Volume 18: After Zero

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

116

Aric Mayer Disruptive Innovation

Ronald Sean Wall

112

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

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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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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

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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.

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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

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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

2040

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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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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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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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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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4.

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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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Volume 18

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.

1 2

3

4 5

6 7 8 9

10 11

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13 14

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-

Volume 18

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