040)
MASDAR (2007-2023)
LIGHT URBANISM (1996)
1996
2000
2020
2040
GLOBAL WARMING CONSPIRACY THEORIST MICHAEL CHRICHTON GLOBAL WARMING DENIALIST PATRICK MICHAELS BJORN LOMBORG
GLENN REYNOLDS
RIAN TRANSHUMANIST
NEO EUGENIC FREE MARKET ECOLOGIST
RATICAL RENZO PIANO ARUP
KYOTO CONFERENCE
E DEVELOPMENTALIST
KEN YEANG
JOHN THACKARA
PIET VOLLAARD
LIVE 8 LIVE EARTH JOHANNESBURG EARTH SUMMIT 2005 WORLD SUMMIT MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS AL GORE EXPO2000 WILLIAM MCDONOUGH MICHAEL BRAUNGART
JOHN FERNANDEZ
BIOMIMICIST THEO JANSEN CENTER FOR BITS AND ATOMS
PETER TRUMMER
ANTI/NATURE ECOLOGIST
SLAVOJ ZIZEK TIMOTY MORTON REKOMBINANT NEUROGREEN
ARTURO ESCOBAR
ANTIESSENTIALIST
ECO MARXIST JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER PAUL BURKETT
VANDANA SHIVA
ANTI DEVELOPMENTALIST
SERGE LATOUCHE
ALBERTO MAGNAGHI
TERRITORIALIST
RCOPRIMITIVIST
BIOGENETIC LUDDITE
DERRICK JENSEN
HEODOR KACZYNSKI
STEFANO BOERI
NON ANTHROPOCENTRIC JOANNA MACY
NEW AGEIST
SCIENTOLOGY
NEO MILLENARIANIST
1996
NEO-NAZI
2000
2020
NEO NEO-NAZI
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GODZILLA (1998) ARMAGEDDON (1998)
GATTACA (1997)
THE PERFECT STORM (2000) DER SCHWARM (2004) STATE OF FEAR (2004) THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004) LA POSSIBILITE D’UNE ILE (2005) FREE KARMA FOOD (2006) I AM LEGEND (2007) THE ELEVENTH HOUR (2007) WALL-E (2008) BIOSHOCK (2008) BURN UP (2008)
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ZODIAC (1996) RESIDENT EVIL (1996)
OOKS GAMES
Eco-Marxism
Contrary to the depiction of Karl Marx as a productivist who favored the domination of nature, eco-Marxists believe he was a main originator of the ecological world-view. Eco-Marxist authors, point to Marx’s discussion of a ‘metabolic rift’ between man and nature, his statement that ‘private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite absurd’ and his observation that a society must ‘hand it [the planet] down to succeeding generations in an improved condition’. Other (c.f.) Eco-socialists feel that Marx overlooked a ‘recognition of nature in and for itself’, ignoring its ‘receptivity’ and treating nature as ‘subjected to labor from the start’ in an ‘entirely active relationship’. Eco-phenomenology
Ecological phenomenologists argue that the environmental crisis is equally physical and metaphysical, and that a fundamental reconceptualization of human relationships with the earth is necessary to help undo the damage stemming from a contemporary Western history of separation from and utilitarian valuation and exploitation of the natural world. Eco-socialism
The utopian reformist critique of capitalism aims for the reestablishment of pre-industrial lifestyles in order to preserve social relations and the environment. Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment is a term used to describe a phase in Western philosophy and cultural history in the eighteenth century during which reason was advocated as the primary source and basis of authority. Enlightened philosophers were profoundly influenced by the scientific method of mechanical physics. Evolutionism
As developed by Charles Darwin and others, the theory of evolution describes the process of change in all forms of life over generations. An organism inherits features (traits) from its parents through genes. Changes (mutations) in these genes can produce a new trait in offspring. If a new trait makes these offspring better suited to their environment, they will be more successful at surviving and reproducing. This process is called natural selection and it causes useful traits to become more common. Over many generations a population can acquire so many new traits that it becomes a new species. Free Market Ecology
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This theory states that through the constant flexibility and adaptiveness of its devices – such as the price system – the free market is the best solution to overcome the environmental crisis. Free market ecologists, supported in part by Garrett Hardin’s works, propose the privatization of common goods such as land, water and air to solve the alleged inefficiency of common property.
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Global warming conspiracy theory
Supporters of this theory claim that the theory of global warming is a fraud, perpetuated for financial, ideological or world domination purposes.
Global warming denialism
This theory describes efforts to counter all or part of the theory of global climate change when those involved are believed to be acting out of vested interests rather than an unbiased evaluation of the scientific data. While the term ‘climate skeptic’ generally refers to scientists taking good faith positions on the global warming controversy, ‘climate change denial’ usually refers to disinformation campaigns, particularly by groups with ties to the energy lobby. Libertarian Transhumanism
Advocates of the ‘right to human enhancement’ who argue that the free market is the best guarantor of this right since it produces greater prosperity and personal freedom than other economic systems. Luddism
Social movement of British textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested – often by destroying mechanized looms – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution which they felt threatened their livelihood. For a short time the Luddite movement was so strong that it clashed in battles with the British Army. See also: Neo-Luddism. Malthusianism
English economist Thomas Malthus expressed views on population growth and noted the potential for populations to increase rapidly and often faster than the food supply available to them. This scenario, outlined in his treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population, is known as a Malthusian catastrophe. Malthusian classical theories continue to inspire researchers today (see Neo-Malthusianism). Mechanicism
This theory offers the interpretation of phenomena through mechanical models and the belief that reality can be reduced to cause-effect patterns. It has its origin in the application of the scientific method of physics to ‘weaker’ sciences, such as the human sciences, politics and sociology. Even if the mechanicistic, cause-effect model has been superseded in most fields by (c.f.) Ecology, (c.f.) Cybernetics or (c.f.) Systems Theory, it is still influential of Western societies. Millenarianism
Millenarianism is the belief by a religious, social or political group or movement in a coming major transformation of society after which all things will be changed. Millennialism is a specific form of Millenarianism based on a one thousand year cycle and this form is especially significant within Christianity. Millenarian groups typically claim that society and its rulers are corrupt, unjust or otherwise wrong. They therefore believe they will be destroyed soon by a powerful force. The harmful nature of the status quo is always considered intractable without the anticipated dramatic change. See also Neo-millenarism. Neo-Eugenics
This is a pseudo-scientific medical discipline aiming at improving the human species through breeding and DNA manipulation techniques.
Neo-Luddism
Neo-Luddism is a modern movement of opposition to specific or general technological developments. Few people describe themselves as neo-Luddites; the term ‘neo-Luddite’ is most often deployed by advocates of technology to describe that resist technological advances.
future’, 1987), those who believe in Sustainable Development put forward that it is possible to amend the negative environmental side-effects of capitalistic economic development, satisfying present needs without compromising the needs of future generations. Systems theory (General)
Neo-Malthusianism is a set of doctrines derived from Thomas Malthus’s theory that limited resources keep populations in check and reduce economic growth. A current proponent of Neo-Malthusianism is the Club of Rome. Neo-Millenarianism
As periods of crisis emerge, millenarian fears rise (see Millenarianism). So we can expect a new millenarian tide for the next future. Permaculture
The word was coined in 1978 by ecologist Bill Mollison and one of his students David Holmgren. It is a contraction of ‘permanent agriculture’ or ‘permanent culture.’ Permaculture is about designing ecological human habitats and food production systems. It is a land use and community building movement which strives for the harmonious integration of human dwellings, microclimate, annual and perennial plants, animals, soils and water into stable, productive communities. The focus is on the relationships created among the elements by the way we place them in the landscape. This synergy is further enhanced by mimicking patterns found in nature. Positivism
Positivism puts forward that the only authentic knowledge is based on actual sense experience. Such knowledge can only come from strict scientific method. Metaphysical speculation is avoided. Though the positivist approach can be traced back to the beginnings of scientific method in Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics, the concept was first coined by Auguste Comte, widely considered the first modern sociologist, in the middle of the 19th century. See also Mechanicism Post-structuralism
Post-structuralist philosophy states that language is not the expression of an immanent ‘structure’ of the world (as structuralist philosophy argued) but rather that language constructs the world’s structures. For this reason, post-structuralists believe that no nature exists. What we call nature is a field of different contrasting forces of practices, power and desires. Romanticism
Romanticism is an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against the social and political norms of the Enlightenment and a reaction to the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music and literature. The movement argued for a ‘natural’ epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage. Sustainable developmentalism
First formalized in the Bruntland Report (‘Our common
Systems theory is the interdisciplinary study of complex systems in nature, society and science. It is a framework with which one can analyze and/or describe any group of objects that work in concert: a single organism, any organization or society, or any electro-mechanical or informational artifact. Systems theory originated in biology in the 1920s from the need to explain the interrelatedness of organisms in ecosystems. As a technical and general academic area of study it predominantly refers to the science of systems that resulted from Bertalanffy’s General System Theory (GST), among others, in initiating what became a project of systems research and practice. Techno-utopism
A techno-utopist imagines various future scenarios based on hypothetic technological innovations, believing that those technologies will solve all human problems, including environmental issues. Territorialism
Starting from a critique of sustainable development, Territorialists focus on the increasingly important role of local qualitative development and develop the concept of ‘local self-sustainable development’. This concept emphasizes the balance between directing development toward fundamental human requirements (which cannot be reduced to material needs alone), self-reliance and the development of self-government by local society, and enhancing environmental quality. Transpersonal ecology
Studies the transcendental and spiritual aspect of the relationship between man and the environment. Vernacular
Architectural movement which believes the best environmental solutions are those inherited from the past from traditional communities. Vernacular architects are led either by (c.f.) Anarco-primitivism or by localist protectionist reactionary ideologies. Welfare economics
Welfare economics uses microeconomic techniques to simultaneously determine allocative efficiency within an economy and the income distribution associated with it. It analyzes social welfare, however measured, in terms of economic activities of the individuals that comprise the theoretical society considered. The work of Pigou stresses the distinction between private and social marginal products and costs. He put forward that via a mixture of taxes and subsidies governments can correct such perceived market failures – or ‘internalize the externalities’. Environmental damages of industrial activities are a particular type of negative externality.
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Neo-Malthusianism
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Image Koert van Mensvoort
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Next Nature
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While our natural environment is replaced by a world of design…
Censorship Today Violence or ecology as a new opium for the masses? Slavoj Žižek
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek polemically narrates the naturalization of capitalism and how ecology became a new field for capitalist investment. He also argues that the ultimate consequence of recent developments in biogenetics will be the end of nature. Ecological apartheid will divide our urban society. Capitalism is not in control of nature and due to techno-scientific interventions the essence of the ecological order is lost.
Marco Cicala, a Leftist Italian journalist, told me about his recent weird experience: when, in an article, he once used the word ‘capitalism,’ the editor asked him if the use of this term is really necessary – could he not replace it with a synonymous one, like ‘economy’? What better proof of the total triumph of capitalism than the virtual disappearance of the very term in the last 2 or 3 decades? No one, with the exception of a few allegedly archaic Marxists, refers to capitalism any longer. The term was simply struck from the vocabulary of politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists – even of social scientists... But what about the upsurge of the anti-globalization movement in the last years? Does it not clearly contradict this diagnostic? No: a close look quickly shows how this movement also succumbs to ‘the temptation to transform a critique of capitalism itself (centered on economic mechanisms, forms of work organization, and profit extraction) into a critique of ‘imperialism’.’ In this way, when one talks about ‘globalization and its agents,’ the enemy is externalized (usually in the form of vulgar anti-Americanism). From this perspective, where the main task today is to fight ‘the American empire,’ any ally is good if they are anti-American, and so the unbridled Chinese ‘Communist’ capitalism, violent Islamic anti-modernists, as well as the obscene Lukashenko regime in Belarus may appear as progressive anti-globalist comrades-in-arms... What we have here is thus another version of the ill-famed notion of ‘alternate modernity’: instead of the critique of capitalism as such, of confronting its basic mechanism, we get the critique of the imperialist ‘excess,’ with the (silent) notion of mobilizing capitalist mechanisms within another, more ‘progressive,’ frame. So what is the problem here? It is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s notion of the End of History, but the majority today is ‘Fukuyamaian’: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally-found formula for the best possible society, all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant, etc. The only true question today is: do we endorse this ‘naturalization’ of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which will prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are three (or, rather, four) such antagonisms:
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1. Ecology
In spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe or crisis, can easily turn ecology into a new field of capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk involved fundamentally precludes a market solution – why? Capitalism only works in precise social conditions: it implies the trust into the objectivized/ ’reified’ mechanism of the market’s ‘invisible hand’ which, as a kind of Cunning of Reason,
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guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the common good. However, we are in the midst of a radical change. Until now, historical Substance played its role as the medium and foundation of all subjective interventions: whatever social and political subjects did, it was mediated and ultimately dominated, overdetermined, by the historical Substance. What looms on the horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will intervene directly into the historical Substance, catastrophically disturbing its run by way of triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe, etc. No longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no longer holds that, whatever we do, history will go on. For the first time in human history, the act of a single socio-political agent effectively can alter and even interrupt the global historical process, so that, ironically, it is only today that we can say that the historical process should effectively be conceived ‘not only as Substance, but also as Subject.’ This is why, when confronted with singular catastrophic prospects (say, a political group which intends to attack its enemy with nuclear or biological weapons), we no longer can rely on the standard logic of the ‘Cunning of Reason’ which presupposes the primacy of the historical Substance over acting subjects: we can no longer adopt the stance of ‘let the enemy who threatens us deploy its potentials and thereby destroy himself’ – the price for letting the historical Reason do its work is too high since, in the meantime, we may all perish together with the enemy. Recall a frightening detail from the Cuban Missile Crisis: only later did we learn how close to nuclear war we were during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on October 27 1962. The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire it if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no. ‘A guy named Arkhipov saved the world,’ one chronicler of these events bitterly observed. 2. Private Property
The inappropriateness of private property for the so-called ‘intellectual property.’ The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital) industries is how to maintain the form of (private) property within which only the logic of profit can be maintained (see also the Napster problem, the free circulation of music). And do the legal complications in biogenetics not point in the same direction? Phenomena are emerging here which bring the notion of property to weird paradoxes: in India, local communities can suddenly discover that medical practices and materials they had been using for centuries are now owned by American companies and must now be bought from them; with the biogenetic companies patenting genes, we are all discovering that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others... The crucial date in the history of cyberspace is February 3rd, 1976, the day Bill Gates published his (in)famous ‘Open Letter to Hobbyists,’ the assertion of private property in the software domain: ‘As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. /.../ Most directly, the thing you do is theft.’ Bill Gates has built his entire empire and reputation on his extreme views about knowledge being treated as if it were tangible property. This was a decisive signal which triggered the battle for the ‘enclosure’ of the common domain of software. 3. New Techno-Scientific Developments
The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in bio-genetics) – Fukuyama himself was compelled to admit that the biogenetic interventions into human nature are the most serious threat to his vision of the End of History. With the latest biogenetic developments, we are entering a new phase in which it is simply nature itself which melts into air: the main consequence of the scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is thus ‘desubstantialized,’ deprived of its impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called ‘earth.’ This compels us to give a new twist to Freud’s title Unbehagen in der Kultur – discontent, uneasiness, in culture. With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer ‘natural,’ the reliable ‘dense’ background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction.
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4. New Forms of Apartheid
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Last but not least, we have new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. On September 11th, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on November 9th, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9th announced the ‘happy ‘90s,’ the Francis Fukuyama dream of the ‘end of history,’ the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search is over, that the advent of a global, liberal world community lurks just around the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance where the leaders had not yet grasped that their time is over). In contrast, 9/11 is
Roof Marsh, 2008 Photo Scott Hocking
the main symbol of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the U.S.– Mexico border. So what if the new proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the new megalopolises? The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially in the Third World megalopolises from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India, China, Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times. It is surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic proletariat (‘freed’ from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, ‘thrown’ into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms. While today’s society is often characterized as the society of total control, slums are the territories within a state boundaries from which the state (partially, at least) withdrew its control, territories which function as white spots, blanks, in the official map of a state territory. Although they are de facto included into a state by the links of black economy, organized crime, religious groups, etc., state control is nonetheless suspended there, they are domains outside the rule of law. On East German maps of Berlin during the Cold War West Berlin was left blank, a weird hole in the detailed structure of the big city; when Christa Wolf, the well-known East German half-dissident writer, took her small daughter to East Berlin’s high TV tower, from which one had a nice view over prohibited West Berlin, the small girl shouted gladly: ‘Look, mother, it is not white over there, there are houses with people like here!’ – as if discovering a prohibited slum zone... This is why the ‘de-structured’ masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a non-proletarized urban environment constitute one of the principal horizons of the politics to come. If the principal task of the emancipatory politics of the XIXth century was to break the monopoly of the bourgeois liberals by politicizing the working class, and if the task of the XXth century was to politically awaken the immense rural population of Asia and Africa, the principal task of the XXIth century is to politicize – organize and discipline – the ‘de-structured masses’ of slum-dwellers. Hugo Chavez’s biggest achievement is the politicization (inclusion into the political life, social mobilization) of slum dwellers; in other countries, they mostly persist in apolitical inertia. It was this political mobilization of the slum dwellers which saved him against the US-sponsored coup: to the surprise of everyone, Chavez included, slum dwellers massively descended to the affluent city center, tipping the balance of power to his advantage.
How do these four antagonisms relate to each other? There is a qualitative difference between the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included and the other three antagonisms, which designate three domains of what Hardt and Negri call ‘commons,’ the shared substance of our social being whose privatization is a violent act which should also be resisted with violent means, if necessary: the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of ‘cognitive’ capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education (if Bill Gates were to be allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have literally owned the software texture of our basic network of communication), but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc.; the commons of external nature threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to forests and natural habitat itself); the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity). What all these struggles share is the awareness of the destructive potentials, up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself, if the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed a free run. It is this reference to ‘commons’ which justifies the resuscitation of t he notion of Communism – or, to quote Alain Badiou: The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself. So where do we stand today with regard to communism? The first step is to admit that the
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‘The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other’
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solution is not to limit the market and private property by direct interventions of the State and state ownership. The domain of State itself is also in its own way ‘private’: private in the precise Kantian sense of the ‘private use of Reason’ in State administrative and ideological apparatuses: ‘The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of one’s reason, on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. By public use of one’s reason I understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him.’
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‘When politics is reduced to the ‘private’ domain, it takes the form of the politics of FEAR’
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What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there is a privileged social group which, on account of its lacking a determinate place in the ‘private’ order of social hierarchy, directly stands for universality: it is only the reference to those Excluded, to those who dwell in the blanks of the State space, that enables true universality. There is nothing more ‘private’ than a State community which perceives the Excluded as a threat and worries how to keep the Excluded at a proper distance. In other words, in the series of the four antagonisms, the one between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one, the point of reference for the others; without it, all others lose their subversive edge: ecology turns into a ‘problem of sustainable development,’ intellectual property into a ‘complex legal challenge,’ biogenetics into an ‘ethical’ issue. One can really fight for ecology, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes, while not questioning the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded – even more, one can even formulate some of these struggles in terms of the Included threatened by the polluting Excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only ‘private’ concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. Corporations like Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favor among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell products that contain the claim of being politically progressive acts in and of themselves. One buys coffee made with beans bought at above fair-market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one buys from companies that provide good benefits to their customers (according to the corporation’s own standards), etc. Political action and consumption become fully merged. In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian fighting against poverty and diseases, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire. When politics is reduced to the ‘private’ domain, it takes the form of the politics of FEAR – fear of losing one’s particular identity, of being overwhelmed. Today’s predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics – an awesome example of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: ‘post-political’ is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus on expert management and administration, while ‘bio-politics’ designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primal goal. It is clear how these two dimensions overlap: once one renounces big ideological causes, what remains is only the efficient administration of life... almost. That is to say, with the depoliticized, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero-level of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through fear, a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity. No wonder, then, that the by far predominant version of ecology is the ecology of fear, fear of a catastrophe – human-made or natural – that may deeply perturb, destroy even, human civilization, fear that pushes us to plan measures that would protect our safety. This ecology of fear has every chance of developing into the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing religion: it takes over religion’s fundamental function of providing an unquestionable authority which can impose limits. The lesson this ecology is constantly hammering is our finitude: we are not Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded in a bio-sphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources, we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our Earth with respect, as something ultimately Sacred, something that should not be unveiled totally, that should and will forever remain a Mystery, a power we should trust, not dominate. While we cannot gain full mastery over our bio-sphere, it is unfortunately in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance so that it will run amok, swiping us away in the process. This is why, although ecologists are constantly demanding that we radically change our way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress: every radical change can have the unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe. It is this distrust which makes ecology the ideal candidate for hegemonic ideology, since it echoes the anti-totalitarian post-political distrust of large collective acts. This distrust unites
religious leaders and environmentalists – for both, there is something of a transgression, of entering a prohibited domain, in this idea of creating a new form of life from scratch, from the zero-point. And this brings us back to the notion of ecology as the new opium for the masses; the underlying message is again a deeply conservative one – any change can only be for the worst. Here is a nice quote from the TIME magazine on this topic: ‘Behind much of the resistance to the notion of synthetic life is the intuition that nature (or God) created the best of possible worlds. Charles Darwin believed that the myriad designs of nature’s creations are perfectly honed to do whatever they are meant to do – be it animals that see, hear, sing, swim or fly, or plants that feed on the sun’s rays, exuding bright floral colours to attract pollinators.’ This reference to Darwin is deeply misleading: the ultimate lesson of Darwinism is the exact opposite, namely that nature tinkers and improvises, with great losses and catastrophes accompanying every limited success – is the fact that 90 percent of the human genome is ‘junk DNA’ with no clear function not the ultimate proof of this? Consequently, the first lesson to be drawn is the one repeatedly made by Stephen Jay Gould: the utter contingency of our existence. There is no Evolution: catastrophes, broken equilibriums, are part of natural history; at numerous points in the past life could have turned in an entirely different direction. The main source of our energy (oil) is the result of a past catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions. One should thus learn to accept the utter groundlessness of our existence: there is no firm foundation, a place of retreat, on which one can safely count. ‘Nature doesn’t exist’: ‘nature’ qua the domain of balanced reproduction, of organic deployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris, brutally throwing off the rails its circular motion, is man’s fantasy; nature is already in itself ‘second nature,’ its balance is always secondary, an attempt to negotiate a ‘habit’ that would restore some order after catastrophic interruptions.
With regard to this inherent instability of nature, most consequent was the proposal of a German ecological scientist back in 1970s: since nature is changing constantly and the conditions on Earth will render the survival of humanity impossible in a couple of centuries, the collective goal of humanity should be not to adapt itself to nature, but to intervene into the Earth’s ecology even more forcefully with the aim to freeze the Earth’s change, so that its ecology will remain basically the same, thus enabling humanity’s survival. This extreme proposal renders visible the truth of ecology. The lesson to be fully endorsed is thus that of another environmental scientist who came to the result that, while one cannot be sure what the ultimate result of humanity’s interventions in the geo-sphere will be, one thing is sure: if humanity were to stop abruptly its immense industrial activity and let nature on Earth take its balanced course, the result would be a total breakdown, an imaginable catastrophe. ‘Nature’ on Earth has already ‘adapted’ to human interventions and human ‘pollutions’ are already included in the shaky and fragile balance of ‘natural’ reproduction on Earth to such an extent that its cessation would cause a catastrophic imbalance. This is why humanity has nowhere to retreat: not only ‘there is no big Other’ (self-contained symbolic order as the ultimate guarantee of Meaning); there is also no Nature qua balanced order of self-reproduction whose homeostasis is disturbed, thrown off the rails, by imbalanced human interventions. Indeed, what we need is ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on. Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us is a vision of what would have happened if humanity (and ONLY humanity) were suddenly to disappear from the earth – natural diversity blooming again, nature gradually regaining human artifacts. We, humans, are reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence. (As Lacan pointed out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a, the gaze which observes the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence – like the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception, the parental copulation, or the act of witnessing one’s own burial, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. A jealous child likes to indulge in the fantasy of imagining how his parents would react to his own death, putting at stake his own absence.) ‘The world without us’ is thus fantasy at its purest: witnessing the Earth itself retaining its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we humans spoiled it with our hubris. The irony is that the most prominent example comes from the catastrophe of Chernobyl: exuberant nature taking over the disintegrating debris of the nearby city Pripyat which was abandoned, left the way it was. Against this background, one should also render as problematic Badiou’s distinction between man qua mortal ‘human animal’ and the ‘inhuman’ subject as the agent of a Truthprocedure: man is pursuing happiness and pleasure, worrying about death, etc., he is an animal endowed with higher instruments to reach its goals, while only as a subject faithful to a TruthEvent does he truly raise himself above animality. The problem with this dualism is that it ignores Freud’s basic lesson: there is no ‘human animal,’ a human being is from its birth (and
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‘There is no Evolution – Nature doesn’t exist’
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even before) torn out of animal constraints, its instincts are ‘denaturalized,’ caught in the circularity of the (death-)drive, functioning ‘beyond the pleasure principle,’ marked by the stigma of what Eric Santner called ‘undeadness’ or the excess of life. This is why there is no place for ‘death drive’ in Badiou’s edifice, for the ‘distortion’ of human animality precedes fidelity to an Event. It is not only the ‘miracle’ of a traumatic encounter with an Event which derails a human subject from its animality: its libido is already in itself derailed. One should thus turn around the usual criticism of Badiou: what is problematic is not the quasi-religious miracle of the Event, but the very ‘natural’ order disturbed by the Event. So, back to the prospect of ecological catastrophe, why do we not act? It is too easy to attribute our disbelief in the catastrophe to the impregnation of our mind by scientific ideology, which leads us to dismiss the sane concerns of our common reason, i.e., the gut sense which tells us that something is fundamentally wrong with the scientific-technological attitude. The problem is much deeper; it resides in the unreliability of our common sense itself which, habituated as it is to our ordinary life-world, finds it difficult to accept that the flow of everyday reality can be perturbed. Our attitude here is that of the fetishist split: ‘I know very well (that global warming is a threat to humanity), but nonetheless... (I cannot really believe it). It is enough to look at my environs to which my mind is wired: the green grass and trees, the whistle of the wind, the rising of the sun... can one really imagine that all this will be disturbed? You talk about the ozone hole – but no matter how much I look into the sky, I don’t see it – all I see is the same sky, blue or grey!’ And therein resides the horror of the Chernobyl accident: when one visits the site, with the exception of the sarcophagus, things look exactly the same as before, life seems to have deserted the site, leaving everything the way it is, and nonetheless we are aware that something is terribly wrong. The change is not at the level of the visible reality itself, it is a more fundamental one, it affects the very texture of reality. No wonder there are some lone farmers around the Chernobyl site who continued to lead their lives as before – they simply ignore all the incomprehensible talk about radiation. Do these farmers not behave like the madman in the old joke circulating among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling with fright – there is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it would eat him. ‘Dear fellow,’ says his doctor, ‘you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man’. ‘Of course I know that,’ replies the patient, ‘but does the chicken know it?’ The chicken stands for the big Other which doesn’t know. In the last years of Tito’s life, he was effectively such a chicken: some archives and memoirs show that, already in the mid-1970s, the leading figures around Tito were aware that Yugoslavia’s economic situation was catastrophic; however, since Tito was nearing his death, they made a collective decision to postpone the outbreak of a crisis till his death – the price was the fast accumulation of foreign debt in the last years of Tito’s life. When, in 1980, Tito finally died, the economic crisis struck with revenge, leading to a 40 per cent fall in the standard of living, to ethnic tensions and, finally, civil and ethnic war that destroyed the country – the moment to confront the crisis adequately was missed. One can thus say that what put the last nail in the coffin of Yugoslavia was the very attempt by its leading circle to protect the ignorance of the Leader, to keep him happy.
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‘90 percent of the human genome is ‘junk DNA’ with no clear function’
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Is this not what, ultimately, culture is? One of the elementary rules of culture is to know when (and how) to pretend NOT to know (or notice), to go on and act as if something which happened did not happen. When a person near me accidentally produces an unpleasant vulgar noise, the proper thing to do is to ignore it, not to comfort him: ‘I know it was an accident, don’t worry, it doesn’t really matter!’ We should thus understand in the right way the joke about the chicken: a madman’s question is a quite pertinent question in many everyday situations. When parents with a young child have affairs, fight and shout at each other, they as a rule (if they retain a minimum of decency) try to prevent the child from noticing it, well aware that it would have a devastating effect on him – so what they try to maintain is precisely a situation of ‘We know that we cheat and fight and shout, but the child/chicken doesn’t know it.’ (Of course, in many cases, the child knows it very well, but merely feigns not to notice anything wrong, aware that in this way his parents’ life is a little bit easier.) Or, at a less vulgar level, recall a parent in a difficult predicament (dying of cancer, in financial difficulties), but trying to keep this secret from his nearest and dearest... And this is also our problem with ecology: we know it, but the chicken doesn’t know it... The problem is thus that we can rely neither on the scientific mind nor on our common sense –
Skylight Forest, 2008 Photo Scott Hocking
they both mutually reinforce each other’s blindness. The scientific mind advocates a cold objective appraisal of dangers and risks involved where no such appraisal is effectively possible, while common sense finds it hard to accept that a catastrophe can really occur. The difficult ethical task is thus to ‘un-learn’ the most basic coordinates of our immersion into our life-world: what usually served as the recourse to Wisdom (the basic trust in the backgroundcoordinates of our world) is now THE source of danger. One can learn even more from the Rumsfeldian theory of knowledge – the expression, of course, refers to the well-known accident in March 2003, when Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: ‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.’ What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the ‘unknown knowns,’ things we don’t know that we know – which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge which doesn’t know itself,’ as Lacan used to say. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq are the ‘unknown unknowns,’ the threats from Saddam about which we do not even suspect what they may be, what we should reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the ‘unknown knowns,’ the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves. In the case of ecology, these disavowed beliefs and suppositions prevent us from really believing in the possibility of the catastrophe, and they combine with the ‘unknown unknowns.’ The situation is like that of the blind spot in our visual field: we do not see the gap, the picture appears continuous.
If the Freudian name for the ‘unknown known’ is the Unconscious, the Freudian name for the ‘unknown unknowns’ is TRAUMA, the violent intrusion of something radically unexpected, something the subject was absolutely not ready for, something the subject cannot integrate in any way. In her Les nouveaux blessés (The New Wounded), Catherine Malabou proposed a critical reformulation of psychoanalysis along these lines. Her starting point is the delicate echoing between internal and external Real in psychoanalysis: for Freud and Lacan, external shocks, brutal unexpected encounters or intrusions, due their properly traumatic impact to the way they touch a pre-existing traumatic ‘psychic reality.’ Malabou rereads along these lines Lacan’s reading of the Freudian dream of ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ The contingent external encounter of the real (the candle collapses, sets the cloth covering the dead child afire, and the smell of the smoke disturbs the father on a night-watch) triggers the true Real, the unbearable fantasy-apparition of the dead child reproaching his father. In this way, for Freud (and Lacan), every external trauma is sublated, internalized, owing its impact to the way a pre-existing Real of the ‘psychic reality’ is aroused through it. Even the most violent intrusions of the external real – say, the shocking effect on the victims of bomb-explosions in war – owe their traumatic effect to the resonance they find in perverse masochism, in the death-drive, in unconscious guilt-feelings, etc. Today, however, our socio-political reality itself imposes multiple versions of external intrusions, traumas, which are just that, meaningless brutal interruptions that destroy the symbolic texture of subject’s identity. First, there is the brutal external physical violence: terror attacks like 9/11, the US ‘shock and awe’ bombing of Iraq, street violence, rape, etc., but also natural catastrophes, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.; then, there is the ‘irrational’ (meaningless) destruction of the material base of our inner reality (brain-tumors, Alzheimer’s disease, organic cerebral lesions, etc., which can utterly change, destroy even, the victim’s personality; finally, there are the destructive effects of socio-symbolic violence (social exclusion, etc.). (Note how this triad echoes the triad of commons: the commons of external nature, of inner nature, of symbolic substance.) Basically, Malabou’s reproach is that Freud himself succumbs here to the temptation of meaning: he is not ready to accept the direct destructive efficiency of external shocks – they destroy the psyche of the victim (or, at least, wound it in an unredeemable way) without resonating in any inner traumatic truth. It would be obviously obscene to link, say, the psychic devastation of a ‘Muslim’ in a Nazi camp to his masochism, death-drive, or guilt feeling: a Muslim (or a victim of multiple rape, of brutal torture...) is not devastated by unconscious anxieties, but directly by a ‘meaningless’ external shock which can in no way be hermeneutically appropriated/integrated. For Freud, if external violence gets too strong, we simply exit the psychic domain proper: the choice is ‘either the shock is re-integrated into a pre-existing libidinal frame, or it destroys [the] psyche and nothing is left.’ What he cannot envisage is the victim as if he were to have survived his own death: every different form of traumatic encounter, independent of its specific nature (social, natural, biological, symbolic...) leads to the same result – a new subject emerges which survives its own death, the death (erasure) of its symbolic identity. There is no
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‘One can learn even more from the Rumsfeldian theory of knowledge’
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continuity between this new ‘post-traumatic’ subject (suffering Alzheimer’s or other cerebral lesions, etc.): after the shock, literally a new subject emerges. Its features are well-known from numerous descriptions: lack of emotional engagement, profound indifference and detachment – it is a subject that is no longer ‘in-the-world’ in the Heideggerian sense of engaged embodied existence. This subject lives death as a form of life – his life is death-drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic engagement; and this holds for henchmen no less than for his victims. If the XXth century was the Freudian century, the century of libido, so that even the worst nightmares were read as (sado-masochist) vicissitudes of the libido, will the XXIst century be the century of such post-traumatic disengaged subjects whose first emblematic figure, that of the Muslim in concentration camps, is not multiplying in the guise of refugees, terror victims, survivors of natural catastrophes, of family violence...? The feature that runs through all these figures is that the cause of the catastrophe remains libidinally meaningless, resisting any interpretation. The constellation is properly frustrating: although we (individual or collective agents) know that it all depends on us, we cannot ever predict the consequences of our acts – we are not impotent, but, quite the contrary, omnipotent, without being able to determine the scope of our powers. The gap between causes and effects is irreducible, and there is no ‘big Other’ to guarantee harmony between the levels, to guarantee that the overall outcome of our interactions will be satisfactory. The problem is that, although our (sometimes even individual) acts can have catastrophic (ecological, etc.) consequences, the big Other prevents us from believing in it, from assuming this knowledge and responsibility: ‘Contrary to what the promoters of the principle of precaution think, the cause of our non-action is not scientific uncertainty. We know it, but we cannot make ourselves believe in what we know.’ This situation confronts us with the deadlock of the contemporary ‘society of choice’ at its most radical. In the standard situation of the forced choice (a situation in which I am free to choose on condition that I make the right choice, so that the only thing left for me to do is the empty gesture of pretending to accomplish freely what is in any case imposed on me). Here, on the contrary, the choice really is free and is, for this very reason, experienced as even more frustrating: we find ourselves constantly in the position of having to decide about matters that will fundamentally affect our lives, but without a proper foundation in knowledge – as John Gray put it: ‘We have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. New technologies alter our lives daily. The traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. At the same time we have little idea of what the future will bring. We are forced to live as if we were free.’ It is thus not enough to vary the standard motif of the Marxist critique: ‘although we allegedly live in a society of choices, the choices effectively left to us are trivial, and their proliferation masks the absence of true choices, choices that would affect the basic features of our lives...’ While this is true, the problem is rather that we are forced to choose without having at our disposal the knowledge that would enable a qualified choice. The lesson is thus the old Lacanian one: there is no big Other. The first to get it was Job – after Job is hit by calamities, his theological friends come, offering interpretations which render these calamities meaningful, and the greatness of Job is his insistence on the meaninglessness of his calamities (when God appears afterwards, he confirms that Job, not the theological defenders of faith, was right). The function of the three theological friends is to obfuscate the impact of the trauma with a symbolic semblance. This need to discover a meaning is crucial when we are confronting potential or actual catastrophes, from AIDS and ecological disasters to the Holocaust: they have no ‘deeper meaning.’ The legacy of Job prohibits us such a gesture of taking a refuge in the standard transcendent figure of God as a secret Master who knows the meaning of what appears to us as meaningless catastrophe, the God who sees the entire picture in which what we perceive as a stain contributes to global harmony. When confronted with an event like the Holocaust or the death of millions in Congo in the last years, is it not obscene to claim that these stains have a deeper meaning in that they contribute to the harmony of the Whole? Is there a Whole which can teleologically justify an event like the Holocaust? Christ’s death on the cross thus means that one should drop without restraint the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology – Christ’s death on the cross is the death of this God, it repeats Job’s stance, it refuses any ‘deeper meaning’ that obfuscates the brutal real of historical catastrophes. And the lesson of ecology is that we should go to the end here and accept the nonexistence of the ultimate big Other, nature itself with its pattern of regular rhythms, the ultimate reference of order and stability. However, this lack of the big Other does not entail that we are irrevocably caught in the misery of our finitude, deprived of any redemptive moments. In his The Cattle Truck, Jorge Semprun reports how he witnessed the arrival of a truckload of Polish Jews at Buchenwald; they were stacked into the freight train almost 200 to a car, traveling for days without food and water in the coldest winter of the war. Upon arrival everyone in the carriage had frozen to death except for 15 children, kept warm by the others in the centre of the bundle of bodies. When the children were emptied from the car the Nazis let their dogs loose on them. Soon only two fleeing children were left:
‘The little one began to fall behind, the SS were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too, the smell of blood was driving them mad, and then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller... together they covered a few more yards... till the blows of the clubs felled them and, together they dropped, their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all eternity.’ One can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed: while the soundtrack renders what goes on in reality (the two children are clubbed to death), the image of their hands clasped freezes, immobilized for eternity – while the sound renders temporary reality, the image renders the eternal Real. It is the pure surface of such fixed images of eternity, not any deeper Meaning, which allows for redemptive moments in the bleak story of the Shoah. One should read this imagined scene together with the final shot of Thelma and Louise: the frozen image of the car with the two women ‘flying’ above the precipice: is this the positive utopia (triumph of the feminine subjectivity over death), or the masking of the miserable wreck the car IS in reality at that time? The weakness of the final shot from Thelma and Louise is that the frozen image is not accompanied by the soundtrack depicting what ‘really’ went on (the car crash, terrible cries of the dying women) – strangely, this lack of reality undermines the very utopian dimension of the frozen image. In contrast to this scene, our imagined filmed scene from Semprun would fully assert the Platonic duality of temporal empirical reality and eternal Idea. What this means is that, without shame, in conceiving art, we should return to Plato. Plato’s reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city – rather sensible advice, judging from my post-Yugoslav experience, where ethnic cleansing was prepared by poets’ dangerous dreams (the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic being only one among them). If the West has the industrial-military complex, we in the ex-Yugoslavia had a poetic-military complex: the post-Yugoslav war was triggered by the explosive mixture of the poetic and the military component. So, from a Platonic standpoint, what does a poem about the Holocaust do? It provides its ‘description without place’: in renders the Idea of Holocaust. Recall the old Catholic strategy to guard men against the temptation of the flesh: when you see a voluptuous feminine body in front of you, imagine how it will look in a couple of decades – the dried skin, sagging breasts... (Or, even better, imagine what lurks now already beneath the skin: raw flesh and bones, inner fluids, half-digested food and excrement...) Far from enacting a return to the Real destined to break the imaginary spell of the body, such a procedure equals the escape from the Real, the Real which announces itself in the seductive appearance of the naked body. That is to say, in the opposition between the spectral appearance of the sexualized body and the repulsive body in decay, it is the spectral appearance with the Real, and the decaying body which is reality – we take recourse to the decaying body in order to avoid the deadly fascination of the Real which threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance.
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Image Google Maps
Next Nature
Volume 18
…our technological world becomes complex and uncontrollable – a nature of its own.
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Arguments in favor of a nonanthropised urban ethics Stefano Boeri
Moving away from the anthropocentric observation of the urban condition, Abitare’s editor-in-chief Stefano Boeri understands non-growth and human retreat as producing valuable urban ecosystems. Reforestation protects natural zones and green corridors shelter animals from the anthropocentric world. These potentially create new ways of exchange between wildlife and human beings, a new ethical order of urbanity.
2.
The urban condition is – without doubt – the first testing ground for this new ethics. The contemporary metropolis is in fact the most important site for the intensified negative power of those kinds of dynamics – demographic, environmental, economic – which are moving us toward species suicide. Yet the metropolis is also where the inequalities and injustices linked to the human race are found in their most extreme forms. The support for a non-anthropocentric (humancentered) ethical outlook implies the application of a new idea of urbanity, one seen as humanity located within a spatial context where a co-habitation with the kaleidoscope of life is sought rather than accepting a pre-ordained hegemony of power. This implies an equal distribution of the conditions linked to social mobility, experimentation with co-habitation of different species and the rebuilding of a different kind of relationship with the components of the natural world. We need to think about an urban politics based on inclusion which protects those principles and values that effect the future of the whole planet and its ecosystems. Thanks to the adoption of a non-anthropocentric ethical outlook, what is required is a radical transformation in urban politics. This is already clear in terms of those political ideas which propose the freeing up of energies within a ‘global planet’ (in the words of the landscaper Gilles Clement) and which apply a parallel set of policies: one based on self-limitation and the other on an idea of grafting onto what is already there.
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Down from the Stand
1.
It is increasingly common that when thinking about their work those who deal with the planning and transformation of lived space also have a strong ethical and philosophical edge to their outlook. We are pushed today toward thinking about the world in terms of the survival of humanity by an ongoing environmental crisis, unstoppable population expansion, the widespread urbanization of the planet and the destruction of our natural resources (in terms of animals and nature) – in other words thanks to a kind of species suicide. It is no longer enough simply to look after the principles, values and the needs of our species. We need to locate these within a wider vision of the future of the planet, a kind of vision that – from an ethical perspective – could be related to a sort of non-anthropized approach to the urban phenomena. While keeping mankind and its needs at its center, this kind of world-view begins with a desire to protect and help other species and the natural world of plants. A vision of this type allows energies to be pushed towards re-forestation and the re-naturalization of parts of anthropised territory (territory which is subject to human-impact): the urban re-colonization by animal species which had been expelled from these areas, the regeneration of the flora and fauna in the oceans and in the other great liquid continents present in our planet. A non-anthropized ethical approach is still interested in the survival of mankind, but places this desire within a wider scenario of limits and possibilities. It is only possible to plan the future of our planet from within a wider worldview. Thus non-anthropized ethics does not abandon mankind to its fate, but simply places it at the center of a new kind of discourse, one in where humanity is no longer alone on the pedestal of life.
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The former implies a kind of suspension of activity – building, occupation and so on – while the latter is a sophisticated strategy for understanding the key zones within the anthropocentric territory in the city and inserting at these points elements of reversibility able to enrich the environment and (re)create greater biodiversity. 3.
We can indicate three areas of action here. The first relates to the re-naturalization of urban spaces. A nonanthropocentric outlook overturns the way we understand the world. The idea is to view urban space – the dense clots and its folds of cement and asphalt from the outside by beginning with the great plains and the non-anthropocentric landscapes which (decreasingly) surround them. The idea is to restore parts of the city to a state of natural bio-diversity through a series of policies which run across and connect up over the entire area lived space. Such politics would include the forestation of peripheral areas and urban corridors, the transformation of ex-agricultural areas into protected natural zones, the creation of green corridors to occupy empty spaces within the urban fabric, the gradual de-mineralization of the fronts and roofs of the city through the use of cover-material which can host different kinds of plants. A second set of anti-anthropocentric actions relate to the bio-diversity of the animal world and the possibility of various species co-habitation. This is a difficult and little researched area which can no longer be overlooked. At least in the sense that outside of the barriers which are linked to the growth and the culture of the animal world, there is an urgent need to re-think and create within urban spaces some protected areas for the free circulation of species which are compatible with urban eco-systems. These can be parks and oases sheltered from the anthropocentric world, where urbanity is controlled by the laws of the animal kingdom and where bio-diversity becomes a way for these animal species to observe us while we remain within our artificial barriers. It is also important that the reclaimation of exanthropocentric spaces by animals and mammals is supported in order to promote new forms of exchange and new relationships (as with the populations of wild boars which have returned to large areas of the Apennines) or the movement and mobility of species across landscapes which are anthropocentric can be encouraged (for example through special stopping areas for migrating birds in urban areas).
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The first area for any kind of experimentation in nonanthropocentric urban ethics has to be that of human relations understood in a contemporary way. Globalization – above all in its immaterial forms –the global spread of flows of images and information – is already in itself a state of affairs which necessitates an interpretation placing mankind within the context of geography and not simply as the only available referencepoint. A non-anthropocentric urban bio-politics must be able to observe the state of cities without immediate resort to categories of history and ideology which are in themselves intrinsically anthropocentric. This is how we can also try to avoid outdated distinctions such as
those between periphery and center, public and private, and local and global. In their place we need a new descriptive geography which observes urban populations and their spatial and economic relationships from the point of view of their evolution, as part of a general generative grammar of space. If we can do this then we can use the idea of an urban ecosystem made up of different forms of energy and the study of the development of every lived space could become a way of understanding urbanization as imposing limits on other forms of life or of seeing the processes of non-growth and the retreat of the presence of humans as a form of re-colonization by nature. Just as we should understand the re-combinations of biodiversities introduced by, for example, migration as an extraordinary creator of limits and opportunities for the entire variety of life-forms and not merely as a producer of social risk.
Sustainable Dystopias 2: The Urban Agriculture scenario proposes a hybrid mix of city and agriculture, a system based on nature yet highly artificial.
Sustainable Dystopias 3: A third visualization consists of a Highly Technological Environment that responds to issues of sustainability by creating high efficiency systems capable of capturing and channeling energy.
Food not Bombs Photos by Monica Nouwens, 2008
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Urban kitchen in L.A.: volunteers using left-over ingredients for free meals for the homeless.
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Peter Trummer
‘Life and living being are at the heart of new political battles and economic strategies.’1 What is the role of architecture and urban planning in imagining new heterogeneous relations between people and their environment? Peter Trummer examines the virtues of what he calls ‘population thinking’ in urbanism. This biological notion could help produce more flexible, more stable environments.
Volume 18
Population Thinking in an Age of Bio-Politics
Housing distribution in Phoenix
In the last couple of years I have focused my research on the urban edge, where the city is growing and the instruments of planning are directly applied to the raw landscape. Here I elaborate on my work in Phoenix, Arizona.2 The reason to choose this place is based on the particular regimes by which it was extended and the special character of its natural ecology. Indeed, in Phoenix there are two conditions of extraordinary character. On one hand there is the planning regime determined by the culture of subdivision and on the other hand there is the natural beauty and harshness of the desert ecology. The start of the practice of planning has an exact date. In 1932 President Hoover called for a Presidential Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership.3 This conference was designed to turn housing into money. In a series of studies produced by Harvard University’s School of Urban Planning, a theoretical pattern of a neighborhood unit was taken as the prime element to develop knowledge on how empty land can be subdivided for housing. This theoretical pattern was tested by various layout arrangements between buildings and car accessibility (see image 5abcde).4 Each plan, based on 200 acres, included all imaginable costs necessary to build it. The aim of this research was to define rules for neighborhood planning to permit banks to guarantee money. This meant that housing could become a profitable property. Up until that point banks would not give money for such developments. Because these new neighborhoods had to be worth their money all the layouts had to be proved in terms of investments and cost performance. The output of this conference was a series of books that defined the culture of subdivision and a couple of years later became the executive regulations for all American Neighborhood Models. Each rule defined precisely how raw land could be transformed into a new suburban living environment. This practice of subdivision, as we know it today, was mainly applied after the Second World War by people like William Levitt and his firm Levitt & Sons in their Levittowns. Levitt turned this culture of subdivision into mass housing manufacturing process. He actually mass planned, designed and built whole neighborhoods. From detail to neighborhood a entire settlement was constructed as a frictionless milieu of repeating elements in order to reduce unforeseen events. Two points are striking. The first is that the outcome of the Presidential Conference was never purely meant to produce a homogenization of housing environments; secondly and even more importantly, it could all only be guaranteed by the absolute denial of the specificities of the ground. The ground in Arizona is unique. Phoenix is placed in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. Compared to other deserts and across the world the Sonoran Desert is the wettest. This wetness leads to a specific ecology and an enormous fauna. Due to its raining seasons and the particular sedimentations of the soil, the desert generates what are called ‘washes’, a network of green zones that become flooded and define various degrees of vegetation densities within the topography.5 The elimination of the diversity of the native environment with its specific wet ecology was necessary to subdivide the land into identical plots. How could one overcome the effect of this planning instrument or better the events guaranteed with this milieu? How could
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one actualize neighborhoods by taking the dis-consensus between the rules of subdivision and the ecological performance of the territory as a given? In order to do that we have to see the raw desert as an economic property, one differentiated by the condition of the soil. Let’s take one example. Through the erasure of these washes, Phoenix’ urbanization is effected by the production of heat islands. Heat islands are areas in cities that cannot cool down at night. Even in mild climate zones buildings constitute heat islands requiring an enormous amount of energy to be cooled down and this is all the more so in deserts. With radiation maps we can identify such heat islands. If we produce a radiation map of the desert we can identify a gradient effect6 (see image 2) based on the various degrees of overheating. The major factor for this gradient is the degree of vegetation density which prevents buildings or the earth from heating up too much. If we apply a constant density between built areas and greenery, we achieve a layout of subdivision in which all plots are different in terms of their economic value due to the different densities achievable in various locations. The same applies to housing units. Due to the geometry of the radiation that envelops residents, each housing unit varies in size and organization allowing for a set of housing environments. The result of such an approach leads to a form of housing distribution in which the degrees of built and non-built produce a variety of housing units from single family houses to collective housing units. This distribution of living areas produces an economic diversity of low and high income within the scale of the neighborhood (see image 3, 4) similar to the population diversity over the whole city of Phoenix.7 The effect of the overall plan is the production of what is described above as a milieu. In opposition to predicted and standardized behavior, this milieu is based on conflicting events produced by the unforeseen proximity of various different income groups within an artificial ecology. In opposition to conventional neighborhoods with segregated housing units of similar income groups, each of these neighborhoods is based on a population based not on exclusion and which is specific to its territory condition and spatial policy.
A quarter mile section of the raw desert landscape of Maricopa County, Phoenix, Arizona with its specific vegetation distribution – washes – based on natural flooding.
Radiation Map of the Raw Desert Landscape
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Population thinking in Urbanism
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My Research on Phoenix and on American suburbanization can be described as a specific means of practice: first we must identify a problem in order to identify solutions. From day one the question of methodology in designing residential neighborhoods was seen as a problem of finance and the idea of subdivision its solution. We might think that this kind of practice is unique to the US, but actually based on Cerda’s five bases of urbanism (technical, legal, economic, administrative and political) we in Europe have established forms of urban governance that have the same effect. Since then, in addition to establishing rules and regulations for planning new housing neighborhoods, nearly every city has also established an administrative, legislative and economic apparatus to govern the production of housing in order to solve its quantitative or qualitative problems. The focus of my research within the last couple of years has been based on a slightly different question: ‘What kind of urbanism is embedded within our environments’. This question fits less into the frame of how
Projected Neighborhood Model, Associative Design – Urban Ecologies, Phoenix Arizona; Second-Year Research Program directed by Peter Trummer; Project by Mika Watanabe & Lin Chia-Ying, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Photo Peter Tijhuis, Amir Djalali
e.) Neighborhood of Varied Dwellings – adapted to Irregular Topography. Publications of the President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership – Final Reports of Committees, 1932.
to solve that problem and instead opens up fields of discussion in which many solutions are possible. From an economics point of view, governance might be the problem; from the viewpoint of governance, the environment might be the problem; but viewing things environmentally we as a population might be seen as the problem. However we see it, all together it constructs a milieu that carries events that are toxic to one or the other. Whatever the outcome of these questions it will have an effect on us as a population. What could this idea of population thinking mean to the practice of urbanism? Population thinking is a biological definition of a species. There are many species concepts. Population thinking is ‘the’ biological species concept. In order to talk about a species we have to understand it as a population. ‘A species is a group of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups’. First ‘it is a protected gene pool, whereby an individual is merely a temporary vessel holding a small portion of the contents of a gene pool for a short period of time.’ Secondly, ‘The species is also an ecological unit that, regardless of the individual composing it, interacts as a unit with other species with which it shares the environment’, and thirdly ‘the members of a species constitute a reproductive community.’8 This description defines a species as a population. It does so by making two distinctions. On one hand each individual is different and on the other these differences among individuals sustain its difference as a species. Without this diversity of individuals the whole species would vanish. A population is therefore a multiplicity of individuals embedded in a particular milieu. It is this relationship between a population and its milieu that sustains its existence as well as all its ecologies. In his book The Three Ecologies Felix Guattari sketches a scenario of the earth driven by the forces of globalization.9 In addition to the tremendous impact
on our environment, ‘domestic life is being poisoned by the gangrene of mass media consumption; family and married life are frequently ‘ossified’ by sort of standardization of behavior; and neighborhood relations are generally reduced to their meanest expression … It is the relationship between subjectivity and exteriority – be it social, animal, vegetable or cosmic – that is compromised in this way, in a sort of general movement of implosion and regressive infantalization.’10 He believes our political groups and executive authorities incapable of providing answers to the homogenization of our daily life. He formulated an ethic-political alternative what he calls ‘ecosophy’, an ethico-aesthetic aegis between the three ecological registers: social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology. Guattari refers with semiotic regimes to those regimes that dominate our biosphere. And he claims architecture and urban planning as major factors responsible for what he calls ‘subjectification’. The word subjectification covers the process that makes us individuals. This process determines our ideas, tastes, models and ways of being; it is based on the homogeneity of images with which we are confronted in our everyday life. Architecture and urban planning play a crucial role in the process of subjectification. But this process cannot be achieved, Guattari argues, by the separation of nature from culture. All the ecologies effect us as individuals. And we individuals effected every ecology. In this light I have tried to formulate a design practice based on the disconsensus between the Regimes of Planning and the Ecology of our Nature. I have examined how architecture can be instrumental within this conflict and produce heterogeneous urban environments, environments that are resistant to homogeneity. The intention of population thinking is to unfold urban collectives, groups, crowds or multitudes actualized by means of differentiation.
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Neighborhood Models based on different Subdivision Layouts: (f.l.t.r.) a.) single Building – Line in the Gridiron Pattern, b.) single Building – Line in Irregular Pattern, c.) Cul-De-Sac – Loop Pattern, d.) Cross-Access Street – Rectangular Pattern,
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Bio-politics
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Alain Bombard (1924 –2005) sketched a good example of what is meant when we talk about a species and its milieu. He once conducted the following experiment on television. He took two glass tanks, one contained polluted water from the Port of Marseille with a healthy and thriving octopus in it and the other contained clear and unpolluted seawater. When he transferred the octopus from the polluted to the unpolluted ‘normal’ water, it immediately curled up, sank to the bottom and died.11 The octopus not only depends on its environment, it becomes actualized by it. As do the orchid and the wasp: the wasp becomes part of the orchid’s reproductive apparatus while at the same time the orchid becomes the wasp’s sexual organ. They not only need one another, they are part of the same process of becoming. In the eighteenth century Western society took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. ‘The basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy a strategies of power.’12 So what happened in town planning in the eighteenth century was less a matter of designing layouts on a blank sheet. The issue in the eighteenth century was to open up the town to the judicial, administrative and economic forces of capitalism. It was rather a question of constructing a spatial milieu to perform spaces of circulation.13 A good street, as Foucault says, was one of circulation of diseases, miasmas, shopping, air circulation, thieves and rioters. To plan a town meant to construct a milieu in terms of events, series of events or possible elements embedded within the regime of its judicial, economic and administrative constraints. Even if the architects of the eighteenth century had never employed the notion of populations, town planners reflected on the forces effecting a city and planned a milieu even before the notion was formed and isolated. We could say that a milieu for a biological population is the interrelationship of a natural given, the ecology of the territory (a river, hills, mountains, marches or deserts), combined with a set of artificial elements like the agglomeration of houses, streets and infrastructural facilities constructed under the regimes of planning. The events potentially embedded between these two
conditions are the qualities relevant for the process of our subjectification. For Foucault the concept of biopolitics is a problem of what he calls Govermentality, the totality of institutions and practices that effect our behavior.14 What is new in what Foucault presents in his lectures at the Collège de France is that for the first time life as a species and its productive requirements have moved into the heart of political struggle. Sustainability is one of these.
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6 7 8 9
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Maurizio Lazzarato, From Biopower to Biopolitics, at http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcbiopolitics.htm See the Associative Design- Second-Year Research Programme by Peter Trummer, Research Report No.14, Associative Design – Urban Ecologies, Phoenix Arizona, Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2007/2008. See Publications of the President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership – Final Reports of Committees, 1932. Idem. Images taken from Associative Design- Second-Year Research Programme by Peter Trummer, Research Report No.14, Associative Design – Urban Ecologies, Phoenix Arizona, Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2007/2008. Idem. Idem. See Ernst Mayr, Populations, Species and Evolution (Cambridge (MA)-London: Harvard University Press, 1963). Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, (New York: Continuum / London: The Athlone Press, 2000), first published in French by Editions Galilée, 1989. Idem. The example is taken from Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (New York: Continuum / London: The Athlone Press, 2000), p. 2; first published in French by Flammarion, 1977. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (New York: Palgave Macmillan, 2007), first published in French by Editions du Seuil/Gallimard, 2004. Idem. Idem.
John Roberts interviewed by Piet Vollaard
Despite difficulties in designing, building and maintaining a single carbon free or fully sustainable building, recent discussions and design efforts have upscaled to the city and beyond. According to John Roberts, director of Arup Energy, one of the biggest energy consultancies in the world and currently working on several sustainable cities around the globe, scale is an important issue. Beyond the size of a small town, control becomes a major challenge. And what about the existing fabric? That will be an even bigger task.
Piet Vollaard So how does Arup tackle these problems when asked to design a low carbon city? JR A low carbon city deliberately sets out to minimize its greenhouse gas emissions. The transition to a low carbon society involves the integration of all of that society’s activities and patterns of behavior. It includes much more than just the spatial arrangement of activities and infrastructure. It embraces all the aspects of the social, economic and technological. Obviously we cannot control all these issues fully. So it’s very important to start the design process by setting objectives that are clear, measurable and within reach, socially, economically and technologically. One such measure could be the Planet Eco Footprint, the amount of land and water area a human population requires to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb its waste. Currently this is about 1.8 hectares (apx. 4.5 acres) per person. If you are able to live as a person off that amount of space then we can go on living like this for a long time. For a city like Dongtang, a new ecocity near Shanghai Arup has been working on, this would mean a two-thirds reduction of energy use. In order to reach this goal we’ve proposed a number of design measures. We proposed a compact city, on average six-storey buildings with mixed use; a balance of living, working and leisure, so you don’t necessarily need to leave the
Volume 18
Yes, We Can… Up to a Point
John Roberts It’s relatively easy to produce a fully carbon free, sustainable unit on a small scale and within clearly defined boundaries. The sustainable house is technically no problem anymore. We can do that; convincing examples have been available for a long time. But if we upscale to neighborhoods, cities or even regions or countries new problems arise. On that scale we don’t have working examples, design standards or procedures. We more or less still have to find out what the problem is before we can start working on solutions. On the other hand it’s important to upscale our efforts because it’s clear that in order to reach the goals of the Kyoto protocol we have to work in much larger numbers, in many more places and taking much bigger regions into consideration. My guess is that at the moment we can make a new city of about 100,000 truly sustainable. A larger population would start to be uncontrollable and any less would lead to problems of efficient energy production. If designed correctly this can be combined with densities of around 90 to 150 people per hectare to achieve pretty low energy consumption figures. Density is important. In general the more dense the development, the easier it is to reach high levels of sustainability. There is of course a limit to this. There is a point at which you start to pay a lot for vertical transport. Hong Kong is great; San Diego is terrible. London is OK in terms of density, but here scale is the problem: it’s too big to handle as a fully controllable system. In addition to the problem of the larger scale, the boundaries we set are important, both in terms of physical boundaries and the framework within which we work. For instance, do we include social and political issues? The Masdar development project by Foster and Partners, a planned sustainable city in Abu Dhabi, is a good example of clearly set boundaries, in this case even marked by a city wall. The scale, 6 square kilometers (2.3 square miles), is relatively modest and the goals are clearly set: a carbon neutral, zero waste community. Because of these clear boundaries, I think they can succeed. Never mind what happens outside these boundaries, the car is parked outside the city wall.
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city very often. It’s divided into small, village-like units and could house 400,000 people by 2020. We focused on public transport, walkable distances and electrical vehicles. 40 % of Dongtang will be used for construction and 60 % of the land will be dedicated to green spaces and farmland for local food. Base load electricity is produced is a central plant that runs on rice husk, a local waste product. We would need about 1% of the total production of rice husk in China, by far the biggest rice producer, so you can do this only a limited amount of times and it cannot be replicated on a large scale. We’ve also planned a wind plant. Wind energy is intermittent so you cannot use it for base production. At the moment it’s unclear whether Dongtang will be built, but for us it provided a useful way to gain knowledge and experience. We were able to use this experience in a second large assignment when asked to provide a sustainable energy strategy for Dubai Waterfront, an enormous new development of about 120 km2 (apx. 46 square miles). In this case both the circumstances and the scale were much more challenging. The UAE uses more electricity and probably also more water per capita then any other country in the world. In addition we had to start from a master plan that was not based on a sustainable strategy. The UAE does have a sound policy concerning carbon reduction, but there were no set goals, no framework within which one could make sustainable design decisions. So we had to provide them for the developer. For a development on such a large scale we also had to more or less reinvent energy modeling. Recognition of patterns of use are important. We had to understand both annual and daily consumptions. Only then was one in a position to identify possible savings. If you change people’s behavior in order to reduce consumption these patterns differ from normal patterns. One cannot simply extrapolate current patterns of use. We investigated reduction options and corresponding patterns with three typical buildings. We compared the ‘business as usual case’ with possible options for improvement. From these studies we found that contrary to common wisdom the orientation of a building does not make a big difference. Yet with relatively simple building techniques, just sound building actually, using traditional local techniques and typologies and a few more high-tech options, one can reduce energy consumption by about 50%. We’re not doing the urban design for Waterfront, but we did come up with a set of urban design guidelines necessary to achieve low carbon goals. These are all measures that do not require a significant change in behavior by the user. The message is: you can design good buildings in urban environments that are not that well organized and still reduce energy consumption by half. So a simple step-up from normal practice in Dubai already helps a lot. Another great item is transport. First, people in Dubai don’t walk because of the 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) heat in summer. Providing shade for short walks in combination with good public transport and individual transport running on electricity would decrease energy consumption for transport by 50-75%. So an affordable, integrated public transport, both within the city and for the main external destinations, combined with compact urban design principles can reduce transport energy consumption enormously. The
current plan for Dubai Waterfront specifies 42 traffic lanes going into the city and 42 coming out. In the low carbon case, with full public transport you would only need 10 road lanes going in and out. We also found transport is highly integrated with urban form. So a good urban design should start with the notion of transport infrastructure. Still even a good public transport system would fail without a change in public behavior. In Dubai this would call for a drastic change, both with the whiteman-van public as with the developers who will have to invest not only in roads but in public transport as well. We plan to take advantage of the planned Arabian Canal. We can pump water to a high level and let it cascade back through the city at fairly low energy costs. We’ve planned a concentrated solar collecting station next to the road as a noise buffer. We also use wind energy. We’ve developed an integrated resource waste management facility based on the principles of zero waste and waste to energy. All these measures reduce the demand for a central, gas-fuelled power plant, although such a plant would still have to provide almost all of the city’s energy. PV Wouldn’t it be easier and more efficient to distribute energy production instead of centralizing it? Many people seem to think that each individual house or building could and should produce its own electricity. JR Again, scale is the issue here. Each system has its own natural boundary in terms of scale and distance. Whether it’s efficient at producing energy on a small scale depends on the local scale and density and the availability of renewable sources in the neighborhood. But as a general rule you can say that onsite generation of electricity is difficult, not very efficient and often hopeless. Large power stations are much more efficient than smaller distributed systems and distribution of electricity has hardly any loss. In that it differs from heat and cold. Losses are comparatively large when you try to transport heat over larger distances. Therefore it’s better to keep heat and cold production local and produce it on a smaller scale. In Dubai we proposed making hot water in solar collectors for each building or building bloc and making cold water at night to be stored for daytime use. We still need electricity, however, and pv-cells on each bloc would hardly be enough; at best they could reduce peak loads. So larger central energy plants are necessary, if only for base-load power generation. Another problem is that at the moment we don’t have convincing or efficient solutions for long-term energy storage. This makes local production problematic and for large-scale production we have to base our production capacities at peak-usage. A good solution for this problem would really help a lot. Maybe compressed air is the answer. We can run cars on compressed air and it would be easier to store energy in the form of compressed air locally at home. PV It seems that the most can be gained at the start of the decision-making process. How can you set objectives and guide people through the process of design, building and finally use? JR As I said earlier, we more or less had to find out what the right procedure was while working on big projects like Dongtang and Waterfront. There simply was no prior experience with the design of large, sustainable cities. On the basis of this experience we are now in the process of developing a Sustainability Design Framework. [see illustration] It helps us put the
assignment in context; it enables us to set objectives early on and from these produce design guidelines and accountable milestones both during the process and afterwards when everything is in operation. It provides us with a strategy that informs the design and allows us to set a reasonable amount of restraint on the design. Another good thing is that it raises a lot of questions early in the process and not afterwards when nothing can be done about it anymore. Yet a lot still depends on the government’s, clients’ and the general public’s willingness to change their behavior. There is a huge amount of inertia in the wrong direction to overcome. In Dubai we have to convince our client that he should do more than simply provide empty lots upon which other developers can build; he must play the role of the municipality. Otherwise how is he going to be allowed to levy a congestion charge, how can he charge differentially for water and electricity, how can he insist that every building be designed according to the guidelines? And to go even further, maybe insist that every building is equipped with a smart building management system connected to a central system? Because if someone is actually wasting energy, perhaps he left home having forgotten to turn off the air-conditioning – some ultra-rich people in Dubai always leave the air-conditioning on, even when they are away for weeks – it should be turned off by the system. These are the measures we are all going to have to face in the future in order to save energy. The morality of it doesn’t concern me because we are all in this together; we cannot waste any more energy through sheer stupidity. What is driving the developer in Dubai is that in 10 or 15 years reputable companies will be willing to come to waterfront. The message is that unless you do this stuff you will end up with a place that is not desirable for these companies. That’s quite a good motivating factor to get us to where we want to be.
carbon levels, even taking into account the losses of old buildings and the costs of new building material production. These are hard decisions facing us in the near future and obviously this is primarily a political issue. It may not be coincidence that we’re working on sustainable cities in political climates that are mainly centralized and more or less autocratic. In our parts of the world the climate is different, which makes it much harder to make tough decisions. But it will be necessary. We need strong policies on a national and even international level. I believe that strong financial incentives will be needed. Why don’t we tax the amount of carbon we use instead of our income? I’m suggesting a full change from the tax on income to one on carbon use. It would generate exactly the same income for the state. It would be based on the principle that the polluter pays which is a principle people understand. Acceptance of such a carbon tax may even be easier than a tax on income. It would really influence the way people think and act. One might argue that very rich people wouldn’t be influenced by such a change, but they’re not influenced by income taxes either, are they?
JR We must believe we can do it, otherwise we’re lost. Fortunately the human race is good at that. So yes, we can, because we need to. At the moment we’re just starting. Much can be gained from relatively simple measures; improving the efficiency of existing power plants and infrastructures, improving public transport, educating the public, providing the technology to use energy wisely and support that politically by providing financial incentives for instance. In general, we must observe the three golden rules: demand reduction, improve efficiency and use renewable sources. These are plain common sense really. One of the best things you can do is teach young children sustainable behavior at school so they can tell their parents. The hopeful truth is that we can reduce our carbon emissions easily by half simply by changing our behavior without any real loss in welfare, comfort or even a big change in public spending. The hard truth is that this is not enough. We will need to do more. And that’s where the real difficulties start, both political and technological. What about our existing cities, for instance? Until now we’ve been talking about new cities. It’s already quite hard to retrofit an old house to meet new sustainability standards. It’s far more difficult, if not altogether impossible to retrofit an entire city. Perhaps it might be necessary to completely demolish cities or parts of them if we really want to reach zero
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PV Can we actually do it – can we produce sustainable cities?
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National Level Vision, policy, legislation and regulation
Corporate Level Visions and policies
Project Level Sustainablity Framework Vision, objectives and targets
Strategies Demand-side reduction for water, waste, transport, energy, etc and urban design
Hierarchy of KPIs
Implementation Plans
Low Carbon Guidelines
One per objective ideally
What, how, who, when?
Guidelines
Business Cases Technical feasibility, commercial viability
Programme and Milestones
Concept Design
Procurement Strategy
Agreed Budgets
Specifications and operating requirements
Milestone Monitoring Design
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CO2eq. assessment
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Sustainability Design Framework Diagram Arup
Procurement
Construction
Commissioning
Operation
Thomas Daniell
Architect Thomas Daniell thinks through the nature of Japan’s Edo period’s ecological biosphere and its current popularity in the discussion on global sustainable development. 1. Postwar Japan
Japan’s phoenix-like emergence out of the urban firestorms triggered by incendiary bombing campaigns during the final months of the Second World War is a story that has been told often enough. The incredible collective willpower that rebuilt – or better, reconceived – the nation during the postwar period (albeit under the benevolent guidance of the American Occupation for the first seven years) enabled decades of unprecedented industrialization, urbanization, modernization, democratization and a welcome reentry into the global community of nations symbolized by the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka Expo. It was a long haul from the brutal, favela-like conditions of Japan’s cities at the end of the war, confronted as they were with overwhelming homelessness, unemployment, inflation and material scarcities. The turning point was 1960, the year Hayato Ikeda (a career bureaucrat in the Finance Ministry) became Prime Minister and announced his ‘income doubling plan’ and ‘politics of patience and reconciliation’: slogans that equated to massive industrialization and a concomitant suppression of societal disagreement. Ikeda built on his own late-1950s policies of preferential financing for heavy industry, advocating huge government investment in transportation infrastructure and an uncompromising commitment to economic progress. The environmental and social consequences were immaterial. Ikeda’s personal ruthlessness was no secret: he had been appointed head of MITI (the Ministry of International Trade and Industry) in 1952, but was forced to resign within a month as a result of his infamous statement that in the pursuit of national industrialization, ‘it makes no difference to me if five or ten small businessmen are forced to commit suicide.’1 Heartless as this may sound, Ikeda’s crime was merely an overly blunt expression of a generally accepted Japanese principle: individual suffering is irrelevant in the pursuit of collective wellbeing. Boosted by US investment and the Korean War, the Japanese economy succeeded far beyond expec-
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Back to the Future: The Edo Biosphere
tations. Within a few years, Japan had a Gross National Product second only to the US, an affluent citizenry with a remarkably flat distribution of wealth, a superb educational system, the highest literacy levels in the world and local industries producing an array of consumer goods that had turned the label ‘Made in Japan’ from a contemptuous warning into an assurance of quality. The 1960s also nurtured the Metabolists, a group of young visionaries who attempted to give architectural form to the utopian promises of technological progress, infinite growth and development without consequences.2 The spirit of the times is encapsulated by Kenzo Tange’s 1960 Tokyo Bay Plan, an enormous, potentially infinite, extension of the city out across the water, with housing and other facilities sprouting from a central infrastructural spine. The parallel story is one of appalling and tragic environmental damage that gave Japan the sadly deserved reputation of having the worst pollution problems of any developed country. Since the late nineteenth century, incipient industrialization had been causing serious damage to local ecosystems and their human inhabitants, but the problems exponentially increased after the Second World War. A series of notorious ecological disasters during the 1950s and 60s resulted in outbreaks of incurable illnesses, birth defects and deaths, as the natural environment became poisoned by industrial waste: arsenic (Morinaga Milk Powder poisoning), sulfur dioxide (Yokkaichi Asthma), mercury (Minamata Disease), cadmium (Itai-itai Disease).3 Such incidents were initially confined to rural areas, a result of provincial governments trying to stimulate their local economies by attracting industrial investment – mining, chemical production, wood pulp treatment – that directly and indirectly destroyed the health of their farming and fishing communities. Protests were initially suppressed or ignored, with the wider population all too content in their new prosperity. Media coverage of the problems and successful compensation claims eventually led to the enactment of strict new environmental legislation in 1970 and the establishment of the Environmental Agency in 1971. This was another turning point, coinciding with the World Expo in Osaka – a paean to progress and technology, dominated by the Metabolist architects. Again Kenzo Tange made the definitive contribution, a vast spaceframe roof covering the Expo grounds. For the general public the utopian idealism of it all was no longer inspiring, but rather a callous display of the gap between these fantastic visions and the degraded reality of their living environment. It fueled a burgeoning backlash to modern affluence and progress – the dawning feeling that something was deeply amiss, that a historical wrong turn had been taken. This was the genesis of the ‘Edo Boom’ (or more accurately, series of booms): a flourishing popular interest in the premodern Edo period (1603-1867). Once regarded as laughably backward, an embarrassing episode best forgotten in the forward thrust of Japan’s manifest destiny, during the 1970s a stream of books, lectures, exhibitions and television shows began to valorize Edo as an innocent, Edenic period of social and ecological sustainability. This reached a crescendo during the second half of the 1980s, precisely coinciding with the most shamelessly unsustainable period of Japan’s postwar economic growth, the so-called ‘bubble.’ Since the burst of the bubble at the beginning of the 1990s, the fascination
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Solar-powered cycles of sustainability in Edo Period society. From: Atsushi Tsuchida, Ekorojii Shinwa no Kouzai [The Value of Ecology Myths] (Tokyo: Hotaru Shuppan, 1998), p. 187.
2. Edo Japan
The Edo Period began in the wake of a century of devastating civil wars, with a military regime (the Tokugawa Shogunate) taking control of the nation and imposing a somewhat Taliban-like peace, stability and unity. Japan was run for the following two-and-a-half centuries by a series of warlords – de facto rulers based in the de facto capital, Edo, while the nominal ruler, the Emperor, lived in secluded irrelevance in the official capital, Kyoto. The new rulers invented a strict social hierarchy (a five-tier caste system), regulated architectural form and aesthetics (preventing wealthier commoners from building houses that might compete with the aristocracy), banned and confiscated all firearms (ensuring the dominance of the samurai sword) and most importantly closed the country to the outside world. Foreign trade and communication were almost entirely prohibited. The Edo Period ended with the restoration of the Emperor to power in 1868, together with the official relocation of the nation’s capital from Kyoto to Edo (the latter city was then renamed Tokyo). Japan was reopened to the world, and like a child starved of novelty began to enthusiastically and uncritically import Western ideas while dismissing the older ways as primitive and worthless. Yet during those centuries of self-imposed isolation, Japan was a closed system, a laboratory for an extended experiment in sustainability. Without significant fossil fuel reserves, unable to import energy or manufactured goods, Japan effectively became a solar-powered nation. Recycling was not a choice or an ideology, but a life-or-death necessity, so pervasive that the word itself did not exist. The exquisite minimalism of the arts and crafts was not a rejection of luxury and decoration, but the only available option. Edo society teemed with itinerant artisans specialized in repairing various materials: welding metal cooking pots, gluing broken ceramics, repapering lanterns and umbrellas, refurbishing footwear, replenishing ink pads. If an object was beyond repair, it was repurposed: kimonos became diapers became cleaning rags. Finally, the component materials were collected and reused: scrap metal was melted down, coagulated wax from old candles was made into new ones, used paper was pulped and turned into clean sheets.4 A balanced integration with the wider ecosystem was crucial for long-term survival. Centuries of smallscale farming and forestry around Japanese villages resulted in a kind of hybrid natural-artificial landscape known as satoyama.5 A word that today evokes an idyllic, rural lifestyle, satoyama are usually defined as coppice woodlands maintained in a sustainable equilibrium with adjacent paddy fields and human communities. Forests were regularly, judiciously thinned and the wood used for charcoal and construction. The inedible straw left over from the rice harvest was turned into coats, hats, footwear, bags, embedded into clay walls as reinforcement, woven into tatami mats for floors and used as fuel for fires. Ultimately, everything was returned to the earth, whether directly or as ash after being burned. The main source of fertilizer was
‘night soil’ (human excrement), often collected directly from residences by farmers who paid for it in cash or crops. It was valuable stuff: dealers set up warehouses, landlords argued with their tenants over ownership and farmers became connoisseurs – different neighborhoods commanded different prices and the best shit was used for cultivating the highest grades of green tea. One side effect was cities that were extraordinarily clean by medieval standards (no one would pour potential wealth out the window, European-style). Equally important was the daily reminder that humanity was intimately, necessarily connected with the cycles of nature. Unsurprisingly, a society of reuse and recycling is not good for business. Without constant disposal and demand for new products, the economy stagnates. Historical analyses show that the Japanese economy grew insignificantly during the Edo period, averaging 0.3% per year.6 The picture painted by the Edo Boom is undoubtedly a simplistic idealization of what must have been a grueling existence for much of the population. Admittedly, not even the most extreme of the contemporary Edo-philes are proposing a return to that lifestyle. More than an unwillingness to abandon modern conveniences, this is the acknowledgment of an insurmountable problem: the sustainability of Edo Japan was predicated on a far lower population (throughout the Edo Period, the nation held a stable 30 million people) and a correspondingly higher proportion of arable land and natural forest. Interlude: Biosphere 2
Though national in scale and multigenerational in duration, the isolated ecology of Edo Japan might be seen as a precursor to Biosphere 2, the largest-ever artificial closed ecological system. Intended as a microcosm of the earth itself (i.e. Biosphere 1), Biosphere 2 comprises an array of enormous greenhouses in the Arizona desert. From September 1991 to September 1993, eight humans were sealed inside together with 3800 other living species spread across seven biomes (rainforest, desert, ocean, savannah, marshland, agriculture and a ‘cultural’ habitat for humans). There was to be no material input, with the entire system powered primarily by sunlight, and rigorous crop rotation, animal farming and waste recycling providing all necessities for the duration. Given the complexity and originality of the experiment, calculation errors and unforeseeable events inevitably intervened. Insects destroyed much of the crops. Oxygen and food ran low. The team was forced to slaughter all the pigs and chickens, eliminating the absurd inefficiency of raising vegetables only to be used as animal feed – one outcome was evidence that a vegetarian diet and abnormally low body weight will significantly increase human health and longevity (as had already been proven with laboratory animals). Yet, inadvertently perhaps, Biosphere 2 was a social experiment as much as a scientific one. Destabilized by the shortage of food, the participants soon divided into two factions with a relationship that was, at best, icy.7 Violence was only averted through a determined commitment to civility and the creation of ad hoc food-related festivals – not unlike some primitive agrarian society – intended to inspire a sense of community. The widespread media criticism of Biosphere 2 notwithstanding, it was a compelling confirmation of the experience of Edo Japan: the creation of a closed system exponentially increases the importance of efficient recycling, of
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with Edo culture has only deepened. An Edo-Tokyo Museum opened in 1993 and new publications on the subject continue to appear, ranging from serious, substantial historiography to the most superficial, selfcongratulatory ‘nipponology.’
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maintaining a high ratio of cultivated land to human population, and of ensuring a strict social order.
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3. Japan now
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With a population of close to 130 million overwhelmingly middle-class consumers, contemporary Japan simply cannot sustain itself without a constant influx of new resources. Indeed, the nation is now one of the world’s main importers of raw materials and energy (oil, natural gas, uranium). Yet grassroots activism on issues of energy, recycling and pollution has spread into national awareness, exemplified by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the nature-themed Aichi Expo 2005 and the bid for a carbon-neutral Tokyo Olympics in 2016. Japan is now a world leader in solar power research and usage. Maverick architect Tadao Ando, after four decades of creating sublime yet uninsulated raw concrete dwellings, is focusing his energy and fame on planting trees. In a droll echo of Tange’s 1960 proposal for extending human habitation out into Tokyo Bay, Ando has been promoting a 480,000-tree ‘Sea Forest’ on a garbage landfill island in the bay. As in many First World countries, Japan now has an increasingly popular back-to-theland movement.8 Following decades of rural depopulation due to youth invariably moving to the cities, idealistic new communities are resettling abandoned villages and publicly funded volunteer groups are rejuvenating the satoyama landscapes. Yet however admirable, without broader action these trends are deeply quixotic. Their success is predicated on a far smaller population willing (or forced) to make do with far less and an understanding of the human world as being integral to the natural world. Premodern Japan lacked a sharp distinction between nature and culture, conceiving each as inextricably embedded in the other. Time was seen as circular: any one life follows a linear trajectory from birth to death, but the collective rides cycles of eternal recurrence and renewal. Balance must be maintained and the individual must stay strictly subservient to the group. The mentality of modern Japan has arguably undergone a shift toward a Western, linear conception of time. At worst, this manifests in lunatic fantasies of infinite growth or even more insidiously the End of Days: if our present moment is located somewhere between a creation and an apocalypse, the ‘moral’ thing to do is use up our divinely bequeathed resources before time runs out. While Japan may have belatedly recognized the urgent need to shift course nationally, globally the situation is only being maintained through massive imbalances in regional wealth. The idealized selfsufficiency of Edo Japan is no longer tenable. For true sustainability, everything removed must be replenished. The flows of material into Japan and the rest of the First World are themselves unsustainable. As formerly Third World populations increase in affluence – cars for the Chinese, refrigerators for the Indians – there will not be enough to go around. Priority must go to tackling new frontiers in intensive agriculture and technologies for resource recycling and procurement (seaweed farms? alchemical transformation of plastic waste? towing mineral-rich asteroids into earth orbit?). Failing that, the problem becomes disturbingly simple: without realistic recourse to global vegetarianism or global war, the closed system of our planetary biosphere now holds more human beings than it can sustain.
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Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1982), p. 202. Their manifesto was presented at the World Design Conference held in Tokyo in 1960 as Metabolism 1960: The Proposals for New Urbanism (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1960). Jun Ui (ed.), Industrial Pollution in Japan (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1991). The information given here about recycling in the Edo Period is primarily drawn from Eisuke Ishikawa, Oo-edo Risaikuru Jijou [The Recycling Situation in the Edo Period] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997) and Atsushi Tsuchida, Ekorojii Shinwa no Kouzai [The Value of Ecology Myths] (Tokyo: Hotaru Shuppan, 1998). A comprehensive survey of historical and contemporary satoyama is contained in Kazuhiko Takeuchi, R. D. Brown, I. Washitani, M. Yokohari (eds.), Satoyama: The Traditional Rural Landscape of Japan (Berlin: Springer, 2003). Eisuke Ishikawa, O.c. [note 4] The two sides of the story are recounted in Abigail Alling, Mark Nelson, and Sally Silverstone, Life under Glass: The Inside Story of Biosphere 2 (Tuscon: Biosphere Press, 1993) and Jane Poynter, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes inside Biosphere 2 (New York: Basic Books, 2006). See, for example, John Knight, ‘The Soil as Teacher: Natural Farming in a Mountain Village’, in Pamela J. Asquith and Arne Kalland (eds.), Japanese Images of Nature (Richmond: Curzon, 1997), pp. 236-256.
Pig Story Christien Meindertsma
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PIG 05049 was shipped in parts throughout the world and made into a variety of products. Some of these products remained close to their original form and function, while others diverged dramatically. In the end, PIG 05049 ended up in 185 products that include ammunition, medicine, photo paper, heart valves, brakes, chewing gum, porcelain, cosmetics, cigarettes, hair conditioner, and even bio diesel fuel. PIG 05049, a book by Christien Meindertsma, designed by Julie Joliat. For more information: www.theseflocks.com.
Oil Story
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Harriet Russell
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Drawings from An Endangered Species, 2007 Commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture for the exhibition ‘Sorry, Out of Gas’ © Centre Canadien d’Architecture/ Canadian Centre for Architecture, Monteal
Prison Break in a Ruined Tower Gianluigi Ricuperati
I would like you to please read this excerpt from Ada, by Vladimir Nabokov. ‘Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: “real things” which were unfrequent and priceless; “simple things “ which formed the routine stuff of life; and “ghost things”, also called “fogs”, such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a “tower” or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a “bridge”. [...] In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral “thing” might look or even actually become “real” or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid “fog”. When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with “ruined towers “ and “broken bridges”.’ With its measure of childishness, genius and the appalling, Ada’s classification is hard to resist. You’ll find a card for each work. On each of these cards you will find insights and citations. Then, further down, squeezed in at the bottom of the page are boxes corresponding to the main categories of Ada’s philosophy. It would be extremely praise-worthy and enjoyable to instinctively draw a cross on the box you think best suits the work. Ada’s philosophy is a perfect spectrum of how the products of the intellect influence our memory and the voluble register that rules our most intimate and unquestionable taste. It magnificently mimes what takes place somewhere when our body – eyes, ears, hands and so on – encounters a picture, a building or an advertisement. The F.A.S.T. intention was to take Ein Hud – a ruined tower – and transform it into something that holds promises and hopes and vitality for the coming future – a bridge. Let us now praise the Ein Hud palingenesis. When I heard about the Malkit Shoshan’s initiative at Ein Hud I sent them this text, dangerously enthusiastic. At the end of August 2008 I was invited to take part with artists, architects and intellectuals in the event called Ein Hud. It was my first time in Israel. Like the protagonists of the serial Prison Break, one of the best TV serials to be produced in the West in the last few years, I had the sensation of living in a big open air prison – a prison in which everyone complains, someone is trying to escape, you always have to look over your shoulder, and it is impossible to live above or below tension and suspicion. I don’t have the intention of saying anything trustworthy on the Israel-Palestine issue. Like a convict in a top-security
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Long after the Palestinian inhabitants were forced to leave their village, the crumbling remains of Ein Hawd have been restored and taken over by Israeli artists. The conservation of its ‘authentic’ characteristics ignores the fact that the original inhabitants were expelled. The Palestinians settled nearby in the new Ein Hud. F.A.S.T. engaged in legalizing this settlement (that officially doesn’t exist), confronting Israel’s policy of isolation and eviction. Gianluigi Ricuperati was present during the week of events and discussions to celebrate first results.
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prison, I insert scraps of paper between my toes – coded scraps of paper that someone will have to understand to get me out of here. Scraps of paper that recount nothing but sensations. Being in Israel for me means experiencing an instinctive dictionary of dark sensations. I don’t know what to offer except the single, minuscule particle of experience that a writer introduced into a Big Insoluble Mess can transform into connections, verbal representations, threads of sense wrenched from the lines of geo-political cocaine that are laid out on the plate of Israel every week, every day the God of Armies sends to earth. Ein Hud, 31 August 2008. A Palestinian writer says that they have stolen even their food and culinary traditions. Jerusalem, 30 August 2008. Outside the Shoah Museum an Arab Israeli taxi driver welcomes us with this phrase: they’re exaggerating, aren’t they? In the car, 29 August 2008. The whole country is full of streets; there are more streets than anything else. Israel is the place in which History is represented as Infrastructure. In the car, near Ein Hud, 3 September 2008, together with the 18-year-old Palestinian who helps us to find our way in our car remotely controlled by AVIS in Tel Aviv: he’s got a brand-new iPhone. In a kibbutz not far from Tiberias, 30 August 2008. Unbearable smell of over-ripe tomatoes: the smell of desert socialism. Ein Hawd, near Ein Hud, 3 September 2008, State-funded artists’ colony. There’s nothing more depressing than breathing the air of painters on Social Security. Besides, the painters are bored, while outside the colony the umpteenth woman soldier bounces her tits as she cradles her machinegun. On the road to El Karmel, 3 September 2008. They tell me that there’s a very big store with flats in which Palestinian traders used to live and work before 1948 and which has now been turned into a prison. We can see it clearly in front of us. It’s in a panoramic position, on a sort of promontory. A prison with a view. Was it worth it? Was it necessary to go through that experience? Was it really the best thing to arrive up there just to understand for a moment? There are two opposing ways to gather the traces of truth from settings that are otherwise impenetrable – as impenetrable as the countries still closed to money and global air traffic, such as North Korea; they are as impenetrable as the points of view of the global financial élite which generates phantasms, conspiracies, paranoid and banal ideas; they are as impenetrable as a place that cannot be visited or a memory that remains unspoken; they are as impenetrable as the sensation of being a citizen without rights in a country without peace. The two ways are either to go in, to force the boundaries, to get up there via lifts full of legitimate doubts and floor after floor of swindled people or to wait outside and dog the footsteps of whoever has just emerged, weaving the transcription of their stories. And to reconstruct. Believe me, Israel is full of ruined towers and fog in spite of its geographical position. The experience of Ein Hud is a tiny piece of revolution, all that can be hoped for from courageous and just spirits. But the external eye, disillusioned and gloomy, cannot shrink from noting that it is an act of desperation. There’s an excellent restaurant at Ein Hud, run by a person who seemed marvelous to me: the mayor of Ein Hud, a Palestinian. Many Israeli citizens come here, sit down, eat and enjoy the view, the food, the courtesy, and every quality that you can imagine. In a prison too there are habitual flashes, quiet days, the progressive erosion of the possibilities of living together. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
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‘In loving memory of the boom economy’ in the City of London October, 2008 Photo Luke Mac Gregor/Reuters
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PostCapitalist City
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The PostCapitalist City Tagging Cloud
The Post Capitalist City Tag
Getting to grips with new ideas on unreal estate and urban sustainability Clare Butcher and Joost Janmaat
This cloud of words forms the foundation of the many discourses, visions, imaginings, ambitions and agendas concerning the elusive notion of the ‘Post-Capitalist City’. These terms can be conservative or revolutionary, practical or impractical, realistic or fairly utopian. We deliberately present them here without definition, since that would effectively prohibit something of their dynamism; and we subsequently propose a ‘free association style’ usage of this vocabulary in forming new ideas. We challenge you to pick and chose, stumble through the words and come to your own understanding of the possible futures of areas like Detroit, South Side Chicago, Rajasthan, Acre and Eindhoven, in a moment of global credit-crunch and political pessimism.
Space
gging Cloud
Getting to grips with new ideas on unreal estate and urban sustainability.
Value
Use
*This tagging cloud was produced by Clare Butcher and Joost Janmaat in the context of a seminar held at the Van Abbemuseum in collaboration with the Heartland Project on 22 September 2008. The participants were Stephanie Smith, Femke Lutgerink, Andrew Herscher, Jose Subero, Kerstin Niemann, Mireille Rodier, Gijs van Oenen, Marjectica Potrc, Christian Ernsten, Simon Dermout Cramer, Christian Ernsten, Lilet Breddels, Arjen Oosterman, Rachel Jenkins, Amir Djalali, Ivet Reyes-Maturano, Fleur Brom, Katrien van Hettema Clare Butcher and Joost Janmaat (skype participants: Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, Design 99). More information: http://heartland.vanabbe.nl
Andrew Herscher
Shrinking cities are looked upon and thought about in terms of loss: real estate value, employment, welfare… Andrew Herscher proposes a positive reading: the ecology of the abandoned city introduces new values, new opportunities and a potentially rich reality that can compete and even supersede the market economy. unreal (u˘n-re¯el, -re¯l’) adjective not corresponding to acknowledged facts or criteria; being or seeming fanciful or imaginary; lacking material form or substance; contrived by art rather than nature; Slang: so remarkable as to elicit disbelief.
Speculating on Unreal Estate
If these propositions are true, then Detroit is the home of manifold examples of what could be called ‘unreal estate’: urban space that has slipped through the literal economy, the economy of the market, and entered other economies, including but not limited to those of survival, invention, play and desire. The values of unreal estate are unreal from the perspective of free-market capitalism, which is to say that these values simply do
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Detroit Unreal Estate Agency
Sustained For What?
The discourse of sustainability urges us to consider the world of uncontrolled global warming as unsustainable. In so doing, however, this discourse suggests that other worlds – of social and economic inequalities, of death from preventable diseases, of poverty, of homelessness – are, by contrast, sustainable. Thus while foregrounding ecological catastrophe as ‘an inconvenient truth’ that demands response, the discourse of sustainability leaves other truths and other catastrophes as nothing less than convenient. Why should poverty be sustainable? Why should homelessness be sustainable? Why should social and economic inequalities be sustainable? Why aren’t social and economic problems considered as environmental issues and thereby granted status within the discourse of sustainability? What exactly does the project of sustainability presume to sustain the world for, besides the suffering and violence that free-market capitalism accepts as contingencies or marginalities or, indeed, regrettable necessities? What, if anything, is sustainable beyond the borders – ideological as well as geographical – of free-market capitalism? Consideration of these sorts of questions may prompt not only a re-consideration of the sustainability project as merely ecological life-support for a global semi-dystopia, but also raise questions about the political economy in which that project is situated and sustains. The city of Detroit provides invaluable lessons in this regard. In its apparently catastrophic form – a ‘ruined city,’ an ‘abandoned city,’ a ‘forgotten city,’ a ‘shrinking city’ – Detroit has recently emerged as a figure for abject urban failure. All narratives of this failure define Detroit according to loss, with the loss of the economic value of urban assets accompanying, sponsoring or following a loss of urban population, a loss of urban territory, a loss of urban infrastructure, a loss of urban order, a loss of urbanity itself. But what if what has really been lost in Detroit is the capacity to understand new urban conditions, conditions in which value is no longer structured economically, in the terms of free-market capitalism, but rather in other terms? What if Detroit has not so much fallen apart, emptied out, disappeared or shrunk as it has transformed, become a novel kind of city that only appears depleted, voided or invisible through the lens of conventional urbanism? What if Detroit’s urban conditions comprise a new media, one ungraspable by the precepts of received concepts of the city including, most notably, new urbanism? What if this new urban media has not only lost one sort of value – a value that is brokered economically – but gained other sorts of values, values that now have little or no economic salience? And what if one of these values is a new form of sustainability, a form in which sustainability does not comprise a redemption of capitalism as much as an embrace of its seeming failure?
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Photo Andrew Herscher
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not exist. Thus Detroit’s economic catastrophe has rendered much of the city’s property ‘valueless’ – but only in terms of the dominant regime of value. As owners and caretakers, both formal and informal, abandon valueless property, that very same property becomes available for other forms of occupation, other practices and activities, and other regimes of value. Thus ‘valueless’ urban space is also a site for the imagination and exploration of alternative values: a spatial fab lab, both site of and instrument for the production of alternative urbanisms. The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency was established in order to register and foster such alternative urbanisms. The ambition of the agency is generally to foreground Detroit’s ‘unreality’ not within the domain of fanciful irrelevance, but rather within that of creative speculation. In Detroit speculation on modes of urban living has emerged and flourished in the wake of the collapse of speculation on property values; there is an economy of speculation, that is, an economy in which values are established and circulated both within and beyond the realm of free-market capitalism. Seeking to document the urban culture that capitalism’s apparent failure makes possible, the Detroit Real Estate Agency seeks to invest not in a better world-to-come beyond or after capitalism, but in actually existing enclaves within capitalism, enclaves where the extraction of value in economic terms creates space for the imagination and cultivation of other values. The world of unreal estate offers a parallax position from which to assess value, an alternative to the single, fixed vantage point established by the market economy. In the world of unreal estate, precisely those urban features that are conventionally understood to diminish or eliminate value (inefficiency, redundancy, waste, danger, uselessness) are what create possibilities to
construct new values. What usually appears to be the ‘ruin’ of the city thus becomes projective or potential. Reciprocally, the values that are conventionally understood to support the ‘reconstruction’ of the city (optimization, capitalization, efficiency, functionality) are, by contrast, banal at best and destructive at worst. In short, the concept of unreal estate invites an understanding of Detroit in all its complexity and heterogeneity, rather than a reduction of the city to a ‘problem’ that needs to be solved or an ‘example’ of an urban condition that is already presumed to be understood. Unreal estate, then, is not in contradiction or contradistinction to the real, but an alternative reality, one that is ‘so remarkable as to elicit disbelief.’ Other Economies, Other Politics
What is unremarkable to the market is productive work and the non-productive play that rewards or compensates for that work. What is remarkable, then, is the privileging of play over work or even the blurring of boundaries between the two. Thus the unreality of unreal estate can be considered in terms of the practices, activities, processes and events these estates facilitate, each which fall between or reconsider ‘work’ and ‘play’: curating and displaying objects without value; tending and harvesting sites that do not yield gains or accumulations; playing with and for time; hanging on and hanging out; getting into and getting by. This unreality can also be considered in terms of architecture: the unstable, interim, ephemeral and provisional ‘building’ that is placed on unreal estate, less in denial of its unreality than in participation with it. Here architecture’s pre-occupation with form-finding transmutes into a collaboration not only with given forms, sites and practices but also more profoundly with the entropy that form traditionally denies or ignores.
The preceding take place in dead zones not only with respect to free-market capitalism, but also to formal politics. Yet this is not to say that the occupations of unreal estate are apolitical. Rather it is to assert the difference between governmental politics and nongovernmental politics and to locate the politics of unreal estate in the latter – a politics devoid of aspirations to govern. Like exits or expulsions from the market economy, rejections of formalized politics also comprise invitations: to neglect rather than resist, to mimic rather than replace, to supplant rather than reverse. These are invitations to consider political change and difference not even from the ground up, for the ground too is generally the province of the state, but on other grounds entirely, grounds that can usefully go by the name of ‘unreal.’ The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency’s disengagement from projects to save, solve or resolve Detroit does not comprise a denial or acceptance of the city’s very real suffering and very real violence. On the contrary: for the agency it is the metaphysics of capitalism that provides the terms to marginalize and normalize suffering and violence. What is really necessary is to imagine and construct a world in which suffering and violence should have no place – a world beyond sustainability, at least as the term is framed in its usual contexts, and one that is in the present circumstances wholly unreal. Have We Got a Deal For You!
Among the actions currently planned by the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency is the production of an Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit, a collective atlas of the city’s alternative urbanisms currently undertaken by cultural entrepreneurs of all sorts; the formation of an activist land bank by means of which the agency will make
properties it has acquired or appropriated from among the 80,000 abandoned properties in Detroit available for year-long projects by artists, architects and community activists; the utilization of Detroit as a laboratory of alternative urbanisms in a series of workshops; and other programs that attempt to discover urban epistemologies adequate to the city’s most veritable unrealities. The agency’s ‘agents’ are envisioned as a loosely-organized experimental community with varied and unpredictable relations to one another and to the agency’s only partly interconnected actions. These actions are envisioned as generative as well as reflective, with the definition, location, representation and exhibition of unreal estate opening up these estates both to each other and to a translocal array of other sites, other agents and other agencies. Through these actions the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency does not propose to advance unreality as a new or counter-reality. It does not aim at a passage out from ideological aestheticizations of Detroit – whether the state-sponsored aesthetics of banality that structure representations of an ‘ordinary’ city or the slightly more provocative aesthetics of sublime urban ruins. It does not intend to hold a space open for supposedly non-aestheticized representations produced by the city’s ‘real’ residents, stake-holders, avatars or shamans. It does not expect to extract profit from Detroit, introducing representations of a novel locality into a global circuit in which such representations are currently the object of intense speculation. Instead it poses unreal estate as merely a different mode of aestheticization, one whose current value lies in ignoring value, at least in its hegemonic formulation.
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Photo Amy Denio, 2008.
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Image Koert van Mensvoort
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Next Nature
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‘Nature’ is one of the most successful products around today.
Mireille Roddier
Two interdependent threads of analysis emerged from the ‘sustainability in the post-capitalist city’1 discussion which looked at varying scales of social equilibria2 and disequilibria, static and dynamic movements. If geographical scale led to a discussion about the totality of dynamic systems and about self-organization3 in space, mention of a temporal scale occasions a very different discussion. The market values’ Achilles’ heel hides in the impossibility of the collective unconscious sustaining an experience of the present moment, free of future projections. These speculations annihilated, the values of the market lose ground against those of direct aesthetic experiences – experiences of the present moment, themselves unspeculatable. As theorists of everyday life4 have claimed, play is a powerful mode of resistance. While the homo-faber insures the survival (futures) of the community, the homo-ludens temporarily escapes the chains of the social contract5 by exiling him/herself deep into the maquis of the here and now, unconcerned with the consequences of the there and later. With homo-ludens in mind, we could establish three distinct sets of strategic practices available to the urban activist. Each set relies on and is assessed proportionally to the fluctuation of market unvalues6, such as disorganization, productive inefficiency, waste of time, will to live, passion for creation, forgiveness of friendship, lovesickness, etc... 1. The Bacchanalian Festival:
Transmuting the psycho-geographic dérive into a temporary autonomous zone7, the parade offers a stronghold inside the instant present. It also showcases examples of emergent patterns triggering critical bifurcations in dynamic systems, as classically illustrated by the international monthly parade/protest led by the velorutionaries of the Critical Mass8 movement. John Jorden of the British direct action network Reclaim the Streets9 has theorized on the revolutionary power of such practices. From the specific issue-oriented street party10 to alternative recuperations11 of the public realm, from the more violently penalized examples of civil disobedience to the fully institutionalized but ludic – if disruptive – urban strolls, the threat-level difference between street festival and riot only exists in the mind of those seeking safety. Issues aside, any good strike (physically manifested in the protest) enables not only the collective experience of solidarity, but a disruption in the pattern (glitch in the matrix) that incapacitates past or future considerations, leaving the present center stage.
3. The Unreal anti-aesthetic:
Is there a form of counter-culture left with power to resist re-appropriation by aestheticiszation? When was the last time we saw a form of aestheticiszation that did not inscribe itself directly into the logic of the market? Is the reversal of values into an a-, un-, anti- value still a plausible mode of resistance or has the antithesis really become an obsolete concept? That is, is dialectical reasoning as dead as art, theory and god? After a century of artistic production meant to continuously counter – only to end up neatly gift-wrapped and pricetagged, is it really reasonable to quit trying? Again, the answer depends upon the temporal framework in which the question is asked. Observed over a collapsed history, all critique transforms – i.e. dies and changes form. This is pretty irrelevant in its flattened form, yet observed at a given point in time, the critique should be gauged not by a timeless notion of its current form, but by the dynamic rate of its mutations21. What was revolutionary then is commercial practice now, sure, but this should not invalidate the reality of its effect at a specific moment, nor should it exclude its current altered form as part of the trajectory. The spirits of Tristan Tzara and Johnny Rotten will live on, just like the proclamation of their obliteration will continue to be broadcast (along with the branding of their names). How does this introduce the notion of unreal estate, according to the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency22? It is important to delineate the obvious pitfalls: how will the Unreal avoid the destiny of the Real23 if they are two sides of the same coin? And when it comes to the specifics of the urban landscape, is the aestheticiszation embedded in the Detroit images Andrew Herscher described as an urban sublime anything other than the commodification of the anti-aesthetic24? Short of answers, we’re currently training agents. Join us. ‘Dans le monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux.’
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Glossarial Comments on the PostCapitalist City
2. Ironic Distancing:
Let’s not undervalue the unvalue of disruption independently of its source. Inscribed within a range that spans from corporate sponsorship to acknowledged civil disobedience, all forms of culture jamming12 open gates to public awareness. As the pranksters of Improv’ Everywhere13 have demonstrated, the use of humor can camouflage activist intentions very well. Also targeting the urban public realm, the British Space Highjackers14 more overtly broadcast their politics while offering a good time. Note that the tactics of the culture jam were previously defined as those of a hijack (détournement15 in French), which were inspired by a method for alienating (verfremdungseffekt16 in German) drawn from a wish to ‘make strange’ (Остранение17 in Russian). The ‘defamiliarization’ process could surely be perceived as ‘refamiliarization’, especially when it comes to our experience of the urban environment, the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction18. The use of public space in terms other than those whose familiarity has been forced upon us temporarily enables a certain consciousness of those negating terms. These alternatives aren’t limited to fullon public performances. Invisible and often anonymous street artists have contributed their share. But the limits of subversion19 are delineated and negating the negation20 has been renegated, ad infinitum. Now what?
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Sustainability in the Post-Capitalist City: Volume Expert Meeting #2, Van Abbemuseum, 22 September 2008 Social Equilibrium: inherent contradiction of terms, the state of equilibrium being the most socially divisive. Self-Organization: behavior pattern considered in ‘complex systems’ and ‘emergent’ theories, popular with designers for their unpredictable and rather aesthetically compelling formal properties. In the context of this discussion however, we understand the systems according to the movements of wealth distribution. Cf. among others: Paul Krugman, The Self-Organizing Economy (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) Theorists of Everyday Life: among usual suspects Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and Michel de Certeau, maybe Raoul Vaneigem most explicitly called for the personal production of poetry and creative spontaneity as conscious resistance to a consumption-based economy (in The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967) ‘spontaneity is immediate experience, consciousness of a lived immediacy threatened on all sides yet not yet alienated, not yet relegated to inauthenticity. The centre of lived experience is that place where everyone comes closest to him- or herself. Within this unique space-time we have the clear conviction that reality exempts us from necessity. Consciousness of necessity is always what alienates us. We have been taught to apprehend ourselves by default – in absentia, so to speak. But it takes a single moment of awareness of real life to eliminate all alibis, and consign the absence of future to the same void as the absence of past.’ Social Contract: bond that ties the noble savage to past and future concerns by subjecting his individuality to the authority of a general will. Unvalue: worth that (directly or indirectly) irremediably withstands profitable exchangeability. Temporary Autonomous Zone: Hakim Bey’s term for the spatially and temporally delimited environment fostering ‘a present moment of aesthetic shock in the service of realization & liberation.’ Critical Mass: tipping point indicating sufficient momentum for a sociodynamic system to become self-sustaining and expand. Term used in Ted White’s 1991 film Return of the Scorcher to describe an emergent moment observed on Chinese roadways where traffic signals lost control of vehicular flow to bicyclists. Naming of monthly bicycle parade ensued screening of the film. Reclaim the Streets: collaborative responsible for scenes that regularly shake the streets of London. ‘The road becomes a stage for a participatory ritual theatre: ritual because it is efficacious, it produces real effects by means of symbolic causes; participatory because the street party has no division between performer and audience, it is created by and for everyone, it avoids all mediation, it is experienced in the immediate moment by all, in a spirit of face-to-face subversive comradeship.’ – John Jordan, ‘The Art of Necessity: The Subversive Imagination of Anti-road Protest and Reclaim the Streets’ in George McKay (ed.), DIY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain, (London and New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 129-132, 135-146. Street Party: occupation of public space, either statically or in motion, either legally or guerilla style, generally involving music, dancing, temporary constructions such as stages or floats, in addition to banners and security forces (defensive or offensive) when used as a platform for either the celebration or the condemnation of specific causes (from gay pride to presidential nominating conventions). Recuperation: fate of avant-gardes the moment they are recognized as such. ‘Contemplation of the Situationist International is merely a supplementary alienation of alienated
society.’ Guy Debord and Ginafranco Sanguinetti, The Real
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Split in the International, translated by John McHale (London: Pluto Press, 2003), p. 33. Culture Jam: Take a familiar situation; so familiar it has become a sign of itself if not a sign of its own signalization. Through any means at your disposal, alter its signification to the point where the levels of representation collapse and the referent appears in question. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite. Improv’ Everywhere: http://improveverywhere.com Space Highjjackers: http://www.spacehijackers.co.uk Détournement: the opposite of quotation, of appealing to a theoretical authority that is inevitably tainted by the very fact that it has become a quotation – a fragment torn from its own context and development, and ultimately from the general framework of its period and from the particular option (appropriate or erroneous) that it represented within that framework. Détournement is the flexible language of anti-ideology. Verfremdungseffekt: search George Brecht. Остранение: search Viktor Shklovsky Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Limits of subversion: ‘The problem with cultural dissent in America isn’t that it’s been co-opted, absorbed, or ripped-off. Of course it’s been all of these things. But it has proven so hopelessly susceptible to such assaults for the same reason it has become so harmless in the first place, so toothless even before Mr. Geffen’s boys discover it angsting away in some bar in Lawrence, Kansas: It is no longer any different from the official culture it’s supposed to be subverting. The basic impulses of the countercultural idea, as descended from the holy Beats, are about as threatening to the new breed of antinomian businessmen as Anthony Robbins, selling success & how to achieve it on a late-night infomercial.’ Thomas Frank, ‘Why Johnny Can’t Dissent,’ in Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (eds.) Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler, (New York: Norton, 1997) p. 45. Negating the negation: when the question of who is negating whom becomes confusing, don’t they cancel each other out? Example in the August 2006 ‘corporate street attack’ in which Red Bull anonymously sponsored twenty-two international street artist to tag the German city of Wuppertal. Rate of mutation: for Hegel the point was no longer to interpret the world, but to interpret the transformation of the world. The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency is dedicated to hijacking the system of cultural values driving undevelopment, development and redevelopment, in Detroit and beyond. Real: cf. biographies of Reality by Baudrillard and Žižek. Anti-aesthetic: cf. Ignasi de Solà-Morales’ concept of the ‘Terrain-Vague’, or Gilles Clément’s ‘third-landscape’ for the territorialized version of the same argument.
Marjetica Potrcˇ
Volume 18
Survival Strategies and Community Building in Post-Capitalism
In the spring of 2006 I spent time in the Brazilian state of Acre, a remote area of Amazonia known for radical social practices and policies. Six months later, the São Paulo Biennial organized a seminar about Acre in São Paulo. The talks revolved around the social policies the Acre state government had developed in co-ordination with local communities, most famously the creation of ‘extraction reserves’ – territories managed and controlled by the communities that live in the forest. Over the past fifteen years approximately half of the state’s land has been distributed to these communities, resulting in a fragmentation or territorialization, of state territory. The logic for creating these selfmanaged territories was simple: If people can survive in the forest, then the forest will also survive. In Acre the period of profit-driven capitalistic over-exploitation of the forest is seen as an era that has come to an end. During the seminar some people wondered why we should even be talking about Acre in a major metropolis like São Paulo. What does a sophisticated urban society have to learn from a remote, sparsely populated region in Amazonia? Surely it should be the other way around. Then the geographer José Carlos Meirelles made a surprising statement: the communities in the forest want to maintain their distance from the outside world. ‘They have their rights to the land as well as the right to remain isolated, carrying on with their culture independently of any contact with ours.’1 The forest communities view their relative isolation positively – they want to develop their societies, but at their own pace; they want to connect with others, but on their own terms. First and foremost they want to preserve and protect their land and their cultural identity. This man, who is extremely familiar with life in the rainforest, described the Acreans’ self-segregation from the larger, globalized society as a positive choice. A key difference between this decision and the model of the gated community, in which people voluntarily segregate themselves in order to live with ‘people like us’, is the Acreans’ bottom-up community building. In the kind of gated community found in North America and Europe, individuals often have little chance to participate in the building of community. An extreme case are the ‘stand-alone cities’ near Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, which outsource their security needs to contractors; the moment a community is unable to pay for their services, the contractor stops providing security.2 In contrast, the Acrean community relies on socially conscious individuals and participatory democracy. Theirs is a different understanding of subjectivity. In Acre the socially conscious individual views existence as, essentially, co-existence. ‘Being’ means ‘being with’, and ‘I’ does not take precedence over ‘we’.3 An example of this understanding can be seen in the forest communities’ communal cultivation of land. The Acreans are quick to point out that this practice is not the result of political ideology: ‘It is not about communism or capitalism; it is simply how things work best locally.’4 Sustainability in the twenty-first century is based on local solutions – which usually embrace some premodern method – and local practices. Even in the European Union localization has become an important recent trend: as the EU expands, it is reconfiguring itself in terms of regions and localities. Examples of empowered localities close to home can be seen in recent programs in the city of Lille, in France,5 and in the growing Transition Towns movement in Ireland and
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the United Kingdom.6 Such endeavors focus on building small-scale resilient communities (Lille envisions neighborhoods as sustainable territories) that practice a sustainable way of life as they tackle such critical challenges as high oil prices and global warming (the impetus behind the Transition Towns movement). Culture is one of the essential pillars of durable sustainability (others are the environment, the economy and society). Culture and small-scale ‘sustainable territories’ – not unlike the Acrean experience – provide the foundation for living on the edge of catastrophe: communities are disillusioned with globalized, profit-driven capitalism and face serious questions about how to survive in the unsettling era that is approaching. Are we looking at a new kind of geopolitical sustainability? Most important in this radical reinvention of communities is a ‘change of culture’, i.e., changes in the way we do things. If we understand politics as the process by which groups of people make decisions then sustainability is political. A forest community in Acre, the close-knit village-like community of a Lille neighborhood, and the Transition Town of Totnes in Devon, England, are all examples of a democracy built from below in which sustainability is understood as a form of social cohesion. As Catherine Cullen, Lille’s deputy mayor for culture, told me: ‘Rebuilding a city means rebuilding how we live together.’7
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José Carlos Meirelles, ‘Isolated Indians and the Right to Land’, talk delivered 11 November 2006 at the seminar ‘Acre’, organised by José Roca at the 27th São Paulo Biennial. Meirelles, an expert on the indigenous peoples of Amazonia, works with the Fundo Nacional do Índio (the National Foundation for the Indian, or Funai). Since 1988, he has resided in Acre, near the headwaters of the Rio Envira. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2007); see especially the chapter ‘Disaster Apartheid: A World of Green Zones and Red Zones’, pp. 406–422. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). This statement was made by Marcos Vinicius Neves, a historian and the chairman of the Garibaldi Brasil Foundation in Rio Branco, Acre, in my video Florestania: A New Citizenship (2006). Lille has, for example, adopted the program Agenda 21 for Culture (http://www.agenda21culture.net/index_en.htm) and is extremely successful in implementing, such as Campaign ‘Acting together for a sustainable and fair city’. See the movement’s website, http://www.transitiontowns.org. From an interview in September 2008.
New Orleans, 2008: The dismantling of modernism takes place as public housing and modernist architecture are torn down.
Tirana, Albania, 2006: The pattern painted on the building facades along the city’s main avenues is an expression of a new citizenship.
Prishtina, Kosovo, 2006: The fragmentation of society leads to the creation of the individual as the smallest state.
Acre, Amazonia, 2006: Isolation plus connectivity becomes the new paradigm after Acre’s fragmentation into sustainable territories.
Acre, Amazonia, 2006: An Ashaninka Indian paints patterns as a social contract on her body. The patterns symbolize social cohesion and local culture and serve as a protective shield for culture in the new territories.
Peter Blom interviewed by Edwin Gardner and Arjen Oosterman
In our society, sustainability requires investment. To that end, banks are essential. Does their credit policy facilitate investment in sustainability? What obstacles stand in the way of our society’s development in a sustainable direction, and are banks themselves in fact sufficiently active? We discussed those questions with Peter Blom, CEO of Triodos Bank, according to its own website ‘the only independent sustainable bank in the Netherlands’.
youngest of the initiators when the bank was established in 1980. So I have witnessed the entire development. AO So you can explain why the bank came about?
When I heard about the Triodos Foundation, which had already been acting as a mediator between capital and innovative projects for 9 years prior to the bank’s founding, it really appealed to me: the financing of companies from a socially, in those days even highly politically inclined perspective. And accordingly, Triodos Bank was a bridge between two worlds. Many people in the NGO world saw it as a bank – so ‘the other world’ – and many banks saw Triodos as an institution belonging more in the NGO world. After all, we offered savings accounts that enabled you to forego interest, financed companies no ordinary bank would ever finance. Yet the bridging function did work, because both worlds recognized that we knew what we were talking about; NGOs had interesting discussions with us about ‘social renewal’ as it was called then. And the banks realized we were professional bankers too. That intermediate position has always appealed to me. PB
AO I’m asking because the switch to sustainability is highly individual-oriented; the consumer is encouraged to assume his responsibility. PB We do indeed operate in the consumer segment and try to make our savers and borrowers aware that if they use their money differently they can bring about change. We consider a different way of saving to be an economic act; it’s something you do on the basis of a particular value and, as a consequence, you change something as well. Also, we recognize the connection between government, the individual and the business world. For instance, the fiscal ‘green scheme’, which we helped to develop and which deploys a tax incentive to stimulate investing in green projects rests upon the idea that, apart from there being a personal financial interest for an individual when investing in green projects, a social interest is also served.1 The latter being paid by the government as a tax rebate. In that sense we are always looking for combinations of activities that go together with government and business, and can be deployed for a common goal. So we primarily address the savings consumer and the credit consumer or credit client, though we do not disregard the fact that the government plays a part in defining the framework and can help. AO It’s interesting to make a comparison with another bank with social objectives: the ASN2, which appeals to its clients with an ethical choice, telling them that choice need not have an adverse effect on their wallets. Does that approach differ from that of Triodos?
It does. We do not compete primarily on price. I respect ASN’s approach, but the direct link between choice and returns is too narrow for us. We say: choose your goals and then we’ll demonstrate that reasonable returns can also be achieved with them. Profit is a consequence, showing how effective and successful you are but not a predetermined objective. PB
Edwin Gardner: Does that also mean that, as a bank, you deal differently with risk, make a different risk assessment?
Volume 18
Investing in Quality of Life
Arjen Oosterman What is your own background? Have you made your career in this bank or did you come in from outside? Peter Blom I grew up here, you might say. I was the
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PB Yes. The big difference between ASN Bank and Triodos is that we finance primarily companies, extend credit – things ASN does to a much more limited degree. It’s more of a traditional savings bank that invests in housing associations, public sector bonds, so stateguaranteed funds, and these days, to some extent, credits, but the latter is our core business. EG
But does this bank take more risks?
It’s not so much a matter of taking more risks. It’s a matter of an equilibrium between returns and risks, so between interest and risks as well. If you know a sector really well, you can arrive at a different assessment of risk than a party that is not well informed – seemingly taking greater risks, while that is not actually the case; but it does result in higher returns. So a bank must define its sectors clearly. PB
EG But isn’t that very complicated? Sustainability as a holistic concept covers all of society, so how can you develop specialty in that? PB That’s one aspect, but you can, for instance, approach sustainable energy as a sector. Sustainable real estate, too, is a sector in which we have specialized. AO Now it’s time to ask what your bank considers sustainability to be. PB Already some time ago we actually changed the term ‘sustainability’ into ‘quality of life’. We felt sustainability was becoming too much of a ‘container’ term into which almost everything could be crammed. If we take a good look at what we finance, it’s all related to furthering quality of life. As yet, quality of life isn’t as hackneyed as sustainability. If that happens, we’ll have to come up with something else. It’s all about qualitative aspects, and with ‘sustainability’ that isn’t necessarily the case. And it’s about life itself, how people live in connection with nature, with other people. The quality of that life is our criterion. And within that general view, our mission focuses on specific sectors. Moreover, we are fairly broadly focused – not only on the environment, but also on poverty elevation, for example through microcredit and fair trade finance and we support culture with a culture investment fund. So that shows we not only consider the environment technologically, but look at various aspects relating to life and living. For us, on a more philosophical level, quality of life has three dimensions: • proper engagement with the Earth – i.e. ecology; • proper engagement with our fellow human beings – the social dimension; and • the creation of human possibilities for free human development, which is strongly culture-related. We have been asked why we also finance culture. Culture is possibly the most powerful source of innovation. Culture gives everything greater experiential value for the individual. So culture is an important component of quality of life in addition to the social and economic dimension. That ‘triad’ of cultural/social/ environmental economy is therefore what we are addressing. AO If we place that in the larger framework of the world economy, is Triodos a niche, a facet or a model?
Essentially, I believe it’s a model. Not that this model can be applied on-to-one to a large mainstream bank, but the underlying principles, the pursuit of maximum sustainability rather than maximum profit, is an important premise for a bank. And if you apply that as a matter of principle, you generate a different way of
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thinking. Just to be clear: It doesn’t mean you operate at a loss, we make a profit too. But the priorities are different and that is crucial. The current crisis is partly due to reversed priorities: the focus on maximum profit, without quality of life or sustainability making up the vocabulary of those that pursue it. Everything is then eroded, parasitized, nothing remains, and the system implodes. But I expect things to change. It can’t be that a bank for example aspires to profit maximization for a small group of your investors, namely the shareholders, and that the others, the savers – who have also entrusted you with their money – don’t matter. It can’t be that you fail to use the share capital as a buffer for the others who want to run less risk, but you even speculate with that share capital. That situation is being drastically reversed at present, by government intervention. So I believe the model of maximum sustainability (of quality of life, or quality of society) is the only alternative. It might appear far off, but it’s near at hand. EG Has it something to do with the fact that in the present economy many assets are kept outside the system? Are you also addressing the way the economic model can be innovated, how sustainability values can be brought into the economic model? PB That is not easy. It concerns the old Roman Law approach of standing up for yourself and leaving the community to its own devices. But in our objectives, we have laid down that non-financial goals are coordinate to, not subordinate to financial goals – something more banks should do. We say: it’s a question of maximum quality of life with the precondition of sufficient profit (not vice versa). You can stimulate that socially (as well as laying it down in your company structure) by introducing a code for socially responsible entrepreneurship or socially responsible shareholding. Then you’re taking a step in the right direction. But there’s a long road ahead. EG Today we heard that Ecuador had included rights for nature in the constitution. Is that an approach? PB It could be. It’s important that it stems from the awareness that it is a coordinate quality that we, as people, need. If we think nature cannot protect itself adequately – something it could do a hundred years ago but not any more, nature should then be given sufficient rights to protect itself. As is the case with animals today. A hundred years ago that would still have been ludicrous. In those days it wasn’t even a foregone conclusion that all people had equal rights. Hopefully that is the case today. I can imagine that after animal rights there will be plant rights. We still find it very strange that a corn cob might have rights. AO But what is ‘sufficient profit’ as opposed to ‘maximum profit’? PB Long-term analyses show that returns on savings measured over a hundred years are 2 to 3 per cent, with bonds it’s 4 to 5 per cent, and with shares 7 per cent. Not 15, not 20, but 7%. Perhaps it’s wiser to use the 7 % as target return than we are inclined to admit, and as a bank we have opted to take 7 to 8% as our target. If you choose the maximum profit model, there are several things you can’t take into account and you endanger the sustainable character of your company. AO People say banking should return to being boring.
PB Yes, from the point of view that banks should not use their equity for ventures with potentially high upand downsides. The joint pursuit of new opportunities with the entrepreneur should be the way to generate creativity. That is not boring at all. Banking is about long term relations, not about short time transactions and bonuses. AO Can a bank play a part in developing or, more specifically supporting society? In the sustainability context.
I think it can do both. Innovation needs money. In the context of development that is an option; a bank doesn’t need to do it, but we choose to. As a bank, we are exposed to so much information that we consider it our responsibility to link up that information. So not only connect up money, savers and borrowers, but information and entrepreneurs too. Entrepreneurs with a desire to make things better for people, for nature and also for themselves, are what we need. They are probably best positioned to make sustainability work in day to day live. PB
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The Fiscal Green Scheme is intended to enhance the appeal of investment in eco-friendly projects and the natural environment and stimulate ‘green investment’. To that end, the Fiscal Green Scheme enables private individuals to invest their savings, taxfree, in eco-friendly projects; (the scheme has been in operation since the end of the 1990s). They do not have to pay tax on the income they receive from their ‘green’ investment. ‘The ASN Bank, founded in 1960, is the largest sustainable bank in the Netherlands and is part of SNS Reaal. The ASN Bank is dedicated to promoting a sustainable society. But obviously, as a bank, we also aim at optimum financial returns.’ (www.asnbank.nl)
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Next Nature
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Human culture causes the rising of a new nature. Real Nature is not green. It is beyond our control.
Photos by Aric Mayer
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Aesthetics of Catastrophe: Hurricane Katrina
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Dorothea Seebode interviewed by Christian Ernsten and Arjen Oosterman
Dorothea Seebode, Senior Sustainability Officer of Philips Research, explains how this multinational is transforming its industrial design strategy from consumer driven innovation to sustainability driven innovation. Seebode is responsible for making a 2050-blueprint scenario effective. But is sustainability for Philips the same as sustainability for the society as a whole?
must be realistic: the drive will always be linked to a commercial agenda. Like people, companies are part of a society that is nowadays completely driven by money. You can see that in the credit crisis, for example. Like people, big corporations suffer from the current situation; in our case mostly since it hinders the realization of our long-term innovation agenda. Nevertheless our commercial experience and strategic changes over the years have permitted us to keep a resilient course. Corporations are the most effective instruments to achieve anything. We have a very common goal for a large group of people, namely to survive as a corporation. That makes commercial organizations actually quite suitable to implement a genuine, sustainable innovation agenda. Here we are in Philips Research, the ‘disruptive innovation powerhouse’ of Philips. We have come to the understanding that sustainability and innovation can’t be separated anymore. Arjen Oosterman I presume that sustainabilitydriven innovation actually intends to introduce another force into the economic organization of society in general? DS Indeed, nature needs to get a voice. Commercial organizations like ours also realize that natural resources are not unlimited. That means we both have to change now while simultaneously helping change the paradigm that shapes society. Philips dealt with this by establishing my role. Two and a half years ago the innovation powerhouse decided that sustainability is such an important topic that Philips needed a dedicated sustainability officer. My job is to embed the notion of sustainable development into our long term and disruptive innovation activities. AO How is the sustainability-driven innovation focus changing Philips as a company? DS In the 1950s and 60s we lived in an era of ‘technology push’, an era in which all innovation was driven by new technology. After that came the ‘market pull’ phase, then the end-user driven approach. Now we’re really a period of ‘society-driven’ or ‘sustainabilitydriven’ innovation. Roughly ten years ago Philips Research explored ‘end-user driven’ innovation with the HomeLab. We built a home here on the campus which we used as a lab. In the beginning the research in HomeLab was constantly challenged. Now its results are making money for the company. We’re in sort of the same situation today with sustainability-driven innovation. On the internet, it’s becoming really easy to do co-creation with communities. We therefore have to start thinking differently about innovation, since there’s a lot of expertise outside. That adds a new layer of user involvement to HomeLab. However sustainability problems are frequently local problems. You therefore cannot have a ‘one size fits all’solution; solutions need to be context-dependent to be appropriate and effective. That limits the type of solutions you can come up with as a mass production company. CE What would you say is the difference between end-user driven and society-driven innovation? DS In end-user driven innovation the individual is in the center, whereas society-driven or sustainability-driven innovation focuses on the individual in his or her ecosystem. With end-user driven innovation you assume
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Disruptive Innovation
Christian Ernsten Is a company like Philips’ interest in sustainability genuine or commercial? Dorothea Seebode With a corporation like Philips one
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that you as an individual are the center of the world, but there needs to be a balance between you as an individual and you in the context in which you’re living both in terms of natural environment and community. So our approach to innovation actually goes back to an increased focus on shared responsibility for society. Let’s make it more concrete. Take a basic need such as ‘lighting’, the first industry in which Philips started. Lighting consumes approximately twenty percent of the world’s electricity, which comes from burning fossil fuels. Our lighting business announced two years ago that we would out-phase incandescent [eds.: the ‘normal’] light bulbs, the ones that are least energy efficient. Although the production of these bulbs is a major part of Philips business, they realized these bulbs are simply not affordable anymore from an environmental perspective. Yet switching to more energy efficient lighting is just ‘doing less harm’. That’s not good enough. In our research we’re therefore also looking for different ways to get light into buildings, for instance through daylight integration by using fibers. If you think about it, you realize that that’s actually somewhat further away from our core competence – since that’s ‘glass and wire’. On the other hand, it provides space for new types of questions, like: ‘Can we think of a light battery instead of an electricity battery? That is, actually store light, not energy… Or, what can we do with our technology competence to speed up the spread and scaling up of ‘renewable energy’? CE What is the future sustainability-driven innovation goal toward which researchers at Philips are working? DS We are currently working on a long-term strategy for 2015 and beyond. We are talking with people from other companies who have conducted this scenario for 2050, the Blueprint. We also believe that if we don’t align forces, we will end up in chaos. Then comes the question: how are we’re going to bring about change? There are people who have ideas about that. In the Netherlands there’s some history of practice with transition experiments, initiated by the United Nations University Merit in Maastricht. But these ideas do not really help with implementation in a way that a commercial organizations like ours need. What I’m currently doing is identifying concrete themes for practical action, for instance ‘water’ and ‘energy efficiency’, where we can really make the blueprint scenario effective. CE Which kind of chaos scenario is the blueprint trying to prevent?
In the Netherlands a lot of attention is being paid to Michael Braungart and William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle idea at the moment. Braungart describes the chaos or worst-case scenario very well. He says there are three options: (1) eco-dictatorship, (2) a big war and the reduction of the world’s human population down to the one billion the world can support and (3) an alignment of forces to create a different way to solve the problems. The latter option is my understanding of the blueprint scenario. Nobody knows how to explain what it means to align forces on a bigger scale yet. What I think is interesting, especially in Europe, is that there are communities that have experimented with different ways of living together. Communities which share water distribution, a power plant or solar panels or commu-
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nities that experiment with money flows. However, these “experiments” work on a local and rather small scale, so the question remains how do we get to a volume that has a big impact? We need to scale up quickly!
Towards an open source sharing model for unrestricted use Aetzel Griffioen
During the last year the Dutch have seen the rise of Cradle to Cradle (C2C). It appears that after Al Gore’s startling message, William McDonough and Michael Braungart have given ecologicallyconcerned Holland a concept to work with. Their slogan ‘Waste Equals Food’ has fast won over major politicians and captains of industry as well as environmentalists from many different camps. But is C2C really the concept to successfully balance ecology and economy? Although it promises to do away with the problem of scarcity, one likely consequence is a severe restriction of the use of raw materials, as well as of the knowledge necessary to make C2C work. For these reasons an open source approach to ecology is urgently needed.
Jean Aubert and Jean Beaudrillard1
Nutritious waste
Between themselves architect William McDonough and former head of Greenpeace’s chemistry department Michael Braungart can design anything from the smallest molecule up to the largest city. And with McDonough’s architecture firm, Braungart’s Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA) and their company McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, redesigning everything is what they intend to do. Copying nature and its endless cycle of life, they claim that recasting human production from a linear into a circular model is all it takes to end our environmental troubles. Hence the introduction of two separate spheres in the production process: the biosphere and the technosphere. On the premise that in nature all products of life – living things, seeds, excretion and corpses – feed other life in ecosystems with an endless number of niches, they want to reform industry so that all its products – industrial and consumer goods, gasses, effluents and waste – are used as food for other products. All products of industry become either biological or technical nutrients. As in nature – where ‘the very concept of waste does not exist’2 – so in industry: waste should equal food. Beyond sustainability
Bringing that to fruition will require a lot of work. To show how much, a large part of C2C is dedicated to a firm rebuttal of the environmentalist movement. Because while decades’ worth of sustainability policies seeking to ‘reduce, avoid, minimize… limit, [and] halt’3 environmental destruction may have lessened its otherwise even greater impact, an unwanted consequence of trying to be ‘less bad’ has been to render the pollution that slips through much ‘harder to detect and thus harder to stop.’4 Therefore C2C does not attempt to limit industry but instead proposes a total overhaul of the production process, asking: ‘What would it mean to be 100 percent good?’5 The answer lies in the phased redesign of all product lines. With all processes refit to take place ‘under the sun’,6 the first step is to eliminate any known toxins a product contains. This is followed by an analysis of the other materials involved to see if there are any unknown health hazards present that should be phased out. Only after that is the product redesigned for continuous reuse in the technosphere or biosphere. Thus they replace the sustainable approach with a purely positive one since maintaining ‘materials in closed loops maximizes material value without damaging ecosystems.’7 Ecology and economy equated
Their identification of the failure of regulation and old style environmentalism to control environmental destruction has put McDonough and Braungart in pole position to remedy the problem. And since working against the industry has not stopped pollution, they have chosen to employ their method together with industry as a design, advisory and marketing company. Upon closer inspection, however, the full C2C program may require a much greater overhaul than industry is prepared to make. McDonough and Braungart also
Volume 18
Untying Cradle to Cradle
‘It is a question of social structures and social contradictions, not a question of illness or deficient metabolism.’
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have a final stage for the redesign of a product in mind. This stage entails rethinking the entire product in an attempt to ‘fulfill human needs in an evolving technical and cultural context’.8 To that end C2C design should always ‘celebrate … the commonweal in which it is rooted’9 by focusing on the question ‘What is the right thing for this place?’10 If we reformulate this negatively we see that McDonough and Braungart’s method is in tension with their practice: while they try to go beyond sustainability approaches, they are also waging war on marketgenerated desire. Furthermore, they stress the importance of locality by declaring their opposition to the famous Koolhaasian theme of genericity which they portray as a ‘bland, uniform structure isolated from the particulars of place – from local culture, nature, energy, and material flows.’11 When I asked Braungart about this he answered that he does indeed envision a new world in which we will live ‘a much more local life, a sort of regionalism.’12 While desirable from an ecological point of view, it remains to be seen if big clients like Nike and Ford will want to go that far. Champion of industry
Meanwhile C2C has succeeded in working with these and other big companies and that has everything to do with the message. Contrary to the environmentalists who demand less economic activity, they say – with some authority, as former environmentalists who have seen the light – that growth is not a bad thing per se as long as it is ‘good growth’13 derived from ‘healthy prosperity’.14 What’s more, they can deliver this healthy way of doing business too. But the coup de grâce is that eliminating waste through superior design also means saving money. After all, where there is no waste, there is no need to clean up. This message, combined with McDonough and Braungart’s way with slogans, has enabled them to become the brand name for supersustainability. Yet while their successful marketing strategy has given C2C the right boost to take up the position of effective industry reformer, C2C has also become its champion. Claiming to have the key to good or healthy practice may turn out for the worst if it remains an empty notion.
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Health defined
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The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has stated that McDonough and Braungart never provide quantitative analyses or definitions of key concepts.15 Instead they let different, widely varying interpretations coexist making it easier to approach companies in dire need of reform, but simultaneously watering down their demands to the point where clients will still accept them. To resolve the tention between the marketing-minded McDonough and Braungart who even rant against government regulation16 and their method of supersustainability with its stress on the local and focus on needs, we turn to the work of Gregory Bateson. He also stressed the need to find a solution in which all parts of society work together and has a definition of a ‘healthy ecology of human civilization’ that fits the bill quite well: ‘A single system of environment combined with high human civilization in which the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system, open-ended for slow change of even basic (hard-programmed) characteristics.’17
According to Bateson a healthy ecology has to do with people, rather than only with nature. And as we shall see this is precisely the aspect of C2C that has so far remained underdeveloped. Knowledge and change
Most importantly, civilization has to have the capacity to deal with the gradual change of the complex of interconnected parameters we call the environment. When change can no longer be tolerated a system breaks down. Bateson likens the environmental system to a tightrope acrobat who needs to be able to exert maximum flexibility with his arms to remain in stable motion on the rope.18 Thus while keeping his balance he is not stagnant, but moves from one pole to the other. Similarly, when dealing with humanity’s attempts to cope with environmental change, the level of human social and scientific development becomes a special parameter because only knowledge, its dissemination and information flows will permit humans to find a balance with their environment. Only when they function optimally can humanity create the necessary feedback loops, like the acrobat who continuously uses his arms to maintain his balance on the unstable wire. Limits to extraction
The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency also criticizes C2C for its failure to comply with ‘systemic limits’. Reformulated according to Bateson’s idea, this indicates that C2C does not take into account the maximum stress certain parameters of the system can tolerate. Although the assessment aims at mostly technical limits to the endlessness C2C presumes – like the availability of a maximum amount of space for composting or the maximum quantity of foodstuffs to be used in industry without causing starvation – I would now like to extend the notion of systemic limits to a maximum amount of stress people can bear. In order to do this a revaluation of the concept of waste is in order. Different forms of waste
If C2C always saved companies money, everyone would naturally adopt it. However at the first Let’s Cradle conference the economist Roefie Hueting showed how costs for environmental and social degradation are usually never covered by corporations. In fact, he portrayed how, should these costs be included in the GNI, GNIs worldwide would halve.19 This fact shows how pollution cannot be included in the economy of today. The only thing that counts is growth and ‘externalising’ costs makes up a great part of big business’ profit.20 Furthermore, the precarious nature of much labor reminds us that capitalism not only extracts value from nature, but also from people’s capacity to work. Economically speaking, McDonough and Braungart are therefore right to disregard overpopulation concerns,21 but they are wrong to neglect the creation of surplus labor. Waste, therefore, does not only have to be material polluting the natural environment, but can also be human, causing among other things unemployment, poverty, isolation and powerlessness.22 Where in earlier times the labor surplus generated by the profit-driven economy could be reinvested by shipping the human waste (i.e., people) overseas to the colonies, nowadays that is no longer a viable option. For us waste, whether material or human, has becomes an inescapable problem left for society to clean up – or to deal with in another way.23
Active expertocracy, passive majority
Thus C2C functions as a catalyst for a sharper divide between producers and consumers, between experts and dummies. Yet total corporate ownership of both the material and the intellectual commons would lock down anyone trying to act ecologically who is not a producer. Bateson would observe that the acrobat now has his arms tied behind his back. The ecologist André Gorz explains this tendency to make people redundant when he maintains that ‘to prevent…profit from dwindling, the productivity of an ever decreasing number of active workers must increase faster and faster.’29 Most of these economically redundant people we find in the Third World where they live in vast slums built on toxic waste dumps, garbage belts and unstable mountain flanks. Apart from the fact that many of them make their living sorting through garbage belts and will be kicked off the moment C2C is implemented on a large scale, conceptually they form the worst image possible of the passivity the economy necessarily generates in the face of environmental change.30 Any ecological model should work against this tendency of the market to generate human waste. To that end, the wider dissemination of knowledge is crucial.
Open source
In his plea for an open source architecture in which many parties work together to solve the spatial problems of the city, the Dutch architect Dennis Kaspori summarized the current production paradigm as follows: heavy emphasis on innovation coupled with a market system distributing products unobtrusively through the mechanisms of demand and supply.31 In the realm of open source software it is the other way around. The free flow of unrestricted information needs and creates a usercommunity with a large number of active members who exchange and manipulate data ever more intensely. Thus it is possible for anyone to become active as knowledge is easily obtainable. Innovation happens there as well, but as a result of the fast recombination of information rather than heavy sponsorship. While in the market innovation is profit-driven, with the open source model it is based on the needs a community encounters.32 Gorz describes a special instance of this distributive model, auto-fabrication, centered not around knowledge or information as such, but around the easy manipulation of materials. He especially favors something called personal fabrication or fabbing which enables one to create one’s own high-tech machines. Because of the low costs involved (the knowledge is free, the machines are cheap and use few resources), fabbing is an excellent way to become able to produce again according to need; for instance, the ANC has recently become very interested in the introduction of fabbers in South Africa.33 Community building
In the last year, McDonough and Braungart have been trying to create a C2C community. This is partly to better disseminate ecological knowledge, but it is also about making consumers start exercising demand for C2C products. In this C2C is no different from any other sustainable product line. The problem here is that the community comes after the product. This means that the C2C method might profit immensely from the reverse of the innovation model: first a community centered on the distribution of ideas from which innovation and new business models will naturally follow – as has been proven extensively in the realm of software where remuneration is received for services rendered instead of products delivered.34 Recently Frank Oxener has started a FabLab on the island of Texel and has stated that he wants to produce only following the C2C method.35 Hopefully his work will help McDonough and Braungart realize that making the C2C material databases public is a necessary step. Opening the databases
In conclusion, a divide exists between the purported C2C method of redesigning production processes and the business model centered on innovation through which McDonough and Braungart market C2C. The latter restricts the use and dissemination of the knowledge as well as the materials necessary to reform all human production to a cradle to cradle model. As such it also reproduces the division between producers and consumers, ultimately emphasizing the creation of the poor and utterly passive pool of surplus labor. The method itself, however, greatly sensitizes those who work with it to an ecological way of thinking. When coupled with an open source working method and local ways of production, the triumphant message
Volume 18
Property control
While C2C redevelops the production process, and does so very well, production is not the entire picture. In the experience economy, it is no longer the labor added to natural resources that primarily determines the value of a product, but the idea, the experience or the identity for which a product stands.24 Because C2C is so good at making slogans and ideas, at creating an experience, it is actually not adopted by the big market players as a better production process, but as a completely new paradigm of product innovation. It is the marketing more than the method that ensures its value. And because an innovation-driven economy sets high store by unique selling points, C2C finds itself in the strange predicament that it needs to protect its own method. This is not to say that McDonough and Braungart are evil; far from it. In order to reform industry they are simply forced to work together with businesses, since governments’ strategies don’t work. But the marketing scheme necessary to engage with corporate clients has taken on a life of its own. In the words of the ecologist philosopher Henk Oosterling, ‘the medium has become milieu’ and now simply dictates the way to go.25 In all their C2C dealings McDonough and Braungart make use of an SM-license which is a preregistration form of copyright (Europe) and patent (USA) for immaterial services. They also reassure their clients that C2C ‘does not alter common intellectual property understanding: Products and inventions belong to producers.’26 Thirdly, the literally priceless data on toxic materials, ways to purify them, etcetera,27 C2C has been generating for quite some time now remain locked behind intellectual property rights as well. Lastly, with regard to the proposed industrial loop every company or conglomerate needs to instigate, it follows that the industrial nutrients no longer need to change ownership when a consumer buys them. Instead, the consumer buys a service and the actual material stays forever in the hands of the producer!28
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that ‘Everybody is a designer’ now has the potential to come true – provided designers render services that are built upon a shared and ever-increasing knowledge that allows all humans on the planet to work toward ‘an ongoing complex system, open-ended for slow change of even basic (hard-programmed) characteristics.’ Hopefully the union of C2C and FabLab will make clear that the knowledge and data uncovered in the C2C project are too valuable to keep tied up. Michael Braungart might even welcome that because when asked about their copyright restrictions, he answered, ‘We only copyrighted our book and the publications to hold some modicum of control over their contents – to prevent greenwashing, in fact. But since our goal isn’t any kind of profit, they can as well be spread as if under a CC license, or even copyleft.’36
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The French Group (Jean Aubert and Jean Beaudrillard), ‘The Environmental Witch Hunt’, p. 2, at: http://www.metamute.org/ en/the_environmental_witch_hunt_statement_by_the_french_ group_1970. William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle. Remaking the way we make things (New York: North Point Press, 2002), p. 104. Idem, p. 45. Idem, p. 65. Idem, p. 67. Idem, p. 130. http://mbdc.com/c2c_home.htm Cradle to Cradle, p. 180. Idem, p. 150. Idem, p. 124. Idem, p. 29. Michael Braungart, interview at the first big Dutch C2C conference Let’s Cradle on November 1st and 2nd 2007, Maastricht. Cradle to Cradle, p. 78. http://mbdc.com/images/quote_c2c.gif T.G. Aalbers, F.D. Dietz en D. Nagelhout, Een quick scan van het concept Cradle-to-Cradle in de context van het Nederlandse milieubeleid. Publication number 500086003 (Bilthoven: Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving, 2008), pp. 2-3. Also at: http://www.mnp.nl/nl/publicaties/2008/Eenquick scanvanhetconceptCradle-to-Cradleindecontextvanhet Nederlandsemilieubeleid.html Cradle to Cradle, p. 61. Gregory Bateson, ‘Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization,’ in: Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, 1973), p. 470. Idem, p. 474. Roefie Hueting, as heard on 1 November 2007 at Let’s Cradle in Maastricht. http://www.letscradle.nl/images/stories/200711_maastricht/downloads/Roefie_Hueting_speech_maastricht _c2c_1-11-07.pdf, p.2. David C. Korten, Het bedrijfsleven aan de macht (Rotterdam: Lemniscaat 2003), p. 112. For a short English excerpt, see http://www.pcdf.org/corprule/failure.htm. Cradle to Cradle, p. 66 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 252-257. Mike Davis, ‘A Surplus Humanity?’ in: Planet of Slums (London, New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 174-198. On the colony as outlet for human superfluity, see: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, 1968), pp. 189-191; and Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives. Modernity and its outcasts (Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press, 2004), p. 37-39.
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Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access. How the Shift from Ownership to Access is Transforming Modern Life (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 2000). ‘[Als] het medium milieu is geworden,’ p. 29 in: Henk Oosterling, Radicale Middelmatigheid (Amsterdam: Boom, 2000). http://www.epea.com/english/services/whatweoffer.htm To be found at http://www.materialconnexion.com Cradle to Cradle, pp. 111-112. ‘Pour empêcher le volume du profit de baisser, il faudrait que la productivité d’un nombre de plus en plus réduit d’actifs augmente de plus en plus vite,’ p. 110 in: André Gorz, ‘Crise mondiale, décroissance et sortie du capitalisme’ in: André Gorz, Écologica (Paris: Galilée, 2008), pp. 107-122. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 128. Dennis Kaspori, ‘A communism of ideas: towards an architectural open source practice’ at: http://www.themaze.org/opensource.html, pp. 4-5. Merijn Oudenampsen, ‘Open Source Urbanism: a first step’, Open 15 (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008). André Gorz, Écologica, p. 121. Dennis Kaspori, ‘A communism of ideas,’ pp. 5-6. http://texel.fablab.nl Braungart, interview at Let’s Cradle conference.
Fab Lab’s Sherry Lassiter interviewed by Amir Djalali
Sharing high-end production tools with individual (non-professional) creativity could revolutionize today’s production logic. Empowering individuals and communities with fabrication tools becomes the next challenge for the open source community. Fab Lab is the name of this new approach; its effects on sustainability and the distribution of welfare potentially are promising. An exchange with Sherry Lassiter, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Fab lab country. In the sixties computers were huge machines in the basements of America’s universities. An esoteric discipline, computer science had its own gurus and elected hippy disciples. These people built new narratives to look at the world around us far beyond their expectations. Then came personal computers, the internet and a new generation of geeks (the post-modern version of hippies) who adapted their social and working relations to these new media. In an interconnected world intellectual property is more an obstacle than a form of protection for your work. Sharing your work with other people is not only working ‘against the system’, but it’s also fun and leads to faster technological and human progress for you and your community. And finally came the web 2.0. Sharing became no longer a matter for geeks only, but spread to casual computer users. People could finally become active producers of culture and no longer just passive consumers of commodified ideas. Yet in offline communities far away from our little bedrooms the production of physical objects had changed very little since Henry Ford started massproducing automobiles. In 2001 however Neil Gershenfeld came up with the idea to collect a laser cutter, a precision milling machine (for making circuit boards) and a 3d printer together in a room at the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, connect them to some computers and develop open source software to operate them.
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DIY 2.0
Gershenfeld claimed that with this kind of equipment anyone with a little expertise can ‘make (almost) anything’. The important things were to make access to the equipment easy and spread this model around the world. To do so he chose only commercially available equipment and ensured that all the necessary software was kept free and open source. To facilitate the flow of knowledge and the interconnectedness between the Labs, he provided each of them with VoIP teleconferencing devices. The idea of this Fabrication model based on common technologies spread rapidly. In only seven years 30 Fabrication Labs have been established in locations across the globe and another five are about to be established. The number of Fab Labs doubles every year and a half. The focus of their research varies according to local needs and opportunities: ‘Fab Lab partners are working on creating mesh wireless, ad hoc networks in the Lyngen Alps of Norway to allow shepherds to keep track of their flocks from afar, and to allow fishermen to keep track of their boats at sea. At the Ghana Fab Lab students are working on low-cost designs for mobile refrigeration and TV antennas. In Pabal, India Fab Lab users are making replacement gears for out-of-date copying machines [and] reliable tools for testing milk content and for diagnostics on human blood. At the Costa Rica Fab Lab young people are learning basic electronics and Fabrication – by making functional objects with an array of sensors and actuators. In [the] Boston Fab Lab users make jewelry, toys and crafts using recycled materials from the community.’1 Neil Gershenfeld’s collaborator at CBA, passionate Fab Labber and ‘announcer of the Fab gospel’2 Sherry Lassiter says, ‘If you look at culture there’s a funny model from the forties or the fifties that was almost lost and now it is coming out again. This model is the amateur basement inventor’. It seems we are experiencing a revival of this kind of practice in new and unexpected forms. What and how has this to do with sustainability? Can the technologies produced in a Fab Lab be more energy efficient when thought, designed and applied on a small-scale, communal and local base? And can the Fab Lab paradigm lead to more just and environmentally sound social organizations? We had the chance to speak about these topics with Sherry Lassiter during Amsterdam’s Waag Society’s Fab Lab open day while the local Fabbers were helping crowds of kids design and Fabricate their own candy.
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Energy solutions
New markets
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Amir Djalali How are the Fab Labs engaged in the sustainability battle? Sherry Lassiter There are so many different threads
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here. Fab Lab is now under a lot of pressure for different reasons to come up with energy solutions and reduce the ecological footprint of Fabrication processes. We’re about to start a network in Kenya – specifically two Labs; one is in the city and it has access to all services and network grids. The other is outside the city and is pretty much off the grid. If you look at the Fab Lab in terms of what it can do for that community, it can do a lot because that community has very few high-tech resources at its disposal. So we’re under pressure to come up with a Laboratory that can work with less energy. Normally a Laboratory takes 20 kW to run, which is a lot of power. In this Lab we are going to have 5 kW provided by a combination of solar power and a small generator. Actually, right now it’s working with 3 kW and it’s very difficult for them to add 2 more. We’re under pressure to help them fabricate devices to produce more power in a green, sustainable way. So one of the things they’re doing is planting fields with Jatropha Carcus to make biofuels. Amy Sun, a student at MIT, came up with designs for a small solar-thermal steam turbine to generate mechanical power.3 Through subtractive processes you can actually make something that will take water and directly produce energy without being connected to the power grid. Vicente Guallart4, the architect who started the Barcelona Fab Lab at the Iaac (Catalonian Institute for Advanced Architecture) about two years ago, is working toward establishing a second Fab Lab with zero energy consumption and a zero pollution footprint in a beautiful old farm just outside of the city. They’re concentrating very, very hard on producing energy and on how to use and reuse materials that are locally available. Guallart and the Iaac have been working with us on Internet zero for several years. We are just about to embark on a Fab Lab network-wide project with him regarding the Solar Decathlon in Europe. The goal is to build a solar house in Madrid in May 2010. This will be a collaboration between at least five Fab Labs around the world, plus MIT.5 We are often asked about the ‘big’ successes that have come out of Fab Labs around the world. I’d like to reframe the question: if Fab Labs are about local, grassroots invention and about generating small businesses through invention, then it’s not the ‘big’ successes that you look for, but the little ones. It’s about the small innovator who has an idea that will help her or a small number of people, or a small business. It’s not necessarily about a big sexy idea. It’s about empowerment on a smaller scale, at the local level. So that means a wind powered lamp that hangs on your front porch, or a small alarm system that warns you when the cows cross the fence into the vegetable garden, or a hair dryer that uses just a little less energy. Sometimes invention may lead to larger successes and global impact, but more often than not it leads to local solutions, local empowerment. And that’s where much of the magic and promise of a Fab Lab lies. In the small, in the personal, in a market of 1 or 10 or 100 or 1000 items... not necessarily thousands or millions of fabricated items.
AD This brings us to the true meaning of the Fab Lab model: changing the way we look at the things around us. Fab Labs are about making creativity productive by connecting it at an individual and community level to high-end technology and moving these technologies out of the hands of experts into those of ordinary people. What are your strategies to help this process?
Democratizing technology, by which I mean creating that technology, and rethinking how we look at the ways we produce and share knowledge. Universities are perceived as a rare resource, one to which you must bring your brain to be trained. Given the internet and distance learning tools like teleconferencing, the university is actually almost outdated. Of course there are some things you have to do at universities, but in general to conduct really deep research you don’t need them at all. This is the same idea of distributed access and the democratization of education: you can create your own technological solutions. This implies that people need to change the way they see the world around them. You show that they can change and influence what they always have had to accept. Also this changes the way you look at the market, manufacturing and business models. It’s really personalized. I like the fact that I don’t have to accept these manufacturing models and stores because I can go make my own furniture, my own little electronic gadgets. SL
AD What will be the economic consequences of such a change of perspective?
Big question! I don’t think we’re going to get rid of manufacturing by any means, but I think it will change. It’s very similar to what the personal computer did for desktop publishing. It didn’t get rid of publishing. It actually just created a whole new world. So a change of perspective won’t get rid of manufacturing, just create more, different markets. SL
Sustainability of p2p models
AD In VOLUME 16 Michel Bauwens claimed that ‘we have a false notion of abundance in the physical world and we combine it with the notion that we need to have scarcity in the immaterial world. In other words, we got it wrong in both cases. We are inventing mechanisms that inhibit social cooperation and have a mechanism that destroys the biosphere’. With a P2P model we should be able to turn this false belief around. We need new mechanisms that deal with the world’s finitude, based on ‘free sharing in the immaterial world’. How do Fab Labs deal with the world’s finitude? SL Each Laboratory needs to figure out first what materials are available. We don’t want to dictate what they should and shouldn’t use. Is up to you to choose what is grown, what is natural, or what is available or abundant in your area. We can’t determine that. We can’t determine from the US how the market in India is going, so we leave that up to the Labs to figure out. When there’s scarcity of materials you find new materials too.
We’re working with a group of artists in Capetown one of whom uses kilns to fire pottery. One day she realized that the waste on the inside of the kiln was an interesting material. There’s a lot of it. She took it away, cleaned out the kiln, and made beautiful jewelry out of this totally new material that was in fact a waste product of another process.
The first Neil Gershenfeld class was ‘How to make (almost) anything’; then he gave another class entitled ‘How to make something that makes (almost) anything’ which was really aimed at building the digital fabrication of instruments and doing it with off-the-shelf products which are really cheap.
AD You don’t have any waste and you can recycle as you like...
SL You can, which is wonderful! There are interesting challenges. We use lots of acrylic which is particularly harmful for the environment. How do you replace acrylic? There are materials like acrylic which are difficult to replace, but because you have lots of creativity involved and lots of different situations with different material availability, we will surely come up with solutions for that. AD And the other side of the problem is: how do we manage the abundance of information?
We struggle quite hard against making information scarce. Thankfully Fab Labs seems to attract hackers and people who are really open-source in their ideas and their approach to life. They’re kind of the model for everyone else in the network of how not to hide information, not to keep it secret but share. By sharing you create more and better. If you have a new process and you open it up to everyone, you have more opportunities to improve your product. Take Apple, for instance – take the iPhone. They opened it up to developers to do whatever they want. They worked out a profit-sharing scheme and now you have some of the most wonderful applications for the iPhone. The same happened with desktop publishing. There were many people who were afraid because they thought it would push desktop publishing out of the business. In fact that opened more business opportunities for everyone. I think that’s the same for manufacturing and fabrication. The more open we are the more likely we will open more opportunities and create more business in our market. The next step will be the self-production of all the Fab Lab equipment. The equipment you see here at De Waag in Amsterdam they bought themselves locally. I have to send Fab Labs in less prosperous countries all their equipment. It takes lots of time and money (for import duties) and is just very difficult. Even the American government says, ‘this equipment, these very fast computers may be used by terrorists’, and so on. The idea is that these laboratories will eventually be able to make their own equipment. Thus I could send you a file that has all the plans for the Fab Lab equipment and you could make it all there. A Fab Lab making a Fab Lab. Of many Fab Labs in India I shipped only one there. One Fab Lab can literally make a hundred. SL
AD
Making physical things living
AD I would like to ask you more on this ‘Bits and Atoms’ concept. What is this idea about?
We are at a point where information is physical. It equates logic and form. The logic is embedded in the form. When you talk about smart buildings you’re talking about a building that has sensors everywhere, possibly even in the paint on the walls, etc. All of a sudden you’re not talking anymore about two separate things, sensors and computational devices are part of the physical structures. You can make materials that incorporate the data, the power and the structure all in one piece. These are simple examples of how function could be embedded in form. That world becomes programmable. What happens when digital bits of the world become physical atoms? How do you program that world? How do you design that world? What are the algorithms that make it work?
SL
AD Can this be seen as a total and ecological way of thinking, bringing a sort of ‘life’ to physical objects which can start behaving accordingly with their environment through feedback processes?
In a way it’s kind of getting back to the idea of DNA and RNA, to very basic biological principles. DNA is a code; the way it is put together makes a human or other living beings. The idea is that you can have a sort of DNA for a light or a table, for example. We take a code that happens to be embedded in physical objects send it a message and the object becomes what we ask it do become. Basically, it’s putting this kind of biological element in physical structures. SL
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http://Fab.cba.mit.edu/about http://Fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/MIT/863.05/people/ lass/Lasspage.html http://www.media.mit.edu/physics/publications/ theses/06.08.Sun.pdf http://www.iaac.net/web/en/index.php See last year’s winners and entries at: http://www.solardecathlon.org/
Are these machines open source?
No, but they will be. The open source hacker community is a large community now and they’re tired of paying thousands of dollars for a laser cutter or a milling machine. Actually, a milling machine is fairly pretty easy to replicate. So once you’ve designed your own for 1000 dollars you can easily build more. In most countries everything you need to build those machines is there, so why pay 10 to 25 thousand dollars if you can make it yourself? It’s a lot of work, but eventually you get it down to a science. There are lots of people working on open source milling machines, open source modelers, cutters, etc.
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Kelly Dobson’s ScreamBody is a portable space for screaming. When a user needs to scream but is in any number of situations where it is just not permitted, ScreamBody silences the user’s screams so they may feel free to vocalize without fear of environmental retaliation. This Fab Lab program is part of the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms which broadly explores how the content of information relates to its physical representation.
Photo Corine Smith
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Leah, Birdtown Community Garden
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Volume 18
Urban Agriculture
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Debra Solomon
Imagine a future in which agriculture and city life won’t be torn apart any longer, in which food production will be part of the urban landscape. Debra Solomon gives a sneak preview, suggesting to connect food production with urban culture.
· In Dar es Salaam, urban agriculture forms at least 60% of the informal employment sector and urban agriculture is the second largest urban employer (20%). In 1991, the individual urban farmer’s annual average profit was estimated at 1.6 times the annual minimum salary. · In Addis Ababa, even the smallest-scale backyard producers with very low capital earn large profits. · In Nairobi in the early 1990s, agriculture provided the highest self-employment earnings among small-scale enterprises and the third highest earnings in all of urban Kenya. · In Mexico City pork production can improve household earnings 10% – 40%, vegetable and legume production up to 80%, and urban cowshed-based milk can supply up to 100% of a household’s income.1
Big numbers! Besides the economic benefits for poor urban dwellers in developing countries, UA triggers the development of economic and urban planningrelated proximity tools that could help the management of urban inefficiencies in developed countries as well. UA stimulates micro-enterprises related to growing activities, which may include the collection and composting of urban waste flows, production of organic pesticides, fabrication of tools and the delivery of water. UA is a solution for waste disposal, turning urban wastes into a productive resource. UA can initiate the greening of a city by transforming empty and underused spaces into green zones, maintaining buffer and reserve zones free of housing and it has a positive impact on the urban microclimate in terms of shade, temperature and sequestration of CO2. In North America a form of small-scale commercial urban farming called SPIN (small plot intensive) has appeared in large cities, utilizing ‘under-programmed’ backyards and lots as a land base to grow high-value, quickly maturing crops (lettuce, herbs, micro-greens, radishes) on 60 cm x 7.5 meter allotments spread throughout the city. SPIN farming promises high profits due to low initial investment, low overhead, proximity to buyers and by choosing high-value crops.
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Cultured and Landscaped Urban Agriculture
After a brief appearance in The Victory Garden followed by decades of obscurity, urban agriculture (UA) is being rediscovered as a strategic tool for sustainability and is being touted as an emerging trend in Western cities. Currently UA features prominently in artsy social cohesion projects and designer-rich urban regeneration schemes. But a truly visionary role for UA, one that takes into account both urban and regional planning and that accesses the rich cultural heritage of landscape architecture, has yet to arrive. Urban agriculture has great potential as a strategic tool for environmental sustainability, food sovereignty and social cohesion, but it is not a magic wand. UA has been a prominent feature of many cities in developing countries after the seventies when ‘Free Trade Agreements’ exposed weak southern food markets to the aggression of highly subsidized Western agricultural products. Because this made local crops no longer profitable, rural agriculture the world over transformed itself to export crop-monocultures and there was a spontaneous development of UA. In all cases UA increases the efficiency of national food systems by supplying perishable products like vegetables, fresh dairy and poultry to population centers, decreasing food miles – the distance between field and fork – and by providing a diversity of jobs and incomes in the cities.
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UA’s biggest challenge in Europe will be its integration into city planning and infrastructure so that city dwellers can access its benefits. UA’s second biggest challenge will be to grow, harvest and sow its own cultural heritage to forge a sumptuously visual identity, resplendent with vital cultural programming and content. A shining example of urban agriculture: Cuba
Cuba plunged into deep economic crisis in the 1990s when with the collapse of the Soviet Union it lost its biggest export client (80%) and its biggest supplier of petrol and fertilizer. Until this time Cuba was importing 100% of its wheat, 57% of its calories, 48% of its fertilizers and 97% of its animal feed. During the height of the crisis, Cuba experienced a 70% reduction to its food supply! The response to this critical disruption was spontaneous, individual and later government supported urban agriculture. Within a year the Cuban government was urging citizens to use every possible bit of land to grow food and supported these efforts with enviable access to agricultural research, workshops and all manner of infrastructural assistance. One of the reasons for UA’s phenomenal success in Cuba was the educated, cultured urban population which was open to the notion and poised for interaction with these agricultural research networks. Presently Cuba is considered a living laboratory of how small urban farms and gardening collectives can successfully provide significant portions of the urban food supply despite extreme energy descent or financial crisis. It is also the Cuban people’s familiarity with the cultural infrastructure that allowed their grassroots production to flourish. The Continuous Productive Urban Landscape or CPUL
London-based Bohn & Viljoen Architects are proponents of bringing UA into European cities and have sketched scenarios regarding how it could be implemented into a European context. In their book CPULs: Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: designing urban agriculture for sustainable cities, Bohn & Viljoen propose a positively radical notion of grooming productive urban landscapes into continuous spaces. Their new urban design strategy would alter the appearance of contemporary cities towards an ‘unprecedented naturalism’. Think intermittent small-scale and professional urban agriculture, allotment gardens, increased biodiversity, informal micro-economies and micro-farmer’s markets, decreased carbon emissions, abundant car-free corridors and strategically connected green space. Growing food in the contemporary urban space, CPULs would be formally and programmatically similar to urban parks. Weaving agricultural zoning with extant urban green and brown, farmers’ markets and leisure spaces, in CPUL city-planning well-being is a central and distinguishing factor, if not completely seductive.
pedestrian and bike traffic barriers; they also provide physical platforms for lounging or walking under a draping plant canopy. The crop is a veritable Encyclopaedia Brassica and would include broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflowers, romanescas and kales in colors ranging from darkest purple and reddish black to pale lavenders and silver greens. A redbor kale would feel like a tree right out of a Dr. Seuss book with its stunning vegetation, exquisite palette and its leaves which collect raindrops that resemble diamonds. Vertical gardening and urban tree screens:
Trained along southern building façades and connected to the windowsills and balconies of existing architecture, passers-by gaze upon textured and verdant walls. From inside the building poetic silhouetted leaf outlines, colorful filtered light and beautiful shadows are on display. A salade façade of leafy greens and a courbis trellis for vigorously climbing pumpkins, squash and calabash flowering in whites and warm yellows during growing seasons. Fruit and nut trees, planted espalier style, not only provide locally grown fruit for the neighborhood, they also further enhance the colorful landscape with flurries of blossom snowfall in pinks and whites. Nut and fruit trees are also beneficial as bee, bird and butterfly attractors. The fruit tree flowers and aromatic herbs growing at their feet are the food of honeybees whose hives are situated in rooftop gardens. Green lungs and phytoremediation planting zones:
Certain plants are prized for their phytoremediation. They can cleanse the air, soil and water of pollutants, improve the environment, and can actually remove pollutants better than any other method aside from avoiding polluting in the first place. For example, planting successive crops of spinach is a proven and inexpensive way to remove bio-available lead from soils. A heavy-metal accumulator, the harvested spinach is removed and treated as contaminated waste, and can even be harvested for heavy metals. Other flowering trees and shrubs have proven themselves effective filters for minute particles and exhaust fumes. Landscaping with plants characterized as ‘edible’ brings extra attention to the relationship between environment and local sources of pollution. The neighbors are all wondering, ‘when will our spinach be clean enough to use as ravioli filling?’ Traffic zones:
Verges, roundabouts and pathways can be heavily planted with phytoremediators in order to become the area’s green lungs. While visible and diverse food growing is known to increase a feeling of safety and well-being in the community, landscaping traffic zones with edible planting focuses attention on local sources of pollution. Herbal lawns:
Food in the ‘hood
What might growing and preparing food look like in the urban setting? Imagine an exuberant, edible landscape architecture including the following elements: Raised beds:
Planted with seasonal food crops and corresponding to the existing architecture, raised beds also serve as
Almost ubiquitous as a public groundcover, grass is too delicate, easily worn by use and creates a resourcesucking monoculture. Replacing grasses with a collection of herbs provides clear visual and aromatic markers for pedestrian use vs. sitting areas. Softer herbs (e.g. varieties of chamomile, marjoram and woolly ground mints) are suitable for picnic and lounge areas while pedestrian routes can be planted with sturdier herbs
Organoponico Pueblo Grifo Nuevo, Cienfuegos, Cuba. Photo Bohn&Viljoen Architects
like varieties of low-growing thyme. A bit of rain plus the simple act of treading and suddenly the landscape is perfumed. Water plant zones, ponds, rain harvesting storage and run-off:
Water for landscaping can be harvested and stored in sculptural troughs, raised mini-aqueducts, ponds and fountains. Planted with water herbs like cress and designed to be beautiful and functional both empty and full, the water-storage zones will serve to irrigate the present landscape architecture. Planting and stocking the ponds with insect-eating fish will mitigate mosquito growth. A neighborhood with a rich insecteating biotope (birds, bats, frogs and fish) will also keep the mosquitoes at bay. Cooking facilities:
A vanguard food-in-the-’hood design strategy would combine lush productive landscapes with an array of semi-public communal cooking facilities at the street and semi-private level. Imagine a Kitchen Clubhouse, for example, situated in a central square and visible from the flats above. Beautifully designed in rugged stainless steel, it would incorporate a pizza oven, an array of flatbread irons and BBQ grills intended for both large and small groups. A caretaker-baker-cum-events-coordinator would ensure the space was stocked and maintained, programmed with a diversity of events, and open at convenient times for neighborhood use. The Kitchen Clubhouse would be the focus of bread baking lessons for young children, an after school drop-in pizza club for school students and could function as a daytime facility for the elderly. In the early evening local bad boys would jam on the flatbread irons like a steel drum band – and also develop a small, semi-legal focaccia business supplying the surrounding area with aromatic breads. The Kitchen Clubhouse would also provide basic food preparation facilities for people to use after Saturday’s organic farmers’ market. On Sundays picnic benches would be made available for families to meet and singles to mingle. The Clubhouse would also host the monthly meetings of the International Centre for Strudel Innovation. It is worth mentioning that our cities are already filled with Kitchen Clubhouses in the form of un(der)used kitchens in churches, community centers, day-care centers and schools. Though underused, these facilities come with existing programming and are culturally embedded in their communities. Just as the CPUL connects and expands the green dots of the city, community cooking infrastructure and social networks are valuable urban eco-system resources. Communal kitchens and dining spaces:
At a semi-private level, the ground floors or lobbies of apartment buildings would house communal kitchens and dining spaces for use by all of the building’s inhabitants for gatherings of varying scale. This could be the dawn of the dinner-party renaissance. Multifamily or block-party style dinners could add to the conviviality of the neighborhood as a whole, reflecting ambience back into the building. During the day the kitchen could function part-time as a high-quality cooking studio catering to the elderly or folks just interested in a delicious home-cooked meal.
Food preparation and storage:
Each apartment building’s communal kitchen would also support garden-related food preparation. The kitchen facility could be a storage and distribution center where the fruit harvest from the neighborhood’s own trees could be kept in cold storage and from which it could be distributed to the block’s inhabitants. The communal kitchen is also a distribution center, receiving orders of prepared ingredients from the local food producers, caterers, plus the cheesemonger from the Saturday market. There would be well-planned storage space for jams and preserves with freezer space enough for the lamb that the people in apartments 1 2-15 bought together. Waste:
In the unlikely event that any of this delicious food were not eaten (and in the likely event of kitchen waste), an in-house worm composting facility would ensure that waste is recycled within the area. A designed urbanite adventure into progressive food sovereignty: In terms of city planning, embedding the growing and production of food is regularly cited as a way to increase a neighborhood’s quality of life and social cohesion, simultaneously eradicating the problems associated with bringing industrially produced food into the city. Traditionally applied in urban areas deemed in need of a ‘lift’, urban agriculture is well known for its positive effects. An affluent neighborhood has enormous potential as a laboratory for exceptional food-rich scenarios, going way beyond apartment adjacent allotments and amplifying the apartment kitchen with additional facilities. Culturally productive urban foodscapes or CPUF
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Saint-Vâtienne public landscape architecture featuring curly and red kales, fennel and bananas.
Parts of this text have previously appeared in Cultureel Magazine voor de Toekomst van het Olympischgebied (Diana Krabbendam ed., Beach Company: Amsterdam, 2008) as well as in Actions: What You Can Do With the City (SUN Publishers/CCA: Amsterdam, 2008).
Photo Debra Solomon / culiblog.org
Volume 18
Does all of this sound like hippy holistics? Opulent productive planting and well-designed Kitchen Clubhouses would increase neighborhood interaction with the public domain, expanding the experience of the private domain in its wake. From an urban development point of view, that is like producing 50% more real estate which is just good business. The era has dawned for urban planners, designers and (landscape) architects to commit themselves to knitting urban agriculture and adjacent infrastructures into urban planning in the most exquisite way. This means making another sort of spatial continuity in the form of the culturally productive urban foodscape (CPUF) in which facilities, activities and platforms for (food-related) cultural content are facilitated and connected to the edible landscape architecture. In our future designs let us connect not only the dots of green and brown, but include the stainless steel and the thriving communities into our visions of the continuous productive urban landscape. What an inspiring notion that urban agriculture could be pivotal in shaping a future in which a well-designed, visually inspired and accessible urban food supply has tremendous impact on the texture and tone of urban culture.
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Volume 18
Steef Buijs
Steef Buijs’ training as an urban planner was back in the sixties, so world food problems were not part of his original ‘mindset’ as a planning professional. During his work however he encountered these problems increasingly often and achieved growing insight into how these relate to urban development all over the world. What follows is an account of these experiences, resulting in his present view on how ongoing urbanization might help solve the food crisis. Urbanization: problem or solution?
My first major encounter with global food problems was in the eighties while working on master plans for the Greater Jakarta Area and the Greater Surabaya Area. We had to accommodate growth in Jakarta from about 20 to 30 million inhabitants in slightly over ten years and in Surabaya the figures were from 6 to 12 million during the same time span. In both cases we were dealing with a doubling of the population. Given lower densities due to general income growth and with additional space required for economic functions, infrastructure, leisure, etc, the total amount of land occupied by these urban conglomerates would increase by somewhere between 200 and 300%. At that time it was common wisdom that such rates of urban growth – which were by no means typical for Indonesia but occurred all over Asia, Africa and South and Central America – would spell disaster for our planet as well as for the millions (or rather billions) of people migrating to the cities. But shortly after my
Control of urban sprawl
The second lesson I learned was that often the demand for new urban land was satisfied in a highly inefficient way, destroying much more agricultural production capacity than was necessary. In Surabaya for instance, small pockets of residential development were initiated all over the urban periphery, disrupting the irrigation system in a much wider area than was actually occupied. Sometimes up to ten times as much land went to waste as was directly used for urban expansion. So the gap between urban food demand and rural production capacity that resulted from urban population growth on the one hand and stagnating rural production capacity on the other hand widened even more and did so unnecessary quickly. Here the lesson was that we needed much stricter development control, resulting in more concentrated expansion patterns. Assisted transition rather than compensation
The third lesson had to do with the farmers who had to surrender their land to urban expansion and who were usually compensated monetarily. In most cases the compensation was unfairly low and farmers could not use the money in a productive way. They spent the compensation on consumption and soon had no choice but to join the urban underclass with its precarious existence at the margins of the city economy. Here a solution might be to compensate farmers not in money, but in land elsewhere. Although this would necessarily be less land (say 50%) than their original holding due to the general ‘land hunger’ of the city, when combined with training and investment subsidies to make the transition to more productive/higher value added activities (e.g., fruit, vegetables, spices, dairy, eggs, livestock) it might still offer them a higher income while maintaining their status as independent producers.
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Metropolitan Agriculture and Global Food Problems
arrival in Jakarta a senior planner with the city administration explained to me that in fact the opposite would be the case. Vast rural migration was the only available sustainable solution. The real disaster was expected when all these people stopped migrating to the city. On the island of Java the increase of land-productivity for growing rice and other staples was reaching its limits. Further growth of the rural population could not be sustained by higher production, nor could the increasing demand from fast-growing urban populations be met. The worst that could (and did) happen was an extension of the amount of arable land by felling forests higher up the slopes of the mountain range that forms the ‘spine’ of the island. This led to large-scale destruction of habitats and biodiversity and caused extensive erosion, landslides and the flooding of lowlying, densely populated areas. Yearly flooding of large parts of Jakarta was largely due to this development. That was why my colleague – though not every environmentalist would agree – was convinced that the only sustainable solution was to accommodate and even stimulate the migration of surplus rural population to the cities. Of course this would further accelerate urban growth and hence urban food demand, widening the gap with the production capacity of the countryside. In the case of Indonesia this might be compensated for by supplying rice and other staples from other, less densely populated parts of the country. It would otherwise have to be sourced on the world market and paid for by export revenues from industrial or service activities.
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Moreover, retaining half the rural land within the expansion of the city in a checker board pattern would help give the city a more green and pleasant feel (especially for open field production of fruit, vegetables and spices for livestock is more difficult to integrate in the urban environment). The role of a changing diet
Yet such a transition from staple food production to more intensive crops and livestock would not solve the problem of the widening gap between growing urban needs and diminishing rural production capacity for rice and other staples. Here, however, a general shift in eating patterns in the urban population may help. The urban population, especially the rapidly expanding middle class, works in less physically demanding occupations and needs less energy from their food intake. That means a considerable reduction of per capita rice consumption, while on the other hand higher incomes increase the demand for more tasty, healthy and luxurious foods such as dairy, meat, fruit and vegetables. In the end this shift in eating patterns will hopefully compensate for the decreasing capacity to produce staples while at the same time the integration of urban expansion and intensive metropolitan agriculture will hopefully fully meet the demand for more varied and more valuable alternatives.
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Agroparks
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This kind of transition in feeding and food production patterns forms the link to my recent spatial design activities with ‘agroparks’ in China and India. Using state of the art technology, the productive capacity of these agroparks is extremely high as compared to more traditional growing methods while at the same time they are entirely sustainable in terms of energy consumption, waste handling, water management, etc. Agroparks meet the following general characteristics: • they are closed systems designed to minimize water use, optimize use of nutrients, eliminate pesticides, minimize environmental impact, and improve working conditions; • they are large-scale and especially designed for animal production so that economically viable slaughterhouses can be included in the agropark meaning that the transportation of live animals would not be necessary which is good for animal welfare, prevents spreading of diseases and saves on transportation costs; • they are an industrial ecology and are thus a mix of functions/activities so that the waste from one activity can be used as input for another, e.g., pig manure to produce bio-gas as an energy source for cooling or heating greenhouses. When properly matched, this offers complete independence from fossil energy sources; • they have state-of-the-art food quality, food safety and comfort; and • they pay relatively high wages which are related to extensive training programs to improve skill levels. Agroparks directly serve vast urban populations and also function as focal points for the transformation of vast rural areas where they help farmers produce more efficiently and with less use of fertilizer and pesticides while delivering better quality and getting better prices for their produce. They also facilitate farmers entry to the world market.
In the support they offer farmers agroparks combine the grassroots approach from the Indonesian case with a high-tech approach using ‘rural transformation centers’ as linking pins. These centers establish a network across the countryside and are centered on an agropark. They help small farmers improve their productivity, profitability and quality/safety while also acting as a collection center for produce (fulfilling high standards as required by middle class consumers in urban markets) to be processed in agroparks and distributed to urban markets. They could also offer collective facilities (cold storage, conditioned transportation, access to cheap loans, training, etc.) and serve as a community center (education, health care, special programs for women, etc.). Two basic types of agriculture worldwide
In the end we will see a global distinction of just two basic types of agriculture. On one hand we will have the production of staples on large scale farms in sparsely populated areas, sometimes still within reach of urban concentrations but increasingly far away (such as in Australia, the US, the Ukraine, Brazil, etc). The faster the urban population grows and hence the faster the transition from traditional to modern eating patterns, the more opportunities will arise in these areas to shift to alternative crops such as animal fodder, bio-energy production, fibers and other industrial raw materials. So long as these transition processes are mutually balanced they need not result in a continuing rise in the prices of staples. This might be overly optimistic, but in the long run staple food production and the production of animal fodder, energy crops and industrial raw materials may peacefully co-exist within the same space without land scarcity-driven encroachment on natural reserves. On the other hand we will see highly specialized and highly productive agriculture within urban networks: ‘metropolitan agriculture’. This kind of agriculture will no longer be a typical feature of the countryside, outside the city and separated from the urban area, but will be fully integrated in the urban fabric. A truly sustainable city/metropolis/metropolitan network absorbs the lion’s share of the agricultural production needed to feed its inhabitants. Characteristic of this kind of metropolitan agriculture will be a combination of high quality products at a relatively low price (with maximum responsiveness to changes in demand patterns), fair incomes for primary producers, considerable additional employment and earning opportunities for intermediate industries and services, and full sustainability over the whole chain from production to consumption. There is one very fundamental condition, however, that must be met in order to make this utopian picture come true: sufficient income growth for the urban population as a result of the rapid development of industrial and service economies, including a fair distribution of the gains of such development over the entire working force.
CPUL:
Continuous Productive Urban Landscape
Continuous Productive Urban Landscape is a design strategy for the coherent introduction of urban agriculture into new and existing cities. It proposes the creation of city-traversing networks of productive open space, integrating urban agriculture fields and gardens. London CPUL:
are various design proposals from the last 10 years exploring how, why and where CPUL could be implemented.
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Food is the most consumed commodity. At its basic level it is not subject to consumer choice. It is essential, and thus it is essential to consider how food can be produced and supplied in ways that minimize its negative environmental impact and maximise its quality and our quality of life. CPUL attempts to create urban environments with food and for food providing more experience with less consumption.
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obesity treatment
total financial return from all allotments
greens and less processed food, in short, they produce less foodmiles and eat more healthily. Gillean Denny Allotments – Generating a Sustainable Lifestyle, 2008
The P. £9bn was the estimated total economic,
environmental and social cost of food transport. Moreover, obesity cost the NHS £1bn.
= food
food transported %
The validity of Food Miles as indicator... Report for DEFRA, 2005 + UK public accounts committee, 2007
The V. Every £10 spent with a local food initiative
is worth £25 for the local area, compared with just £14 when spent in a supermarket.
100
goods heavy
vehicles led
d travel tance of foo average dis
50
(Local food better) New Economics Foundation, 2001, year
0
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
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The P. The quantity of food transported by heavy goods vehicles in the UK doubled between 1974 and 2005.
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www.neweconomics.org/gen/m6_i121_news.aspx
The validity of Food Miles as indicator... Report for DEFRA, 2005 + Angela Paxton Food Miles, 2002
The Pragmatic and the Dreamer (UK-centred) dialogue on our society’s relation to food and the city (2008)
=
value
Space requirements
Exploded London (1998) Adding an extra 30% to London’s surface area, would provide space for cultivating all of London’s fruit and vegetable requirements, without using
In a less-energy intensive city, what would we keep, what would we change? For food, fruit and vegetables provide the highest nutrient/energy yield per unit area, therefore it makes sense to localize their production. This is neither a new nor a ‘peak-oil’ concept: In 1826, Johann Heinrich von Thünen developed a land use pattern for feeding cities. His proposals minimized transportation and accommodated crop yield and durability. They are one of CPUL’s references when designing urban corridors, i.e. for transport, ecological diversity, heat island mitigation – and space for food growing next to residents.
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any existing open space.
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How to make a CPUL
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Bring your own city. Map all your existing open spaces, and connect them through green infrastructures. Insert agriculturally productive land. Feed your city!
RIVERfrom London LeisurESCAPE (2003) : It could take 1 hour to cycle THAM ES Tate Modern to East Croydon. It does take 1 hour by car.
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A Continuous Productive Urban Landscape needs to be considered in future urban planning as Essential Infrastructure – just as roads are now. An inventory of open spaces will be created exploring a city’s suitability for urban food growing. These will then be connected via new routes offering fast and safe ways through the city.
es la n
l side each to
eading to
Currently underused open space Existing large car parks (now semi-buried) Existing playgrounds and playing fields Small specific leisure buildings
N WEL WELL GREE L ROAD A215 towards CAMBER
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Continuous landscape Existing parks LeisurEscape map extract: CPUL from Tate Modern to Burgess Park
on Lond only
built park
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2-w
Things to do
Things worth countering: food deserts, food scandals, dietary and lifestyle related ill-health (obesity, heart disease, diabetes) [6] Things worth having: rediscovering seasonality, being adjacent to green space, convivial, populated landscape, visually shared space, organic ornament [7] Things worth encouraging: waste as a resource, composing and reusing sewage as a nutrient for soil, gardening to earn a living, urban farmers [8] Strategies 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11
12
Work with local food groups Stage events, create meeting occasions Combine top down and bottom up strategies Map physical resources, land, water & sun No waste systems: compost, grow, eat, compost Ecological intensification on open urban space New economic models & fair trade for farmers Think 3d, raised beds, walls, roofs, fences See the potential for urban agriculture as organic ornament Low-density strategies (ca. 90 persons/ha): suburban, cyclable, edible landscape intensification Mid-density strategies (ca. 200 persons/ha): mixed use, walkable, high capacity for ecological construction High-density strategies (ca. 450 persons/ha): mixed use, walkable, energy & resource intensive construction
CPUL installation, 100% Design, London 2008
London LeisurEscape, 2003
Urban Nature Towers, London 1999
Food and the Randstad Metropolis Van Bergen Kolpa Architects
Can we maintain this system of productive landscapes any longer or should we consider new crops, new products and even a new Dutch cuisine? What is the future, spatial and gastronomic potential of the Dutch landscape if it becomes progressively wetter? If we see the Randstad as a contemporary city, the green areas within it are the city parks. For decades we have been fashioning these areas for living and working in, and for food. It has produced beautiful landscapes, which we cherish as the Dutch ‘polder’ landscape. However, due to climate changes rainwater patterns will drastically alter in decades to come and the sea water table will rise. The current flexibility and absorption capacity of the soil in the region will no longer be sufficient against the forces of rising water levels. Added to which, geological forces will shift the Dutch geological plate over a diagonal line. The east will rise further and the west will sink even deeper under sea level. Water in all forms will become an increasingly dominant factor and will drastically change the Dutch landscape. The sophisticated system of ditches, canals, waterways and dikes is beginning to give way under growing water pressure. Our familiar lush green polder landscape will become waterlogged, brackish and saline.
and cabbage varieties. Small livestock like sheep and goats raised on saline land will meet a need for halal meat for the growing multicultural Randstad population. In the brackish transitional zones eel can be fished and an abundance of crustaceans and shellfish produced. It will be a paradise for birds like geese and duck. Inner urban environments will lie in the saline landscape like fresh water linchpins, forming smallscale horticultural land for watercress, watermint and allium. The terraced hillsides of the most eastern areas will create first wet and then dry soils for rice, barley, oats and grain crops. Further inland flourishing rivers will flow into fishponds for the farming of bass and carp. And lastly, forests and foreland will take over on a small scale the milk and meat production which previously took place in the polders. Dutch Randstad cuisine of the future: Flow Food
If we consider what the Dutch Randstad of 2040 will look like under the influence of culinary planning, we will see a veritable metamorphosis. By unleashing both the salt and fresh water forces on the landscape an as yet unknown rich biodiversity will start to flourish. This landscape will take on many spatial forms and characteristics thus firing the imagination. Also, the undertaking will be in the best Dutch tradition. We will adapt our resilient landscape to contemporary demands. If ancient crops are cultivated once more, certain dishes will become fashionable again – dishes that meet a need for quality and ‘honest’ food. Take, for example, what was once food for the poor: sea lavender, which grows in saline soil. These days it is considered to be a delicacy. The dominant role of both fresh and salt water in the near future is regarded as a positive factor for the landscape and its productive qualities. A transition will take place, from defensive planning entailing the production of butter, cheese and eggs to a dynamic and diversified culinary planning; the new landscape kitchen of the Dutch Randstad.
This text was based on the project Flow Food (Research & design 2005) executed by: Van Bergen Kolpa Architecten Bureau Lofvers Alterra Wageningen, Vincent Kuypers Z&M delicatessen, Rob Baris
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New landscapes
The basis of the new landscape is the result of an exchange between salt and fresh water. Future coastal developments will create gradual transitions between the land and the sea such as lagoons and marshlands where algae and sea vegetables flourish. High drifting sand dunes will generate a wild environment for juniper bushes and sea buckthorn, from which pleasant wines and preserves can be made. Rising water levels will turn the lower parts of the Randstad Metropolis into a rich and diverse landscape. The region of polders and drained lakes once reclaimed from the sea will provide opportunities for new agro-production, precisely because of the environments abounding in water. The salt water will slowly percolate to the surface of our precious agricultural land and create fertile ground for sea vegetables such as sea lavender, sea asparagus
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Randstad menu [from west to east] Sea [Salt + Wet]
Oysters in an aspic of seawater and agar with salicornia. Salad of different kinds of seaweed, served in a small glass. Roll of egg, smoked salmon and nori seaweed. Dunes [Fresh + Dry]
Crudités (from the dune) with sand carrot, wild and cultivated arugula, sand leek, baby sand potatoes, rape greens and quail egg. White wine from Westland grapes. Polders [Salt + Wet]
Saddle of lamb with parsnip and sea lavender. Gravy of braised lamb and onion. Terraces [Fresh + Wet]
Salad of barley with Dutch marsh herbs, including watercress, wild chives, dandelion leaves, watermint. Hills [Fresh + Dry]
Selection of Dutch farmhouse cheeses with pear syrup. Parfait of lavender ice-cream with raspberry sauce. Valley [Fresh + Wet]
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Coffee with nut cookies.
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Sea
Salt + Wet Lagoon: Tide Landscape New developments
Sweet + Dry Dunes The Hague
Sweet + Wet Creek and Polder Rotterdam
Laver Bread served on Fried Bread
Marsh Samphire
Carragheen Soup
Charcoal Grilled Fish on Fennel
Sea Macro-Alga: Kombu, Wakamé, Nori, Aramé, Hiziki, Dulse
Lagoon Crustacean and Shellfish: Clam, Cockle, Mussel, Oyster, Winkle, Shrimp et cetera
Dunes Sand Leek / Carragheen / Sand Potatoes / Asparagus / Rocket / Hawthorn / Juniper / Rose Hip / Elder / Rabbit / Duck / Rapeseed / Quail
Polder Cranberry / Sorrel / Fungi / Clover / Dandelion / Hop / Nettle / Red Clover / Rhubarb / Deer / Moose
Saltwaterfish / Shellfish Menu 280505: Oyster in a Jelly of Seawater and Agar-agar with Samphire Salad of Seaweed Roll of Egg, Smoked Salmon and Nori
Nori / Laver / Sea Lettuce / Sweet Oar Weed – Marsh Samphire / True Samphire / Sea Purslane / Sea Pea / Sea Lavender / Sea Beet / Sea Kale
Menu 280505: Salad of Carragheen, Rucola, Sand Leek, Sand Potatoe, Rapeseed and Quail Egg
Creek Hazel /Oak / Sweet Chestnut / Almond / Birch / Wild strawberry / Elder / Lime
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Salt + Wet
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Salt + Wet Brackish Polder Gouda
Hill Utrechtse Heuvelrug / Zeist
Sweet + Wet Valley Gelderse Vallei
Watercress Soup
Blackberry and Apple Pie
Summer Pudding
Reservoir Sweetwater Fish / Alga / Shelffish / Eel / Snail / Reed / Duck / Goose / Quail / Wood Pigeon / Deer / Moose /
Pond Alga / Sweetwater Fish / Duck / Goose / Quail / Wood Pigeon / Horseradish / Watercress / Watermint / Allium / Sage / Chives / Parsley / Sorrel / Camomilla / Hop / Nettle / Elderberry / Landcress
Slope Oats / Millet / Bulgur / Sorghum / Spelt / Lavender / Grapes / Hogweed
Foreland Sheep / Cows / Sweetwater Fish / Apple / Cherry / Crab Apple / Pear / Blackcurrent / Redcurrent / Lime
Menu 280505: Lamb with Parsnip and Sea Lavender, Stewed Onion Volume 18
Terraces Utrecht
Sweet + Dry
Leg of Lamb with Mint and Mint Chutney
Brackish Polder Sea Lavender / Sea Purslane / Sea Beet / Sea Kale / Sea Camomile / Sea Grass / Green Cabbage / Brussel Sprouts / Kohlrabi / Fennel / Parsnip / Turnip / Sheep, Lamb /
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Sweet + Wet
Terraces Watercress / Rice / Purslane / Lamb’s Lettuce / Hemp Nettle / Scorzonera / Rye / Barley Menu 280505: Salad of Millet with Watercress, Chives, Dandelion and Watermint
Forest Almond / Beech / Birch / Elder / Hazel / Oak / Sweet Chestnut / Wild Strawberry / Bramble / Broom / Wild Cherry / Wild Raspberry / Blackberry / Juniperberry / Menu 280505: Cheese with Pearsyrup and Nuts Parfait of Lavender with Raspberrysauce
Forest Cows /Fungi / Juniperberry / Blueberry / Pine-tree / Rhubarb / Heather
Loisaida Gardens Michela Pasquali
9th&C community garden Photo di Enrico Vicenti
The Mendez Mural Garden Photo Michela Pasquali
La lucha continua at La Plaza Cultura Garden Photo Michela Pasquali
A new Loisaida garden Photo di Michela Pasquali
Casita portorriqueña at the Bello Amanecer Borincano Photo di Michela Pasquali
Brisas del Caribe Photo di Michela Pasquali
East Side Story Photo di Michela Pasquali
Erika Jacobs Lord
The S-word is ubiquitous in the media today. But what is design practice telling and selling? This spring a group of urban and interior design masters students at the MAHKU (Utrecht, the Netherlands) examined what is being promoted in different parts of the world in order to produce a picture of sustainability delivered by the designers themselves showing what is going on off the pages of academic papers. One of the students, Erica Jacobs Lord presents some results of their investigation.
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Sustainability in Practice
Our research was conceived along broadly regional lines: US, UK, Europe, Japan, Australia, China and various Asian countries. We relied on companies’ websites as the most accurate and up-to-date source of information and let them demonstrate their views on sustainability. We set off on our data collection with no presuppositions. Understanding what is meant by sustainability is a slippery fish at best. Learning about it at the mercy of architectural firms across the globe was like catching minnows in an ocean, but the effort delivered fascinating results. From the more than fifty architecture office websites we combed for information we culled a list of services offered and techniques for sustainable building. While some concepts were found across the board, others were of specialized interest in response to local conditions. For example, using biomass as a tool is important in urban areas while less crucial in rural ones where vegetation is more plentiful. Yet despite differences in scale and location, the ultimate goal of building in harmony with the environment as well as the intention to improve living conditions were the top concerns shared by our worldwide sample. Each company was given a point for each sustainable aspect, technique or technology they apply and these points were then tallied. When averaged per office per country, the UK topped the list followed by the US and Japan. While our sample was relatively small, it is clear that larger and wealthier countries have the resources (or the need or privilege) to look at sustainability. While overall the UK had fewer offices on our list than the US, involvement per office was greater due to the number of intense, multifaceted approaches being employed. The Hockerton Housing Project (http://www.hockertonhousingproject.org.uk) stood far beyond the rest in terms of combining solutions devised by its ‘eco-builder’ founders. Not just a design exercise, living at Hockerton is a self-sufficient way of life in which water, waste and energy management are daily concerns. Going ‘off-grid’ seems to be popular with those looking for total self-sufficiency. And Americans being Americans, they don’t hold back: the CalEarth project (http://www.calearth.org/) builds structures that look like they come from outer space and they may even end up there given the current discussions with NASA on lunar structures. Michael Reynolds, a self-named ‘biotect’ and ‘garbage warrior’, leads his followers with Earthships – dwellings made from recycled materials and earthen walls – in the sustainability ‘battle’ (http://www.earthship.net/). Yet going off-grid requires space: all of the above mentioned projects are built in rural areas where land is affordable and the required resources plentiful. For half of the world’s population this isn’t an option. How are offices coping in urban situations? Urban approaches to sustainability are predominantly technical solutions. Commonly used in practice are photovoltaic systems (solar panels), optimal use of daylight to conserve energy, using recycled and/or sustainable materials low in VOCs (volatile organic compounds), and energy recovery from waste (cogeneration) or from HVAC systems (energy recovery wheel system). Some urban sustainability projects become literally green by using biomass (vegetation) which, if used on
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a large enough scale, creates its own microclimate. But looking green and being green are not necessarily the same thing. While presenting a visually green picture suits the current hype for ‘green building’, it is notable that multinational engineering firms have been building skyscrapers classified as sustainable because of construction methods, use of local materials and energy management. Large corporations in general are turning toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a way to pledge sustainability in multiple areas of their businesses while taking account of society as a whole. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the more radical off-grid practitioners of sustainability are the ‘mathletes’ or those who practice sustainability with calculator and computer in hand. By using software to streamline prefab building elements for efficiency, less material and energy can be used in constructing buildings. Specialized software used with BIM (building information modeling) measures the environmental effects on building performance, allowing fine-tuning of the environmental footprint and construction costs while in the design phase. National and international rating systems like the LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (http://www.usgbc.org/) are making it increasingly easy to form a building sustainability baseline. Using the certification criteria as benchmarks, the entire building process from design to routine maintenance can be orchestrated in an environmentally and socially responsible manner. Our research split offices into to regional and national groups and while there were regional and cultural differences, the fault lines run more clearly along the urban/rural split and economic strata than along political borders. Sustainability and its trendy ‘green’ cousin seem to have their roots in Western guilt regarding our excesses, a collective hangover from the industrial party. By exporting our notions of sustainability and expecting the rest of the world to catch up, indigenous and sustainable traditional practices run the risk of being ignored or lost. Can there be sustainability where there is no word for it? Different cultural attitudes were apparent in Japan where there is no direct translation of the word sustainability. In Japan sustainability is in practice an economic issue: increasing building lifespan, saving electricity and earthquake safety top the list of concerns and contracting companies rather than architects lead the way. Strikingly, our regional breakdowns were not as revealing as the spatial and economic divides which came out of our research. Architects of earthen and hay bale dwellings from Europe, the U.S. and Australia have much in common in terms of ideology and resource use, just as skyscraper engineers from around the world deal with similar issues when building environmentally-friendly high rises. What about those who led ‘sustainable’ lives before they were labeled sustainable or who had no other choice? Compare Japan’s Edo period as discussed elsewhere in this issue. Slums today operate in a similar manner, a modern example of traditional sustainability.1 In recent literature notions of sustainability are conceived of as Western exports needed to ‘save’ the rest of the world. Our research indicates that the urban West expresses sustainability as technological
advancement with the unspoken assumption that less technology advanced societies are not as sustainable. However the opposite seems to be the case. Sustainable rural practices contain the strains of DNA which can recombine with urban forms to produce more resilient living patterns. The recent EU-funded five-year SUCCESS project (Sustainable Users Concepts for China Engaging Scientific Scenarios) proposed the Chinese rural village – by virtue of its balanced relationship with the environment – as a possible engine for change. This is in contrast to recent discourse on Chinese cities in which the focus lies on migration from rural areas to industrialized cities and the crisis being caused by unchecked growth in those areas.2 Here modernity itself threatens what is already a nearly ideal sustainable way of life in rural areas. By modeling the metabolism of the village and projecting various methods of sustainable growth (similar to BIM software, but going a step further by analyzing regional data), the SUCCESS project shows more promising possibilities from indigenous village patterns than from the ‘regurgitation’ of Western concepts of green living.3
1 2
3
See http://www.dharavi.org/ for the case of Dharavi, Mumbai. R.S. Levine, M.T. Hughesa, C.R. Mathera and EJ Yanarellaa, ‘Generating sustainable towns from Chinese villages: A system modeling approach’, Journal of environmental management, Volume: 87 Issue: 2 (April 2008), pp:305-316. http://www.centerforsustainablecities.com/research/ The%20Sustainable%20City%20Game.pdf The MAHKU group consisted of: Shani van Bel, Ilse Beumer, Floris van Heynsbergen, Erika Jacobs Lord, Bart Janssen, Peter Kerkhoff, Leebong Keum, Mio Kuniku, Stephen McConnell, Caroline Pomp and Shebenq.
5 4.5 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 UK
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 N. America
3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 Japan
30 25 20 15
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photovoltaic systems/solar power wind power hydro power cogeneration (producing energy from waste) zero-energy design HVAC ‘energy recovery wheel system’ BMS – buildling management systems storing rain, greywater water harvesting dessicants (humidity) composting contained sewage treatment (super)insulation ‘green’ (soil) walls IFD: Industrial, Flexible and Demountable earth construction hay/straw construction long lifespan of building reduce waste in construction local sources natural renewable recycled low VOC materials vegetation/biomass (microclimates) food production architect controlls total process (systems view) modeling for energy/environment costs, consumption social responsibility
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minimum environmental impact
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human well-being
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Photo Amir Djalali
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Vanitas Venice Biennale 2008 Michael Stanton
Like its predecessors, the 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture is unfathomably deep in material and information. It stretches through the 30 national pavilions in the Giardini, the park devoted to the show, including the vast labyrinthine Italian Pavilion. It flows into the long warehouses and docks of the Arsenale where the curator’s own choices are displayed and where thematic installations and 13 other nations’ contributions spread out. The exhibition further seeps into many spaces throughout the city where another 13 national pavilions and many collateral events and exhibits temporarily lodge. Beyond studying each drawing and model, to view every video, review every site, and read every word of the myriad and fat exhibition documents (the official catalogue alone is five books!) would begin to replicate the labor of Borges’ cartographers in Del Rigor en la Ciencia who painfully aspired to cover, and thus smother, the Empire with their plan. The impossible conceit of every Biennale is that the viewer will completely – not superficially or partially – assess such a colossal display. I therefore yield to this quandary and confess to selectivity, subjectivity and at times a tendentiousness I hope is obvious, yet not dismissive. Finally, like Yourcenar’s Emperor, I find that ‘There have been moments when that comprehension tried to go beyond human experience, passing from the swimmer to the wave. But, in such a realm, since there is nothing exact left to guide me, I verge upon the world of dream and metamorphosis.’1 What I did see, after a relatively careful visit, affected me unexpectedly. Bliss and dread interweave this year in Venice where a sprawling Vanitas pitches on the uncertain waters of the lagoon. The official title of the show is Out There: Architecture Beyond Building. This is catchy and apparently transgressive, but the solutions that meet this challenge at first appear to be supercilious either in the direction of aesthetic cunning or social futility. While deeper study reveals a much more intricate pathology, in this year’s Biennale there ferments a carnival spirit in direct contradiction to, yet often in direct conjunction with, an almost apocalyptic anxiety about the state of both the art and the planet upon which it is practiced. Tears and laughter, fear and joy entwine without synthesis, recalling Manfredo Tafuri’s question in response to an interview with Venturi and Scott-Brown entitled ‘Laughing not to Cry’. Tafuri asked: ‘Why does the alternative to laughing or crying never get mentioned?’2 The positions that initially appear to resonate uncomfortably in Venice, foiled indignation and euphoric formalism, do hint at a dire prognosis for our febrile art. The 11th Biennale has the demeanor of a Vanitas in its recognition of our mortality. But Tafuri has to be right! Such dualities are obsolete! It must be possible that another, at least one other, a third or more ways can exist!
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Is there any criticality at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale and if so, what does it suggest? Since ‘architecture beyond building’ was theme and issue, it should be possible to say what building is about and what architecture could be about. Michael Stanton discerns some patterns in this giant architecture fair and was saved from drowning by numbers by his long-term biennale experience.
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Curator Aaron Betsky, former director of the NAI, lays out the program clearly in an opening document at the door of the Arsenale and again in a spoken manifesto inside and again in a film aired deeper in the exhibit. He says, and this is true, that ‘Architecture is not building…it is about building. Most buildings are ugly, useless and wasteful … though architecture exists most clearly in buildings, they are also its tombs.’ Furthermore, and again indisputably, he states that buildings are ‘also the built affirmation of the social, economic and political status quo.’ The way this exterior role of architecture should interact with the greater discipline of building structures and cities, iterated repeatedly in the curatorial manifestos that accompany those of the designers involved, is through ‘experimentation.’ This again seems irrefutable and essential. The exact experimental procedures take several routes. The show implies that formal élan is clearly one of those, most explicitly articulated in the various revivals of Expressionism seen in recent decades. Yet even on the level of form-making this is not definitive. The inclusion of groups whose work is more conceptual, such as Atelier Bow Wow and Diller Scofido + Renfro, clearly indicates a plurality within the canon. On the other hand, particularly in the national pavilions in the Giardini, a troubled social mandate dominates. Earnest political-economic concerns drive environmental and cultural diatribes as if by simply being aware, architects can avoid the contradictions of a craft that will always be attendant to authority and wealth, can avoid irrelevance within the constrictions of power. This recalls my first Biennale, pre-architecture, in the late-‘70s, with its equally selfrighteous polemics: piles of trash and graffiti, peeling manifestoes, hypodermic toilet seats. These expressions of protest and concern from 1978 share a climate of similar financial crisis and global conflict with the endgames of 2008. Giardini
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To a greater or lesser extent the national pavilions respond to the show’s mandate with calls for sustainability and social responsibility. Many of these generate a degree of viability through, for example, community work or interactive systems that enable action. The Czechs, Koreans and particularly the Belgians react with notable humor and the Germans and British with a notable lack of same. On the other hand, the French especially but also the Scandinavian, Austrian, Finnish, Canadian and Spanish inclusions ignore the thesis of the show and thus produce some of the most intriguing and popular pavilions. They simply display work. The French go so far as to mount an enormous, illuminated OPTIMISTE on the roof of their pavilion. Through the medium of the education of designers the Swiss pavilion tries to engage the responsibilities those designers later face. The Dutch and Luxembourg exhibitions replace form with discourse. The Brazilians do the same but employ non-architects, pushing the year’s theme further. The variable qualities of the show are found in the ‘out there’ themes of the exhibit: mud brick and geometry (Egypt), urban sounds (Greece), magnificent photo-manipulations proposing a Kafkaesque future for civic buildings (Poland), developer horrors (Russia) and a brilliant play on reflection inside and out (Souto de Moura and de Sousa for Portugal). The huge Italian Pavilion is given over to the experimental, the Italian national inclusion having moved to the Arsenale. Here are rooms cluttered in messy vitality, disparate text, video and graphics, collaging the facts of a careening culture with solutions beyond building, in the sense that their sculptural or symbolic extremes can only be critical. UPLOADCITY in the basement offers tiny video screens, headphones and big beanbags. Relevant websites are presented but when I was there all the occupants were asleep; a siesta room providing intense relief from all that intensity upstairs. Within these often muddled attempts to once again locate an architecture of good intentions, the section entitled Masters of the Experiment is most provocative. Here Gehry, Prix, Herzog, Mayne and Hadid (the former way too little and the latter way too much) present an exuberant history of recent big form. While Rem Koolhaas’ office is notably absent from the entire Biennale, the drawings of his wife and partner in the early polemics of OMA form a counterpoint to the other designs. They are joined by what is the oddest inclusion in the entire Biennale: claiming to represent OMA through the filmmaking team of Bêka and Lemoîne (listed weirdly within this pantheon of Masters) have included their piece on OMA’s Bordeaux House. This very funny movie is a great relief, for overt humor is scarce in this show. But its premise is banal and similar to so many films about great modern buildings in the popular press that debunk genius by pointing out technical difficulties and absurd gestures, always the byproduct of extreme design. The film’s inclusion thus challenges the premise of the show and returns to the tragedies of building and disciplinary politics framed by larger cultural issues. The hand drawings by Hadid and Vriesendorp as well as by Lebbeus Woods and Duke Reiter emphatically remind the viewer that analog media are efficient and speedy in comparison to the digital and also remain much more persuasive. Furthermore they are inexpensive and thus mostly immune to the consumerist snares set by the digital.
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Arsenale
Always more impressive in their austerity and extension than the exhibitions they host, the long rooms of the Corderie are dedicated to a review of various directions explored by architecture and urbanism in recent decades. This is introduced by an animated light show that responds
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Vanitas from Sabastian Stoskopff 1630
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to passing bodies with sound and fractured images behind which segments of various iconic popular films repeat on a bed of TVs. The disco atmosphere offered by this exuberant installation is a halcyon introduction for what is about to come, the smooth production that proceeds through the next rooms and on into the various spaces that the Biennale occupies within the vast labyrinth of the Arsenale. Continuing the paleontology of the Masters of the Experiment, dinosaurs roam the great rooms. Bio-morphs and tough-to-construct complexity abound in a history that has often remained ‘beyond building,’ confirmed by the inclusion of the Tyrannosaurus and master-shapemaker Frank Gehry who left intact the workshop in which his reptilian surfaces were created. Likewise Greg Lynn includes vivid images of the techniques involved in transforming innocent children’s toys into guilty works of design. Lynn’s discourse on factory-produced architecture is most intriguing, revealing a practice that has the potential to revolutionize and economize our craft. Among the dinosaurs are some delicate birds, younger designers with similar genetics, but their works are less compelling generally than those they emulate, depending more on new technologies and thus gaining less material traction. They have yet to attain the preposterous rapture of their forbearers. Juxtaposed to all this delicious form are a series of ‘manifestos’ presented on screens with spoken texts. Winy Maas urges belief in technology. Hani Rashid imagines a practice, wind-tunnel testing, that has been a standard for making large buildings for decades. These talking heads often don’t talk. They glare with a grumpy ancien-regime disdain at the viewer as their statements are voiced-over. The seriousness of their funereal gaze3 contrasts with the playful installations they produce. The compulsive experimenter Koolhaas is again absent. A very clever cultural predator indeed, the velociraptor of the group, lumbering consistently into the next epic, has left the building. Diller and Scofidio with Renfro are cleverer, as usual. Their genuinely entertaining inclusion, a front and rear gondola ride through Venice and its far-flung simulacra, invites the exhausted and slightly disillusioned viewer to sit and glide, recalling the suave skepticism that their sort of cross-disciplinary borrowing has always necessitated, in particular their cool play on Deleuze and domesticity at the 1996 Biennale.4 But their frowns are even more severe than most. Why such ferocity about such wit? The curatorial comment on their installation states that their inclusion calls the nature of ‘authenticity’ into question, but the funky landscape of Venice, its Blade Runner techno-exoskeletons and sordid patina, juxtaposed with its sterile corporate imitations, confirms the opposite, the continuation of a durable specificity undaunted by an over-maligned globalism. Upon turning the corner at the end of the Corderie, an anachronistic recapitulation of the late ‘70s Roma Interrotta exhibition inaugurates an urban section that continues the diaphanous mood of the Corderie. Roma Interrotta, the redrawing of sections of the Nolli Plan of Rome by what were then the most lauded architects in the business, the royalty of Post-Modernism, has since come to represent the worst excesses of that confused moment. While this exhibit is largely unknown to those who studied architecture after my troubled generation, to now repeat it, in the frantic and nebulous Uneternal City in the next room, invites unfortunate comparison. A Croatian piazza, updated with a disco floor follows. The crass advertising, of the trade-fair sort, among the installations gives a new meaning to ‘beyond architecture’. A notable diversion is a quite lucid Italian Pavilion confronting the problems of, and solutions to housing. Finally, the long walk ends with a garden: back to a brittle Eden. Entering through a dilapidated warehouse, its empty shelves like columbaria holding the names of plant types, possibly extinct, a path leads through the semi-wild foliage at the edges of Venice to the serenity of a manicured and contoured meadow, then out past a working vegetable patch. The relief is tangible after the kilometers of blissful angst behind.
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Again, between laughter, the paradoxical excesses of the Arsenale, and tears without adequate remedy, the earnest marginality generally presented by the various pavilions in the Giardini there is only the hint of a third way. A decade or more ago cautions were offered in a mood of excitement felt by many of us in the hope that from the various problematic, exciting, but unfocused formal, theoretical and sociological axes of the era, confrontation with political and stylistic hegemonies might evolve. Now the cautions seems more elegiac. To just call for another way is not enough. Aaron Betsky does it eloquently in his talkinghead moment lodged between the designers he has re-canonized. But architecture is crippled by diminished authority and a relentlessly vulgar and increasingly cut-throat economic climate in which to try to produce. It struggles futilely to come to terms with inadequate training in design school hampered by the ‘new technologies’ that promised to free us.5 We can all criticize and implore but in the end, certain suggestions and routes for production need to be identified. This is a risky proposition for it can lead to new critical action by others or to the inevitable flaws and failures in any overriding proposals for action. Nonetheless it is an obligation to do more than condemn or lament. So what then should we do, if not laugh or cry?
1 2
3 4
5
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1954 (orig. 1951)) p. 8. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avantgardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970’s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connoly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) p. 301. I use this term here with Lacanian self-consciousness, referring to authority rather than the visual. See my ‘Dissipated Scandals: on avant-gardism and parlour revolutions in architecture’, Archis – Architecture, City, Visual Culture, no. 8, 1998, and ‘Of Mice and Monsters: a response to Bart Lootsma’, Archis no. 10, 1998. See my ‘Redemptive Technologies’, Archis no. 1, 1997, and ‘Redemptive Technologies II: the sequel (a decade later)’ in Proceedings of the Second International Conference of The Arab Society for Computer Aided Architectural Design, ‘Computing in Architectural Design: Re-Thinking the Discourse’ (Sharjah, UAE 2006).
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The last Biennale could be seen as an answer. It was urban, presented cities and implied rightly that they were the essential site for architectural discourse and action. But rarely was enough information about particular urbanisms presented for architecture’s problems to appear reversible. Cities are the most complex devices produced by our species. Their repair manuals remain very thick. We were reminded by the Biennale of 2006 how impossible it is to embody a city in statistics and images, especially with the fairly terse data offered by the exhibit. No matter how extensive the documentation, the complexity is too great, again like Borges’ map. This ‘collective work of art’ can only be subjectively portrayed; the dilemma of all historians and geographers, the liberation of all designers and artists. Why not direct theory away from its perennial search for new forms with meager results, toward the processes and functions of practice? Why not recognize that the problems that plague our ailing profession derive directly from the economic systems it serves and the methodologies it embraces? Why not confront these with the interdisciplinary ingenuity that has characterized recent decades? Architecture and urbanism are the most expensive and symbolic of human arts; they are thus more vulnerable to current cultural economics than any other. While radically altering this picture is outside the direct prevue of our profession, acknowledgement that this is the case and a flanking assault employing the most radical of critical protocols immediately permits more effective responses. The many alternative directions taken by those trained in architecture internationally are generally not given much attention. Many, if not a majority, of them adopt some sort of concomitant discipline, as filmmakers, community organizers, systems gurus, designers of some lateral sort, artisans, etc. Beyond building for sure! It is they who are moving the discipline in more effective directions. Enjoy formalism! Stop arguing about what it is and what it isn’t. Stop trying to justify it with other criteria whether political, theoretical or practical. The making of beguiling form is one of the most important and powerful aspects of what we do. Thought and analysis lead toward it. Why do we continue to deny that what separates us from all the other professionals and craftspeople who work on a project is primarily aesthetic training, in all the richest interpretations of that term? The meshing of significance and form; the metamorphosis of the given into novel configurations; the pleasures of the visual, tactile, material and compositional manifest in the best architectural projects; all seem to have been discredited by the last century. Beauty has been subsumed by the sublime and the rational. We seem to be preemptively discredit ourselves by continuously insisting our role is more serious, more logical, more profound than that most profound, and traditional, of acts, that of imagining and making the beautiful and, for that matter, the sublime. Perhaps it is simply that when the mimetic aspects of the arts gave way to degrees of abstraction a century ago, when the place of mimesis was no longer underwritten by Classicism, beauty became immaterial. Yet just as beauty embeds in a DeKooning or the Farnsworth House, it continues to oscillate with the sublime in all our best endeavors. We must redefine sustainability beyond easy and often industry-friendly, expensive solutions. Instead of focusing entirely on the environment, what about focusing on work or local protocols, or the relation to capital, or methods that are low-tech, cheap and humane? The environment often becomes an excuse for rejecting indigenous, low-income workers, local materials and regional initiatives. A good example of such endeavors is ecofeminism where any radical realignment is seen as a symbiosis with both the existing and the imagined. A Vanitas always urges exuberant action while recognizing transience. The potential is there in both the euphoria and alarm expressed in Venice. Its actualization demands more of a critical adjustment than that proposed by the flamboyant lamentations and gestures in evidence, but commences with both.
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Volume 19
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The world’s leading trade fair The Bathroom Experience, Building, Energy, Air-conditioning Technology, Renewable Energies
Sustainability reloaded
Frankfurt am Main, 10 – 14. 3. 2009 Water for People Efficient Systems and Renewable Energies Aircontec – Air-conditioning, Cooling, Ventilation In 2009 the leading international ISH show is focusing on the issue of sustainability in water and energy use. Manufacturers will be showcasing sustainable and design-oriented bathroom solutions in the Bathroom Experience. In the Building, Energy and Air-conditioning Technology product areas you’ll find a wide range of green building technologies with efficient systems that use modern heating and air-conditioning systems in combination with renewable energies. Don’t miss ISH 2009 – the industry’s leading international trade fair for 50 years. www.ish.messefrankfurt.com
[email protected] Tel. +31 70 3114 180
VOLGT
Colophon Volume 18 VOLUME Independent quarterly for architecture to go beyond itself editor-in-chief Arjen Oosterman contributing editors Ole Bouman, Rem Koolhaas, Mark Wigley feature editor Jeffrey Inaba editorial consultants Carlos Betancourth, Thomas Daniell, Bart Goldhoorn, Markus Miessen, Kai Vöckler VOLUME is a project by ARCHIS + AMO + C-Lab + … ARCHIS with Lilet Breddels, Joos van den Dool, Amir Djalali, Christian Ernsten, Edwin Gardner, Maria João Ribeiro AMO with Reinier de Graaf C-Lab with Jeffrey Inaba, Benedict Clouette VOLUME is materialized by Irma Boom and Sonja Haller
The VOLUME project interpolates ARCHIS, magazine for Architecture, City and Visual Culture and its predecessors since 1929. Archis – Publishers, Tools, Interventions – is an experimental think tank devoted to the process of real-time spatial and cultural reflexivity. www.archis.org Other protagonists in this project AMO, a research and design studio that applies architectural thinking to disciplines beyond the borders of architecture and urbanism. AMO operates in tandem with its companion company the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. www.oma.nl
C-Lab, The Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting, is an experimental research unit devoted to the development of new forms of communication in architecture, set up as a semi-autonomous think and action tank at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University. www.arch.columbia.edu Volume is published by Stichting Archis, The Netherlands and printed by Die Keure, Belgium. English copy editing and translations David Lee, Peter Mason, Wendy van Os-Thompson Administrative coordination Valérie Blom/Muike Leeuwenberg, Jessica Braun Editorial office PO Box 14702, 1001 LE Amsterdam, The Netherlands, T: +31 (0)20 320 3926, F: +31 (0)20 320 3927, E:
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Contributors Jago van Bergen is a Rotterdam-based architect. Together with Evert Kolpa, he is partner of Van Bergen and Kolpa. Stefano Boeri is an architect and director of Boeri Studio and editor in chief of the magazine Abitare. Boeri is founder of the research agency Multiplicity. Clare Butcher is a Zimbabwean-South African curator in training, currently participating in the de Appel curatorial programme in Amsterdam. She worked as a guest curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen are architects based in the UK. They have taught, lectured, published and exhibited widely on the design concept of CPUL [Continuous Productive Urban Landscape] which they contributed to the international urban design discourse in 2005. Steef Buijs is an urban planner. After working for the city of Rotterdam, and for the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment, he is now an independent consultant. Christophe Catsaros is an architecture and art critic, independent journalist and curator based in Paris. He teaches at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art de Cambrai. Thomas Daniell is an architect, lecturer and writer based in Kyoto, Japan. John E. Fernández is a professor of architecture and building technology in the Department of Architecture at MIT. Aetzel Griffioen is a Master student political philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he fulfilled an assistantship with Dr. Henk Oosterling. Andrew Herscher teaches at the University of Michigan in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Department of Art History and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Scott Hocking is a photographer based in Detroit. Joost Janmaat is a historian, political scientist, director of Partizan Publik and co-founder of the Office for Social Engineering. www.partizanpublik.nl Sherry Lassiter is the Program Manager of the Media Lab at the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. Aric Mayer is a Kenyan born US based photographer. His solo exhibition ‘Balance + Disorder: A Photographic Response to Hurricane Katrina and the Photographic Landscape’ was held at Gallery Bienvenu in New Orleans, LA. Christien Meindertsma graduated two years ago from the Designacademy Eindhoven and since then has been highly successful with projects as Flocks and Checked Baggage. Koert van Mensvoort studied media arts, computer sciences and philosophy. He works as an artist, scientist, inventor, filmmaker and blogger. www.nextnature.org Monica Nouwens is a photographer based in Los Angeles. Michela Pasquali is a landscape architect and botanist and a researcher on community gardening. Marjetica Potrcˇ is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the Americas. Panayiota I. Pyla holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from MIT (2002), and is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Cyprus. Gianluigi Ricuperati is a writer based in Milan and literary editor at Abitare magazine. Mireille Roddier is partner in the design practice Mitnick.Roddier.Hicks. She teaches architecture at the University of Michigan. Harriet Russell is a freelance illustrator who lives and works in London and works for several magazines and newspapers. Debra Solomon is a designer, artist, curator and blogger. In 2004 she began publishing her independent research on culiblog.org on food, food culture, and the culture that grows our food. Tokyo Genso is a Japan-based animation artist. Michael Stanton currently practices architecture and urbanism in Beirut. He teaches and publishes internationally. He is a founding member of Studio Beirut. Peter Trummer is an architect and researcher based in Amsterdam. He is Head of the Associative Design Research Program at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and writes his PhD on ‘population thinking in architecture’. Piet Vollaard is an architect and critic, co-founder of ArchiNed, the architecture website of the Netherlands, and Smart Architecture Foundation. He is author of several books. Ronald Wall is an architect and economic geographer at the Faculty of Applied Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam. His PhD thesis is titled ‘Sustainability within a World City Network’. Slavoj Žižek is a Post-Marxist sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.
