Why ecological urbanism why now mohsen mostafavi

Besides providing accommodation for Ambani, his mother, his wife, three children, and full-time staff, it comes with its own helipad, health club, and six floors of parking. What are the guidelines for evaluating the impact of a building on the city, not just in terms of its aesthetic appearance but also in relation to its ethical performance? The third story was about the making of a film, Grow Your Own , which chronicles the progress of a group of traumatized asylum-seekers as they work their inner-city allotment gardens in Liverpool.

The film was inspired by the research of a psychotherapist, Margrit Ruegg, who runs a refugee support center. Her experience had shown the therapeutic as well as the physical benefits of gardening. In tending to their vegetables on the plots, alongside their neighbors, the participants are able, in a modest and unsentimental way, to construct a collaborative and productive ground for communication and integration.

These three stories are all facets of the multiple realities that our individual and group actions shape in the context of the contemporary urban domain. Like Bateson, Guattari places emphasis on the role that humans play in relation to ecological practices. The city historically constructed is no longer lived and is no longer understood practically.

It is only an object of cultural consumption for tourists, for aestheticism, avid for spectacles and the picturesque. Even for those who seek to understand it with warmth, it is gone. Yet, the urban remains in a state of dispersed and alienated actuality, as kernel and virtuality. What the eyes and analysis perceive on the ground can at best pass for the shadow of the future object in the light of a rising sun.

It is impossible to envisage the reconstitution of the old city, only the construction of a new one on new foundations, on another scale and in other conditions, in another society. The prescription is: there cannot be a going back towards the traditional city , nor a head long flight, towards a colossal and shapeless agglomeration. In other words, for what concerns the city the object of science is not given. The past, the present, the possible cannot be separated. What is being studied is a virtual object, which thought studies, which calls for new approaches.

Every discipline has the responsibility to constantly create its own conditions of progress—its own instabilities—and today it is valuable to recognize that we have a unique opportunity to reconsider the core of the disciplines that help us think about the phenomenon of the urban: urban planning and design.

The prevailing conventions of design practice have demonstrated a limited capacity both to respond to the scale of the ecological crisis and to adapt their established ways of thinking. In this context, ecological urbanism can be seen as a means of providing a set of sensibilities and practices that can help enhance our approaches to urban development.

This is not to imply that ecological urbanism is a totally new and singular mode of design practice. Rather, it utilizes a multiplicity of old and new methods, tools, and techniques in a cross-disciplinary and collaborative approach toward urbanism developed through the lens of ecology. These practices must address the retrofitting of existing urban conditions as well as our plans for the cities of the future. Given the undulating topography of the city, the promenade affords an ever-changing sectional relationship to its surroundings.

As a result, the park produces a different experience of the city compared, for example, to that of a Parisian boulevard. This is achieved through the discovery and construction of stark juxtapositions and contrasts that include the experience of the city from different horizon lines.

This type of urban recycling of the remnants of the industrial city benefits from the unexpected and given context of the site that needs to be remade, a context far from a tabula rasa. In these examples, the site acts as a mnemonic device for the making of the new.

A reference point for many such contemporary projects is the unbuilt competition entry for the Parc de la Villette by OMA. This process also included a rethinking of the relationship between architecture and landscape, through a suppression of the three-dimensionality of architecture. The operative design procedures undertaken by OMA—or for that matter by Bernard Tschumi in the selected and subsequently built version of La Villette—are suggestive of the potentials of an ethico-aesthetic design practice that brings together architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism.

Despite these examples, one could argue that the traditional divisions between architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urban design are still necessary for the formation and accumulation of specific disciplinary knowledge.

But each individual discipline is of limited value in responding to the range and diversity of contemporary urban issues. The pitfalls of acting in isolation become especially evident in the extreme conditions of the most densely populated conurbations around the globe, where it is much harder to identify disciplinary boundaries. While a collaborative mode of working among various areas of design expertise is mandatory in thinking about the contemporary and future city, the transdisciplinary approach of ecological urbanism gives designers a potentially more fertile means of addressing the challenges facing the urban environment.

Yet another key characteristic of ecological urbanism is its recognition of the scale and scope of the impact of ecology, which extends beyond the urban territory.

The city, for all its importance, can no longer be thought of only as a physical artifact; instead, we must be aware of the dynamic relationships, both visible and invisible, that exist among the various domains of a larger terrain of urban as well as rural ecologies. Distinctions between rural and urban contingencies can lead to uncertainties and contradictions—calling for unconventional solutions. This regional, holistic approach, with its consequent national and global considerations, demonstrates the multi-scalar quality of ecological urbanism.

Much of the knowledge necessary for this mode of design practice can be gained from disciplines such as environmental planning and landscape ecology, with an emphasis on biodiversity. The insights found at the interface of these disciplines will ultimately provide the most synthetic and valuable material for alternative multi-scalar design strategies. The visionary Italian architect and urbanist Andrea Branzi has for many years espoused the advantages of a different approach toward the city—one that is not reliant on a compositional or typological approach.

Rather, for Branzi it is the fluidity of the city, its capacity to be diffuse and enzymatic in character, that merits acknowledgment. In a series of projects that deliberately blur the boundaries between the disciplines and are as much indebted to art practice as they are to agriculture and network culture , Branzi has proposed an adaptive urbanism based on their symbiotic relationship.

A key feature of this type of urbanism—like the agricultural territory—is its capacity to be reversible, evolving, and provisory. These qualities are necessary in response to the changing needs of a society in a state of constant re-organization. In particular, the open areas that are no longer in use in many cities, such as New Orleans, could become productive domains where residences, work places, and spaces of leisure could be intertwined.

It is a form of nature that resists naturalism and uses its references to the agricultural territory in an operative and temporal way. More specifically, the blurring of boundaries—real and virtual, as well as urban and rural—implies a greater connection and complementarity between the various parts of a given territory. Conceptually akin to acupuncture, the interventions in and transformations of an area often have a significant impact beyond perceived physical limits.

Thinking simultaneously at small and large scales calls for an awareness that is currently unimaginable in many existing patterns of legal, political, and economic activity. One of the major challenges of ecological urbanism is therefore to define the conditions of governance under which it could operate that would result in a more cohesive regional planning model.

The network of relations among multiple localities at different scales provides a window onto the ways in which we could reconsider the implications of developments such as sprawl. There, far from the city core, forests are being cleared for big box stores, high-speed roadways, and low-density subdivisions for long-distance commuters.

One effect can be seen in the alarming rate of increase in the pro portion of Americans who are overweight, from 24 percent in , to 47 percent in , to no less than 63 percent today. Surely the problem of obesity is fueled by the ongoing development of residential communities with so much emphasis on the automobile and so little encouragement of walking. Other factors include the general lack of investment in public transport in the United States compared to most European countries, where urban and regional infrastructures are seen as necessary provisions for the citizens.

These figures show the importance of density as a determining criterion of ecological urbanism. The importance of long-range planning, together with the potential benefits as well as challenges of denser, more compact cities, necessitates a much closer collaboration between the public and private sectors.

Although an increasing number of private development companies, for ethical as well as financial reasons, are now espousing the values of sustainability, their concerns are often focused on the technical performance of individual buildings rather than on the larger territory. The articulation of long-range public policies defined by an ethicoaesthetic principle—on topics such as density, use, infrastructure, and biodiversity—will therefore require a greater imaginative involvement than has been the norm in the past.

Because the public sector deals with the operations and maintenance of existing cities, it bears primary responsibility for considering alternative ways of addressing these issues. This entry has no external links. Add one. Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server Configure custom proxy use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy.

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