Space and Culture

Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty, eds. Ecological Urbanism. 2010. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers. 665 pp. ISBN 978-3-0377818-9-0.

Review Essay by Jim Morrow

Ecological Urbanism is, literally and figuratively, a thick text that merges traditional academic articles with media and design to lay-out the foundation for a new, ecologic approach to urban planning. Its purpose, as the book’s back cover promises, is to draw-up “an imaginative and practical method for addressing existing as well as new cities.”

In many previous texts on urbanism and environmental matters, the city is treated as an unremediable site of critique. It’s seen as an environment that is a ‘blight’, ‘decayed’ or ‘ruined’. And this style of critique has seemingly become a default method in most discussions of urban ecology. And beyond being bleak and depressing, such discussions rarely wander from an apocalyptic narrative that views ecology as a material object – like a verdant place set apart from the machinic life of humanity – when it is, instead, a construct of relations, whether it be human or plant or toxin.

Fourier Phalanastère (Thanks to George Mason Univ.)

Ecological Urbanism has a unique view of the city. Rather than being built on critique, it tries to be conceptual and focus on applications that promote a “new ethics and aesthetics of the urban.” The text’s numerous entries aim to re-purpose ‘design practise’ – a term meant to bring together multiple disciplinary fields that work on the urban, namely architecture, landscape design, planning, and transport – as a functional avant-garde whose aesthetic values can transform the life of a city.

But there are several limits to Ecological Urbanism’s “cross-disciplinary and collaborative” method of blending high academic and aesthetic. The most noticeable limit is the text itself, which often comes-off as a mash-up that lacks coherent purpose. For example, the book includes an entry by Rem Koolhaas, who goes the full Al Gore and mails-in a PowerPoint that has text and visuals that do not reproduce well outside of their native habitat of the lecture hall. Additionally, in trying to balance moral imperative, the aesthetic, and the applied – which may be the design equivalent of Lacan’s psychoanalytic order – the text’s entries read and view as though they are holding-back, unsure of whether they want to create a “future city” or redesign what’s already been built. And this may be a premonition of a common problem if ecological urbanism, the design practise, was to spread off its pages and into the streets.

1. Utopia

Given the growing impossibility of imagining a more sustainable city, it is best to start with a topic Ecological Urbanism did not discuss: Utopia. It’s not that they were wrong to focus on realistic applications, instead it’s that they did not establish an imaginary on which the contributors could use the abstract to point-out what is possible.

By definition, utopia means ‘good place’ or ‘no place’. It is what Henri Lefebvre calls a “virtual object” that’s built “on new foundations, on another scale and in other conditions, in another city”. It’s an imaginary, a dreamscape that’s different from the “old city” and reflects a given historical period’s swank ideas and aspirations, as well as technologies.

In Plato’s Republic, and later More’s Utopia – and to some extent Machiavelli’s Prince, Hobbes’ Leviathan or Locke’s Second Treatise – the utopian imaginary was about the just city and social control. Design and planning were not essential. Rather, morals and laws constituted utopia, with layout being of little concern or consequence.

In the early 19th century, Charles Fourier made designs for a living utopia. His work is significant because it had architecture – it was a significant step in making a virtual ‘no place’ real. According to his sketches, communities would be constructed around Phalanstères that resembled industrial-scale Parisian arcades and would be models of prosperity and social harmony.

In the first half of the 20th century, Le Corbusier drew-up plans for a new Greater Paris. According to his designs, the city would be an ecology of concrete and steel built for speed and technology. In fact, in his models, people are largely absent from the industrial landscape – they’re often represented as small ovals behind the wheel of a speeding car – almost like they’re an afterthought or accessory to the pure, efficient function of technology.

Like Le Corbusier, Albert Speer made plans – however dark and disturbed – for a Nazi utopia, Germania. But unlike Le Corbusier, speed and technology were not the emphasis of Speer’s designs. Instead, his utopia was a monument to the Triumph of the Will and National Socialism: There was no populace present in his models, only structures that garrisoned the Party’s apparatus.

In the second half of the 20th century, with the exception of a few inverse-Caligulan plans to bring Earth to the Moon, utopia became more manageable and focused on individual aspirations. Large-scale schemes were replaced by plans that were self-contained and focused on interior design. For example, in the UK, sections of cities were cleared for council estates or block flats – resembling individual components of Le Corbusier’s architecture – that were part of larger conurbations. Or in the United States, the imaginary became suburban tracts with nostalgic or sylvan names, like ‘Reunion’ or ‘Woodland Hollow’. Likewise, utopia represented an individual aspiration that could be personalised to best serve specific tastes and interests.

At the beginning of the 21st century, utopia continued to reduce in scale to the point that it was designed around single serving, one-off buildings and interior spaces. Instead of redefining everyday life, it is now the facade of the old city; its imaginary replaced by a desire for cultured indulgence.

2. Scale

In the meantime, as utopia has been scaled-down and designed around Brasnäs flatwoven area rugs and granite counter-tops, it has become difficult for architects and planners to imagine a different city. Likewise, if additional matters of concern, like environmental damage and pollution – not to mention a moral imperative – are taken into consideration, the idea of designing a new city seems daft.

Bruno Latour, in his short entry in Ecological Urbanism, warns against getting “lost in a jungle of dreams that never added up to much”. He’s right. But scale is the problem that confronts design practise. The jungle has become overgrown with baroque remnants of failed utopian dreams, not to mention an increasingly toxic environment, that anything short of clear-cut makes it impossible to get a bearing and begin the process of “re-engineering the imagination”.

Sustainable design is limited by scale. As Mohsen Mostafavi says, “LEED certification [the American design standard for sustainable construction] deals with the architectural object, and not with the larger infrastructure of the territory of our cities and towns”. Solid design and construction can aspire to take a building off a national grid that is powered by the worst environmental practises imaginable, yet the grid remains present or expands because urbanisation carries-on. Ecology, therefore, is an urban problem; and design practise has to work on a larger scale than a ‘green’ shed at the allotment.

Laying-out and planning on a large-scale requires letting-go of the architectural object as the purpose of design. And this is a issue handled well by Ecological Urbanism’s contributors. For example, Charles Waldheim notes that a city is not a “collection of objects.” He says the city is, instead, a “continuous system of relational forces and flows”. However, in adapting to an ecologic scale and embracing abstract concepts, like ‘complex relations’, over objects, designers have to also accept root instability – as flows and relations have to be constantly negotiated, unlike objects which have to be stable to be built – which creates added tension between what’s imagined and aesthetic application. Put another way, a change in scale means that design practise has to create a living environment, as opposed to built.

3. Ecology

It’s common to assume that ecology is positive, that it is harmonious and defined by some notion of equilibrium. But such assumptions are misleading. Ecology is qualitative: It is the organisation of a community that comes-of dynamics and relations of different populations, as well as variations in environmental disturbance and resilience. There is no equilibrium, no utopian stability or established order. Likewise, just as there are multiple species and different environmental niches, there are multiple ecologies composed of various and constantly changing relations. As Gregory Bateson points-out “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds…” And it should be added that there’s an ecology of living rooms and flat screen televisions, as there was an ecology of Eichmanns in Speer’s Nazi utopia.

The problem with Ecological Urbanism and its focus on the aesthetics of ecology is that design practise does not inhabit the city; it only creates the form and imaginary of an urban environment. To paraphrase Guattari, within the built environment, the life of a city – it’s other ecologies – reside in its mental and social ‘registers’. And, admittedly, in the case of a text as ambitious as Ecological Urbanism, the task of documenting added ecologies would take multiple, thicker volumes.

By itself, the aethetics and construction of a city are not an environmental problem. It is a symptom of larger ecological disturbances in the life of a city. Likewise, the issue of scale remains; design and planning do not work on a scale that can change the mental and social life of the city, let alone infrastructure. At best, design practice can modify urban form and influence a population’s everyday life – and in Ecological Urbanism, there are some good examples, like pop-up parks, floating gardens, and well thought-out transit solutions. But an ecological urbanism – which is utopic, as it currently exists ‘no place’ – cannot be built without total reorganisation of mental and social ecologies: Everyday life, people’s sensibilities, their habits, their values and culture have to change for the city to change.

For there to be an ecological urbanism, ideas of equilibrium have to go the way of the design object. Instead, it has to address earlier utopian questions of the just city or the political consititution of public space, which means embracing designs that are provisory and capable of adapting to conflicting and constantly changing conditions. Consequently, ecological urbanism is an inherently unstable or agonistic habitus: It has to be built for different, nuanced and dissensual styles of life. It also has to be laid-out in a way that allows relations between constitutients of the urban environment to not be pre-fabricated – which is still a problem of scale, as it implies a multitude of one-off designs. Though, as previously noted, this is not necessarily a design matter, as much as it is a problem with the ecology of living rooms and malls, where relations are habituated and commodified.

4. Concluding Remarks

With ecological urbanism there is matter of moral imperative and aesthetic value: A more ecological city must remediate environmental damage and improve the conditions of everyday life. But a city founded on moral imperative has a problem of being a new city built to solve the aesthetic and particular failures of the old city. This, in turn, implies that the city is a dialectic process, which also means that the city remains a staid built object, and not a lived environment.

For there to be an ecologic city, even if it’s an utopian imaginary, the design object has to be supplanted by a more vitalist imaginary – this is not to say it’s the only option, there are others, but this specific idea is played-with most often in Ecological Urbanism. However, a vitalist city has a multitude of problems and absurdities, the most significant being that it can’t be planned. As Bergson explains, the future is a contingency of unknown possibilities, and laying-out a plan would mean setting a foundation that cannot carry the capacity of future circumstance, which is problem of the contemporary city. Also, in becoming vitalist, design practise has to create space – which itself is oxymoronic – for what Guy Debord called dérive or drift, “for sudden changes in ambiance… within the space of a few metres”, which can give any city a certain uneven quality that already exists in places like Kinshasa or Jakarta. And in choosing vitalism, there also has to be cultural acceptance of a grittiness or carnivalesque that is never present in any urban plan, such as movements of passion or feverish sleeplessness.

Also, the matter of infrastructure remains. Design practise can make a difference in the life of a city. But there can be no significant change in the ecologies of the city, including the mental and social, without total reorganisation of infrastructure. Specifically, infrastructure is a mixed creation or hybrid, it is both an object that has designed material form, but is also vital, as it provides myriad forces and flows that make possible city life. Infrastructure is, therefore, the logical transitional foundation between the old and new city. Utility objects like the energy grid, highways, communications facilities, water supply and waste-water services can be redesigned to alter the nature of goods, services, markets, and forms of care, like education or health care.

Finally, Ecological Urbanism proposes is an aesthetic solution to a political problem. This is not necessarily an urgent matter of concern, but it is akin to using form to manipulate function, and in some ways is technocratic and managerial. And in a risk society, technocratic measures are not necessarily a new or novel solution to old problems. Moreover, as has been painfully learned multiple times, the careful technical calculations of design design can be easily upset by externalities like risk assessment, market forces or even political will, leading to multiple revisions and compromise of the imaginary.

- Jim Morrow