Ecologies of Prosperity by Means of Socioecological Urbanism 20
Margarita Jover
CHAPTER 1
NOVEL SYNERGIES
PHOTO SURVEY
Landscapes of the Anthropocene 49
LINEAGES & CONTEMPORARY VOICES
Introduction 57
LINEAGES
Aldo Leopold, 1949 58
R. Buckminster Fuller, 1968 60
E. P. Odum, 1969 65
Rachel Carson, 1962 74
CONTEMPORARY VOICES
Marina Alberti, 2015 76
Philippe Rahm, 2016 85
Albert Cuchi, 2015 89
Niek Hazendonk, 2015 97
PROJECTS & DESIGN RESEARCH
Introduction 108
Hydrology in Flux 110
Food Production 124
Climatic Metabolism 132
Energy 138
Forests 158
CHAPTER 2
INSTRUMENTAL COMMONS
PHOTO SURVEY
Infrastructures for Material & Energy Extraction 165
LINEAGES & CONTEMPORARY VOICES
Introduction 179
LINEAGES
Patrick Geddes, 1923 180
Martin Luther King, 1967 185
Donella H. Meadows, 1972 187
Elinor Ostrom, et al., 1999 196
CONTEMPORARY VOICES
Alberto Mayol, 2015 208
Eden Medina, 2011 220
Jedediah Purdy, 2016 222
Nina-Marie Lister, 2015 228
PROJECTS & DESIGN RESEARCH
Introduction 235
Infrastructure for Citizenship 236
Urbanism by Cooperation 242
Mid-Way Up 252
Participatory Urbanism 260
CHAPTER 3
DISPERSED CONCENTRATIONS
PHOTO SURVEY
Urbanization Dynamics 265
LINEAGES & CONTEMPORARY VOICES
Introduction 277
LINEAGES
Ildefons Cerda, 1867 278
Ebenezer Howard, 1967 284
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1932 288
CONTEMPORARY VOICES
Paola Viganó, 2012 294
Bernado Secchi, 2009 304
Paola Viganó, 2016 307
Shiqiao Li, 2016 311
Thomas Sieverts, 1997 314
PROJECTS & DESIGN RESEARCH
Introduction 320
Urban Retrofit, Infill, & Remediation 322
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 350
Our Future Terrapolis
Ila Berman
Ecologies of Prosperity for the Living City is an important book. This is not only because it attempts to address some of the most pressing urban, social, and ecological issues of our time, but also because it gives us, even if only faintly, a preliminary roadmap to move beyond the stalemate within which our society, and design and planning disciplines, are currently caught. Operating at the juncture of three terms—ecology, prosperity, and the city—the authors and voices convened to contribute to this volume collectively call for a revision of our values, new models of synergistic thinking, and a transformative set of operative strategies that might lead to a true paradigm shift: what Margarita Jover refers to as a new socio-ecological urbanism. Such an appeal might at first glance seem to be overly naïve and highly optimistic, for it implicitly demands nothing less than a wholesale renovation of our modern way of life, its forms of territorial occupation, and its indiscriminate exploitation and instrumentalization of the natural world. This call for change also insists upon the overhaul and recircuiting of our primary energy systems, social and regulatory structures, and economic systems and definitions of wealth to name a few—those primary drivers responsible for the formation and sustenance of our cities and ultimately the long term impacts of urban life on the biosphere. Idealistic and revolutionary in spirit, yet simultaneously speculative and pragmatic rather than futuristic in attitude, this book takes the position that the contemporary model of Western progress to which we so vehemently adhere, itself the product of a previous societal and technological revolution, is relatively shortlived within the context of human cultural evolution, and, given the ecological devastation and growing social inequity that it has produced, is in desperate need of reform. Not a simple task.
This position of course is not new and finds its support in theorists and scientists alike, a number of whose voices, both historic and contemporary, are recorded and referenced in the texts to follow. In recent years, we have collectively come to acknowledge (or at least those of us that still believe in the findings of scientific research) that we are living in a new era, the Anthropocene, where the short arc of human history has finally intersected with, and thoroughly engaged, the enormity of geological time. It is during this single epoch that the extent of human activities, fueled by the industrialization, urbanization, and capitalization of our planet, and our overpopulation of it, have literally terraformed
and irreversibly transformed the earth, its atmosphere, and all of the life that it supports. Although the seeds of major anthropogenic change find their origins in the Industrial Revolution, since the mid-twentieth century, population growth and planetary urbanization, global warming and climate mutation, and environmental degradation and species extinction have been accelerating at incomprehensible rates, having already brought about what would constitute, by any definition, a global ecological crisis. When biologists predict that by the end of this century our way of life will have exterminated 60-95% of the earth’s species, one would think this would be cause enough for alarm. And yet despite that we are likely already in the midst of the sixth great extinction on this earth, for the most part, we seem to be moving along within a bubble of our own making, somewhat oblivious to the precipice that we have already reached, as if it is too far outside our peripheral vision to clearly see or simply just too uncomfortable to address. When confronted with the overwhelming evidence pointing to our planetary ecological crisis, the most common responses seem to be either denial or complacent indifference, cyncism or apocalyptic despair, or a false hope that our current systems can be subtly tweaked to become more “environmentally friendly” or “socially equitable” without substantial change. Unfortunately, as many scientific experts and reputable thinkers have argued, none of these responses will lead toward a viable future. As Donna Haraway had noted in her book Staying with the Trouble, “there is a fine line between acknowledging the extent and seriousness of the troubles and succumbing to an abstract futurism and its effects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference.” Haraway’s position, in alignment with the basic premise of this book, is that we need a new theory and politics of reformation, one that overhauls existing structures to support a “multispecies flourishing” and to generate, in the words of Isabelle Stengers a new form of “cosmopolitics.”
Design is implicitly about the imagining, making and instantiation of new organizational structures, scales of operation, and material models for inhabiting the earth. The question for Wall and Jover is therefore not simply how do we acknowledge and understand where we are and the impact that our existing systems, in the realms of ecology, energy, and economy, are having on our cities, but rather how do we rethink larger urban frameworks and the political and social systems upon which they depend, and design a new model for a living city whose metabolism supports ecological flourishing and social well-being? This urban model must therefore be regenerative rather than exploitative, visible rather than hidden, and fully implicated by, and supportive of the complex natural systems with which it is intertwined and upon which innumerable species depend. It must also be a model whose stewardship is participatory and able to operate at both local and global scales, and where prosperity is defined by collective and immanent forms of social and material value rather than the surplus accumulation and asymmetrical distribution of abstract exchange value—a system that has far
Ecologies of Prosperity by Means of Socioecological Urbanism
Margarita Jover
On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump won the United States presidential election. It was a week before the celebration of a symposium about urban dynamics. Donald Trump is one of several recently elected leaders across the Western world capitalizing on the discontent of a large part of the population that hopes for a better future. Britain, France, Spain, Austria, Brazil, and the Netherlands have recently experienced similar political phenomena intertwined with their respective identity issues. In Europe and the United States, citizenry expresses discontent about the migration of capital and jobs from the national to the international sphere. Geographer and anthropologist David Harvey states that the reasons for this situation can be traced back to decades of specific policies at the global and local levels, moving from embedded capitalism1 to neoliberalism 2 One of the critical differences between these two systems is the changing role of public administrations, moving from serving the citizen and the public good, towards catering mainly the private interests of corporations and banking systems. Nonetheless, sociopolitical hypotheses aside, today’s reality reflects more public debt, inequality, adverse ecological impacts, and less health and social protections than during the period right after World War II when welfare states emerged. Very few were expecting the results of the presidential election. At the time, the ensuing bewilderment seemed to indicate a sociopolitical crisis; it has as well become a catalyst for individual political engagement. Today, both minor and extensive examples of dysfunctionality in different areas of society are seen through the media. A number of fundamental citizens’ rights in democracies are threatened, at least verbally. A culture of predation— usually practiced in business—seems to permeate real life, and has alarmingly
1. Embedded Capitalism David Harvey. Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press Inc., New York. 2005. p.11. the term “embedded capitalism” refers to “how market processes and entrepreneurial and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environment that sometimes restrained but in other instances led the way in economic and industrial strategy.”
2. Neoliberalism. David Harvey. Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press Inc., New York. 2005. The term “neoliberalism” is “in the first instance a theory of political, economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those militaries, defense, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets.”
become celebrated or even admired. A cultural fear of “the other” seems normal and is even advocated. The myth of individual freedom is paradoxically too close to social isolation and disempowerment in areas far from the centers of social and political power. Borders are increasingly large and offensive and metropolitan areas, and mega-cities are economically polarized with wealthy gated communities and poor slums, which are either enclosed or isolated. The systemic social inequality of access to essential life resources is hypocritically accepted as the fate of the underprivileged, or the ironic, unexpected consequence of their particular attitudes to work. Large numbers of desperate people who can no longer live off the land migrate to cities and become part of the ever-growing, unhealthy slums of enormous proportions, especially in the global south. Culturally, the tendency to monetize all societal activities is even evident at universities. An alternative set of values seems to be missing. Surprisingly, while all these cultural, social and ecological transformations occur, the discussion is still if climate change is real or not; or even if we have really moved from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, a new geological era. While all this happens, the graph of the great acceleration3 keeps climbing.
As all these environmental and sociocultural challenges emerge, millions of citizens are taking part in demonstrations and mobilizing in grassroots movements against the status quo. Since 2001, the World Social Forum has hosted demonstrations in parallel to the World Economic Forum. Civic and political activism is expressed in different areas to palliate social inequality and ecological disruptions, while de-growth4 and other socio-cultural alternatives are also gaining strength at the perimeter of global power centers.
The fact that we have moved from the Holocene to the Anthropocene epoch, based on the geological evidence of anthropogenic change, calls for an analysis of the Western model of progress, the Western model of inhabiting the territory. The dominating model of progress is based on the combination of two relatively new systems of social order and energy. Less than two centuries old, it evolved during the industrial era, amidst a backdrop of class struggle and the creation of Western imperialist nations. The model was eventually exported to the rest of the developing world after World War II. The social order of this model of progress was built to replace the rigidity of feudalism with the crucial concept of citizenship,5 in the context of capitalist democracies. In parallel, a new multisource energy system transformed traditional organic societies,6 based on solar energy and
3. Great acceleration. J. R. Mcneill. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2014.
4. De-growth. Giacomo d’Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgos Kallis. De-growth a vocabulary for a new era Routledge. 2015.
5. Citizenship. E. J. Hobsbawm. The age of revolution. 1789-1848. Vintage Books editions. 1962. “the unity of all ruling classes against the threat of universal suffrage,” the quote collects the spirit of resistance from ruling classes to share power
6. Organic societies E. A. Wrigley. The path to sustained growth. England’s transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution. Cambridge University Press. 2016.
LINEAGES AND CONTEMPORARY VOICES
The texts in Lineages and Contemporary Voices describe new ways of looking at the processes and effects of rampant urbanization. They reflect critical intellectual and scientific goals for city-making, such as life supporting ecosystems, interconnectedness, and the limits to resources. An important task of cities is to consider the needs of local and regional ecosystems, as well as the needs of their human and non-human inhabitants. by the same measure, ecologists need to consider human action and the disturbance produced by a continuously evolving urban context, in order to anticipate feedback loops to invent new forms of stewardship and care.
Lineages includes a critique of mid-20th-century urbanization, new ways of understanding the ecological processes which are the basis of life, and offers a metaphor for how we should live, highlighting our role as stewards. Aldo Leopold (1949) reminds us of the short lifespan of human life in relation to geological time; the image of the planet earth as the “blue marble,” photographed by the Apollo astronauts, gave full power to R. buckminster Fuller’s metaphor of a spaceship without a manual of instruction; Eugene P. Odum (1969) pioneered the concept of interdependent divergent ecosystems; and, Rachel Carson (1962) alerted citizens about a slow invisible poisoning of the environment leading to a national pesticide policy banning DDT.
In Contemporary Voices, Marina Alberti (2013) studies the evolution of urban ecosystems as a basis for determining urban patterns that support ecosystem function; Phillip Rahm (2015) recalls the importance of thermodynamics stating that “form follows climate”; Albert Cuchi (2015) describes the historic practices of agriculture and husbandry in the territory of Santiago de Compostela, Spain as an “organic society”; and, Niek Hazendonk (2016) reminds us of the rival practices of biological-organic versus industrial-chemical food systems and the potential for integrating agriculture into the realm of landscape architecture.
runoff to avoid floods. All traditional cities use a similar strategy, which allows them to avoid doing harm while also taking advantage of the water. A strategy like this involves a connection with the territory through the water and the organic material, a connection that organizes the city and the land around it. Santiago de Compostela provides a meaningful example of this.
However, this connection between the city and the land was lost during the Industrial Revolution. The need to replenish the nutrients from the harvested soil was forgotten when industrial fertilizers from mining and non-renewable resources became widespread. The integrated agro-silvo-pastoral system that we have described above disintegrated into three completely independent industries: industrial agriculture, intensive livestock farming, and modern forest management. The water, which is increasingly brought from farther and farther away, only removes organic waste material from the city through underground channels; it does not reintegrate it into the land. These very sewers also collect runoff water from rainfall and take it away from the streets and natural basins.
Today, at least, we are aware that the productive industrial model’s relationship with the environment has serious problems that call into question the future progress it promises. The pollution caused by the systematic and growing dumping of waste threatens us with global environmental problems in addition to serious local crises. The destruction of natural systems has reached a global scale with climate change and the biodiversity crisis, among other issues. The need for sustainability is the only social requirement to transform the model of industrial production into a system without pollutant waste and that works with materials in closed cycles. Just as organic societies used the biosphere and the area’s biophysical matrix, the type of connection we have to our land once again plays a key role.
Nowadays the Brañas de Sar is a peri-urban area that has lost its productive functions. Just like many other green spaces, its new urban mission is to support the inhabitants’ needs to have to contact with the natural environment seeing that their city no longer “produces” green areas in the context of its own economic and productive functional logic but as a social demand and requirement for habitability. That is why spaces like playgrounds, parks, or sports fields require a clean, unpolluted environment.
To protect these areas from the possibility of pollution that an industrialized city entails, they are separated from the urban metabolism, protected from pollution, and kept up using resources (water, energy and fertilizer) brought from other places. The green areas like Brañas de Sar have changed from being productive, functional areas connected to the traditional organic society to being places of consumption which require external resources and are disconnected from a material urban dynamic that has become contaminating and destructive.
However, with this movement towards sustainability that we now need, these spaces, like all urban spaces, have to take on a different, transformative
The cathedral of “Santiago de Compostela,” Galicia, Spain.
Photograph by American Army, 1950. The river Sar and its floodplain located south Santiago Compostela city center. Dark green, irrigation grassland. Light green, corn and potatoes. Dark grey, shrubs on the mountain.
[2006-2008]
POWER PLANT & VIDEO ART CENTER
ALDAYJOVER ARCHITECTURE & LANDSCAPE
The power plant (District Heating and Cooling) building is a trigeneration facility that serves the buildings of the International Exhibition of 2008 in Zaragoza “Water and Sustainable Development.” It provides heating and cooling to all new buildings and co-generates electricity, connected to the general network. This is a facility that would usually be placed in the outskirts of the city or in industrial areas; or concealed through topographic or disguising strategies. Located between the Water Park and the neighborhood, very close to the river, concealing the facility is not an option and due to flood risks it cannot be buried underground. Instead, the power plant assumes its role of critical public facility with transparency and accepts the rules of urbanity without sprawling amorphously. It behaves towards the city and the park, without backyards, rear facades or service courtyards. The power plant becomes public and transparent through to strategies: a safe interior itinerary for public visits and interpretation and a public video art program.
The 25 cm thick concrete walls, dark gray inside and outside with a folded metal sheet texture, becomes a structural skin. The boiler room has a light roof designed with corrugated polycarbonate sheets where, under each wave, a RGB LED rail is placed. A lighting control that generates images transform the roof into a low-resolution media façade. This large 20x20-meter video surface is completed with another at ground level (4 meters high and 30 meters long) with the same characteristics.
At night, when the building is closed to the public, light and images on the outdoor polycarbonate panels indicate what kind of energy is generated and at what intensity. The system, connected to the control of the power plant, translates the operation of the plant into
color and moving images by the video artist
Eulalia Valldosera. New videos will be added to the collection, or screened in festivals and events. In between the video art pieces, the media facade informs about the production of energy and the performance of the facility, holding it publicly accountable.
TITLE: Power Plant and Video Art Center
LOCATION: Zaragoza, Spain
CLIENT: Expoagua 2008
PROGRAM: Power Plant and Video Art Center
STATUS: Completed 2008
SITE AREA: 3,621 m2
DESIGN PERIOD: 2006
AWARDS: Finalist in 2009 Spanish Architecture Biennial, the ENOR Prize, García Mercadal Prize
CREDITS
Iñaki Alday, Margarita Jover (architects), Lorena Bello (project leader)
Elena Albareda, Jesús Arcos, Nicole Lacoste, Andreu Meixide, Shinji Miyazaki, Rafael Pleguezuelos, Filippo Poli, Marta Serra, Enric Dulsat, Saida Dalmau, Catalina Salvá (architecture team)
Benedicto Gestió Projectes (construction and budget consultants)
Estructuras Aragon S.A (construction company)
District Heating and Cooling. Located between Actur neighborhood and the “Metropolitan Park of Water Luis Buñuel.”
CYBERNETIC REVOLUTIONARIES: CONNECTING CYBERNETICS AND SOCIALISM
EDEN MEDINA
In her study of the Cybersyn project, Eden Medina focuses on the deep conceptual similarities between Stafford Beer’s work in management cybernetics and Salvador Allendes’s Popular Unity Party’s approach to democratic socialism. Cybersyn would help the government understand and manage the political processes it had set in motion via a balance between vertical and lateral forms of communication. The goal was to make government more adaptive so that it could respond to changing societal needs or crisis situations. The collaboration between the Chilean production engineer Fernando Flores and the English cyberneticist Stafford Beer married management cybernetics to Chilean socialism and produced one of the most ambitious applications of cybernetics in history, a radical project to further political, economic, and social change in Chile.
The history of science and technology contains multiple instances of political ideas and ideologies that have influenced the practice and content of science as well as the design and use of technology. However, I am making a different argument here: I am showing the deep conceptual similarities between Beer’s work in management cybernetics and Popular Unity’s approach to democratic socialism. These similarities led Flores to believe that management cybernetics could help the Allende government understand and manage the political process it had set in motion.
Both Beer and Popular Unity were interested in making structural changes to existing organizations. Both were interested in finding ways to make these changes happen quickly while maintaining the stability of the overall organization. And both were interested in the problem of control but eschewed the idea of ruling with an iron fist. Instead, they wanted to find a balance between individual freedom and top-down control, a balance that preserved autonomy but recognized that maintaining the stability of a state or company may require limiting freedom or sacrificing the needs of some to the needs of others.
Such commonalities drew Flores to Beer. Beer’s emphasis on action grounded in scientific rationality also appealed to the young Chilean. Timing played an important role in making this connection happen, since Flores’s letter reached
Beer just when he had become increasingly interested in how to make government adaptive, via the Liberty Machine, so that it could respond to changing societal needs or crisis situations. Beer’s new thinking on management structures that embraced the tension between top-down and bottom-up decision making used that tension to increase the stability of the overall organization (the Viable System Model).
These similarities were not a result of fully shared political convictions. Unlike Allende, Beer was not a Marxist. However, he did describe himself as a socialist on multiple occasions and reported voting for the British Labor Party. Although Beer did not specify where he positioned himself on the spectrum of British socialism, his position was closer to Fabian socialism—a British intellectual movement that favored a peaceful reformist approach to socialism (instead of revolutionary armed conflict) and that had influenced the formation of the Labor Party. Beer thus would have been sympathetic to the aims of Chilean democratic socialism, even if he was not centrally concerned with Marxist ideas such as class struggle and even though he made a comfortable living as an international management consultant. Such sympathies may have further increased Beer’s willingness to assist the Allende government. However, there is nothing in Beer’s early writings to suggest that his approach to adaptive control was shaped by any political ideology. While Beer did believe that cybernetics and cyberneticians had the power to create a better world through the regulation of complexity, and had a social responsibility to do so, he was not a socialist revolutionary.
Therefore, what brought Flores and Beer together was not shared politics per se but rather conceptual commonalities in specific strains of scientific and political thought that Flores recognized and Beer appreciated. These conceptual similarities drew Beer and Flores together despite their different cultural and political convictions. This connection was furthered by Beer’s enthusiasm to apply cybernetic thinking and operations research techniques in the domain of politics.
The resulting collaboration of Beer and Flores would spur the design of a technological system that would reflect the distinguishing features of Chile’s revolutionary process and bear the hallmarks of Beer’s cybernetic work. In the process, it would change the lives of both men. This unique merger of cybernetic curiosity and political necessity would lead to one of the most ambitious applications of cybernetics in history: Project Cybersyn. This project would tackle key problems in the design of political, technological, and organizational systems and address them through the design of a political technology. Project Cybersyn would undertake the questions of how to maintain the stability of a system while facilitating change, how to ensure the cohesion of the whole without sacrificing autonomy, and how to find a balance between vertical and lateral forms of communication. This project stemmed from a conviction that Beer and Flores shared in 1971, namely, that marrying management cybernetics to Chilean socialism could further political, economic, and social change in Chile.
