[This is the fourth piece in a multi-part series examining the city through the lens of the Green Metropolis, by David Owen]
As a fundamentally descriptive work, the Green Metropolis does not elaborate a detailed panacea to the problem of the contemporary city.
In fact, it implicitly suggests that the quick implementation of comprehensive solutions for housing and transportation are worse than no change at all. It was a post-war belief in the future of the automobile that created the suburbs and automobile city. The slow, bloody incrementalism of democratically oriented civic change is more ultimately more resilient than than the sweeping manifestos of ego-driven master planners.
The Green Metropolis suggests that this incremental change should be driven by living smaller, living closer and driving less.
The problem with living smaller, living closer and driving less is the word less. Less is not very attractive for most of us. Outside of the very rich and the aesthetically inclined culture classes, less is not more. Sure, we can dream of living in the sparkling pages of a Dwell magazine, but in reality we have to have sex, raise children, keep mementos of the past, store our bikes and the rest of the minutiae that make up our daily existence. We love our ‘bit of ground’.
Think about it. In North America, most of live in comfortable, temperature controlled homes that do not leak. Our cupboards have enough sustenance. We are not being tortured or pursued by an enemy (most of us at least…). Yet we still kind of need that new set of skiis, or a bigger apartment, or our own garden. Happiness is a dynamic state. This is why a less-is-more, no-growth society is untenable in the face of human desire and a world of plentiful resources.
Danish architect Bjark Ingels has proposed an alternative phrase: hedonistic sustainability, or yes is more.
He suggests that a development can provide innovative design, public space, affordable dwellings, wildlife refuge, energy generation and employment. And it can make money. While it is unclear if his projects actually achieve these goals, the phrase remains compelling: yes is more.
This is a kind of third-wave urbanism. In politics, yes we can. In the city, yes is more. Yet as Barack Obama has discovered, implementing compelling slogans is always more difficult than saying them. This is why ‘yes is more’ needs the help of ecological urbanism.
Ecological urbanism is not a manifesto specifying the geometric shape and colour of a city; it does not prescribe densities or zoning. It does not require a blank slate or greenfield site to be built.
It is a process, with an outcome that feeds another process, that feeds another process, that feeds another process…and so on.
[Look for Ecological Urbanism, part five of this series]