Following basic criteria for sustainability, we propose new ways to integrate food, goods, water, and energy cycles in our near environment.
We will deal with a Landscape, that is, with the involvement of very different agents whose interests and aims overlap, developing a palimpsest on a page that was never blank.
Tomorrow’s city is not an impenetrable partitioning of activities, inherited from functional town-planning. It is not the sum of lined up elements. Tomorrow’s city, the sustainable city, is a network of interdependence between activities, uses and contexts, all interacting through more or less complex combinations. Natural cycles are included in this network, and in correspondence Nature is not confined, but transformed, inhabited.
Timothy Morton’s seminal book ‘Ecology without Nature’ (2007) compares this evolution with the process of gender equality. Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman: the paradox first described by Simone de Beauvoir deactivates any possible active role of ‘the second sex’ transforming actually existing women into fetish objects.
Ecology is not about Cities looking after Nature, but about City and Nature being the same thing. In this new paradigm, the romantic view of Nature feeding the City and the fetishism of economic exploitation of rural landscape is also substituted by an integrative view of anthropized landscape.
Agriculture
The easiest way to start blurring the border between rural and urban is to develop a local network of agricultural production. On the other hand, locally produced organic vegetables have a potential to provide substantial GHG-savings in transport. The common organic garden also has an important social purpose, being a social meeting place and providing a common project where all people of all ages can participate.
Animal husbandry
Areas for organic agriculture can be programmatically joined with animal husbandry. A revisited pig-city can create a powerful productive landmark.
Wood
The construction of public space around wood production can also be a tool to emphasize the differences between various parts of the urban network, by filling undefined areas with woodlands. Depending on future trends, certain urban areas may be allocated to the woodlands, or vice versa. Thus, the city will have room for expansion and reduction, all within the same organic system.
Fish
Particularly strong proposals for a productive landscape can be centred on fish production, combining productive spaces, public areas, walkways… and restaurants with a view to its own production, which could even become a major tourist attraction. Aquatic life in the semi-natural environment becomes accessible to visitors as the user programme weaves itself into various stages of the production line.
Water
A number of interesting programmatic opportunities may arise from a careful consideration of water cycles. This is closely related with all the former points. Water is a clear example of how the demise of the traditional dichotomy city-nature applies to urban design, emphasizing the need to deal with water purifying plants as an element of urban design, and not merely an infrastructural service. In previous decades the logic was to plan these plants just outside the city; but there is no outside any more.
Energy farming
Production of renewable energy provides a new reading of natural landscape. The force of wind and sun, the flow of water, the heat of the earth, are all now made visible through fields of beautiful devices. We are still learning to appreciate the beauty of white windmills slowly turning their slender giant arms above the horizon, or the vineyard-like extensions of photovoltaic panels over our fields, and some visionaries are already bringing this mesmerizing image into the inhabited landscape of urban parks, or covering proposed buildings with shiny abstract envelopes absorbing the energy required to run the quiet murmur of computers systems.
Visualization
All the above is dealing with energy, water, agriculture, fish, pigs, industry... and the beauty of productive landscapes. The classic definition of landscape involves the presence of an observer, a point of view. This combination of ‘viewing’ plus ‘production’ is one of the main driving forces in all these proposals. This is important, as Sustainability may well be a question of visualization.
An important line of action is to visualize the resources we are using for our daily life, showing in real time the state of management of resources (Solar energy, geothermal, biomass, wasted water…), so that people may be conscious about it. Such info-energy landmark will be a new urban and social reference.
Beauty
It is also essential to tackle the aesthetic challenge of sustainability. Most of the historic architectural languages may be analyzed as a basic response to environment conditions; from the obvious reflexes of water-shedding classical frontispieces, through all the various balances of mass and void showing different achievements in relation to natural light, up to the modern proud statement of indifference to the weather. We have now learned that we cannot be as indifferent to the climate as the modernists claimed, and a new architectural language must be created to incorporate our new concern.
Wealth
The media-attractive sights we propose intend to provoke a triggering effect, to become an example of what can be done so that many others around the world may try equivalent approaches. Some of them explicitly refer to the tourist potential of productive landscape, and the wealth that could be derived not only from its product, but also from its beauty.
Development
The exciting rurban scenes to be developed, provide new patterns for cities to grow as a part of nature, not in opposition to nature. The subtle connection to the environment will prove that natural cycles can be a driving force for architectural and urban design, while the new architectural language is part of a necessary effort to re-evaluate the aesthetics of ecology.
All these efforts to integrate elements of sustainable production as a beautiful and profitable feature to enjoy in everyday life, may well be more proactive against climate change than any technical development or any law. Those are the New Productive Landscapes.
We will deal with a Landscape, that is, with the involvement of very different agents whose interests and aims overlap, developing a palimpsest on a page that was never blank.
Tomorrow’s city is not an impenetrable partitioning of activities, inherited from functional town-planning. It is not the sum of lined up elements. Tomorrow’s city, the sustainable city, is a network of interdependence between activities, uses and contexts, all interacting through more or less complex combinations. Natural cycles are included in this network, and in correspondence Nature is not confined, but transformed, inhabited.
Timothy Morton’s seminal book ‘Ecology without Nature’ (2007) compares this evolution with the process of gender equality. Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman: the paradox first described by Simone de Beauvoir deactivates any possible active role of ‘the second sex’ transforming actually existing women into fetish objects.
Ecology is not about Cities looking after Nature, but about City and Nature being the same thing. In this new paradigm, the romantic view of Nature feeding the City and the fetishism of economic exploitation of rural landscape is also substituted by an integrative view of anthropized landscape.
Agriculture
The easiest way to start blurring the border between rural and urban is to develop a local network of agricultural production. On the other hand, locally produced organic vegetables have a potential to provide substantial GHG-savings in transport. The common organic garden also has an important social purpose, being a social meeting place and providing a common project where all people of all ages can participate.
Animal husbandry
Areas for organic agriculture can be programmatically joined with animal husbandry. A revisited pig-city can create a powerful productive landmark.
Wood
The construction of public space around wood production can also be a tool to emphasize the differences between various parts of the urban network, by filling undefined areas with woodlands. Depending on future trends, certain urban areas may be allocated to the woodlands, or vice versa. Thus, the city will have room for expansion and reduction, all within the same organic system.
Fish
Particularly strong proposals for a productive landscape can be centred on fish production, combining productive spaces, public areas, walkways… and restaurants with a view to its own production, which could even become a major tourist attraction. Aquatic life in the semi-natural environment becomes accessible to visitors as the user programme weaves itself into various stages of the production line.
Water
A number of interesting programmatic opportunities may arise from a careful consideration of water cycles. This is closely related with all the former points. Water is a clear example of how the demise of the traditional dichotomy city-nature applies to urban design, emphasizing the need to deal with water purifying plants as an element of urban design, and not merely an infrastructural service. In previous decades the logic was to plan these plants just outside the city; but there is no outside any more.
Energy farming
Production of renewable energy provides a new reading of natural landscape. The force of wind and sun, the flow of water, the heat of the earth, are all now made visible through fields of beautiful devices. We are still learning to appreciate the beauty of white windmills slowly turning their slender giant arms above the horizon, or the vineyard-like extensions of photovoltaic panels over our fields, and some visionaries are already bringing this mesmerizing image into the inhabited landscape of urban parks, or covering proposed buildings with shiny abstract envelopes absorbing the energy required to run the quiet murmur of computers systems.
Visualization
All the above is dealing with energy, water, agriculture, fish, pigs, industry... and the beauty of productive landscapes. The classic definition of landscape involves the presence of an observer, a point of view. This combination of ‘viewing’ plus ‘production’ is one of the main driving forces in all these proposals. This is important, as Sustainability may well be a question of visualization.
An important line of action is to visualize the resources we are using for our daily life, showing in real time the state of management of resources (Solar energy, geothermal, biomass, wasted water…), so that people may be conscious about it. Such info-energy landmark will be a new urban and social reference.
Beauty
It is also essential to tackle the aesthetic challenge of sustainability. Most of the historic architectural languages may be analyzed as a basic response to environment conditions; from the obvious reflexes of water-shedding classical frontispieces, through all the various balances of mass and void showing different achievements in relation to natural light, up to the modern proud statement of indifference to the weather. We have now learned that we cannot be as indifferent to the climate as the modernists claimed, and a new architectural language must be created to incorporate our new concern.
Wealth
The media-attractive sights we propose intend to provoke a triggering effect, to become an example of what can be done so that many others around the world may try equivalent approaches. Some of them explicitly refer to the tourist potential of productive landscape, and the wealth that could be derived not only from its product, but also from its beauty.
Development
The exciting rurban scenes to be developed, provide new patterns for cities to grow as a part of nature, not in opposition to nature. The subtle connection to the environment will prove that natural cycles can be a driving force for architectural and urban design, while the new architectural language is part of a necessary effort to re-evaluate the aesthetics of ecology.
All these efforts to integrate elements of sustainable production as a beautiful and profitable feature to enjoy in everyday life, may well be more proactive against climate change than any technical development or any law. Those are the New Productive Landscapes.
