A new paper in the journal Sustainability suggests that while the term is vague and difficult to implement, we can take more effective actions to counter the obvious UN-sustainable patterns that are all around us -- along with the institutional and cultural forms of "lock-in" that perpetuate them
ABOVE: Left, the Pantheon in Rome, a remarkable exemplar of urban sustainability in continuous use for 1,900 years, in a splendid walkable mixed-use context; center and right, in stark contrast, a 1937 advertisement from Life Magazine, just 87 years ago, effectively marketing a problematic urban model subsequently implemented in cities across the globe, like Dallas, Texas (shown at right). Images: Left, Nono vlf via Wikimedia Commons; center, philafrenzy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain); and right, Google Maps.
CORTONA, ITALY - At a time of growing threats to urban and planetary well-being, the 61st International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference, to take place here from October 29th to November 1st, will focus on the topic of sustainable urbanism. For it is in cities that we conduct most of our interactions, daily movements, consumptions, and all the other impacts we humans generate in and on our world.
To explore this topic, leading researchers in urbanism, architecture, sociology, health, complexity science, and other fields, will join leading city officials, practitioners, NGO heads, and other city leaders from across the globe at the IMCL conference. The focus will be on the current generation of urban challenges, and sharing the latest effective solutions.
Partners and participating organizations will include The King's Foundation (UK), UN-Habitat, the Congress for the New Urbanism, The International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), the Center on African Public Space, the Journal of Public Space, the World Farmers Market Coalition, Seaside Institute, HealthBridge, and other globally active organizations in developing a new generation of more truly sustainable, ecological, beautiful and livable urbanism.
Michael Mehaffy, Executive Director of the Lennard Institute, will discuss a new paper titled "UN-Sustainable Urbanism: The Challenge of 'Lock-In,'” just published in the international Journal Sustainability. The article is part of a special issue that Mehaffy guest-edited, titled "Sustainable Urbanism: Definition, Assessment, and Agenda for Future Research." A number of past IMCL conference participants also contributed to the issue, in addition to Mehaffy.
Rather than focus on abstract ideas of what a sustainable urban future would look like -- which tends to draw unprovable theories, ideological claims and too often, sheer fantasies -- Mehaffy suggests that we focus instead on the more tangible patterns of UN-sustainable urbanism: "Specifically, forms of urbanism that cause an unacceptable buildup of toxic or climate-altering emissions, deplete resources beyond sustainable levels, progressively destroy critical ecologies, and cause other identifiable sources of potentially catastrophic harm to human and urban welfare." To that, Mehaffy suggests, we could add the less obvious forms of social isolation, cultural estrangement and institutional erosion that are increasingly evident in research findings, and that are associated with the decline of public life in modern cities. All of these are deeply interrelated, he concludes.
Mehaffy identifies four main factors of un-sustainable urbanism:
Over-reliance on low-occupancy, high-consumption vehicular transport.
Inefficient envelope, size, orientation, and adaptability of buildings.
Ecologically destructive systems for handling water and energy.
Decline of a well-ordered, walkable, functionally and visually appealing public realm.
The last factor is the least understood, he argues, and yet it is also perhaps the most important of all. In many ways, he says, the last factor is a result of the other three factors (e.g., dominance of low-occupancy vehicles; large, inefficient and poorly connected buildings; and degraded infrastructure resources in a sprawling public realm). In turn, however, the declining public realm exacerbates the other three factors, and multiplies their effects.
Mehaffy proposes a "four-factor model" of unsustainable urbanism, with a degraded public realm as a "multiplier" of the other three. The model allows measurement of the four factors and their potential impacts on human and natural systems.
Why is this unsustainable urban model still prevalent? Mehaffy argues that there is systemic "lock-in" -- that is, self-perpetuating forms of institutional and cultural feedback that incentivize business-as-usual and do not permit needed reforms. Some of those are so-called "path-dependent" patterns, similar to ingrained institutional habits that are hard to change.
Others are the product of obsolete ideologies, including the ideological model of cities created in the early- and mid-20th century. That model was incisively critiqued by Jane Jacobs and others for its overly simplistic practice of functionally segregating the parts of a city -- witheringly described by Jacobs as "decontaminated sortings."
ABOVE, a 1948 drawing by Adolf Bayer titled "Order... Disorder", proposing that the historic city is one of disease, overcrowding, and disorder, whereas the "modern" city would be a sanitary, orderly, rational place. In fact, the scheme on the left features highly segregated functions, or what Jane Jacobs called "decontaminated sortings." Crucially, it also lacks a meaningful or coherent public realm, instead relying on long isolated walkways and encapsulated buildings and vehicles.
The specific actions we need to take then become evident. Many of them are already under way at a number of scales, although they need to be greatly accelerated:
Reduce and re-balance low-occupancy, high-consumption vehicular transport with walkable and bikable infrastructure and urban mixed use.
Improve the thermal envelope, human-scale size, public-private orientation, and adaptability of buildings -- especially their durability and lovability.
Replace ecologically destructive systems for handling water and energy with more integrated ecological systems.
Perhaps most important of all, regenerate a well-ordered, walkable, functionally and visually appealing public realm, using placemaking, "urban acupuncture," New Urban planning principles, and other readily available (and newly developed) tools and strategies.
Mehaffy also points to a cognitive form of lock-in that he calls “modernity bias.” It is an explicit -- if unsupported by evidence -- theory within portions of academia, and a tacit assumption within much of the general public, that “that was then and this is now, and we just can’t (and shouldn't) do that anymore”. Various rationales are given, each of which can be swatted down with empirical evidence and counter-examples—but, meanwhile, another pops up, as in the child’s game Whack-a-Mole. “It isn’t practical”; “it’s too expensive”; “people won’t like it”; “it doesn’t have artistic merit”; and so on. Mehaffy continues:
One of the most powerful factors within this entrenched bias—if perhaps the least recognized—is the idea that the building aesthetics must be aggressively novel in a neo- modernist character if the project is to have any artistic merit. This idea is a reflection of a historically peculiar but remarkably poorly examined conception of the relationship between urban art (and architecture) and urban life. It is in fact a dysfunctional approach to the place of art in the city, as the urban journalist Jane Jacobs famously observed. We need art in cities, Jacobs argued, to illuminate our lives and enrich their meanings. But we must not allow art to substitute itself for urban life and thereby damage the life of the city and its citizens. We must not turn the city into a kind of sculpture garden of disconnected art objects. The result, she said, is neither art nor life, but “taxidermy”.
A key consequence of this confusion between art and life, and this tendency to impose an aggressive form of abstract art as a pattern for the aesthetics of buildings, is a widespread dislike by the public of new sustainable urban projects that are not built on preferred traditional aesthetic patterns. This finding is documented by a large body of survey research. At the same time, new research is documenting that this difference between users and professionals may have more to do with innate neuroaesthetic and cognitive needs than with the ideological or semiotic associations that are typically the focus of designers. Put differently, those who dwell in a place have different needs than those who create that place. If we are professionally committed to serving the actual needs of residents, and addressing the dynamics of their sustainable or unsustainable behaviors, it seems this issue must be taken much more seriously by architects, educators, and institutional decision-makers.
As Jacobs advised, there is certainly a crucial place for art in cities, as an enriching and illuminating dimension of urban experience. But the art must be integrated with the life of a place and its people, in a healthy reciprocal balance.
But when the art hijacks the life of the place and its people, we are all in trouble. And our cities will surely become unsustainable.
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This and other topics will be discussed and debated at the 61st International Making Cities Livable conference in Cortona, October 28th through November 1st, 2024. Please join us!
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