Facing Reality on a Finite Planet

Photo Courtesy of NASA

I have written this in response to an article I read by Alan Berger, a landscape architect who co-directs the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT. The title was, “Cities Are Not as Big a Deal as You Think”.

He advocates an approach called “bioregionalism,” which treats cities and suburbs as a holistic system. The following are a few quotes from his article that have stimulated my response below.

1)      Seto says, “What’s very clear is that we need a language and a finer-grain differentiation of different types of urban life and urban ecosystems, …”

2)      “…for 50 years, people talked about suburbs as distinct from the city,” he says. But as cities and suburbs have changed and blurred together, that distinction no longer makes sense.

3)      Looking across the many different ways that countries define urban in the UN data, Seto says, “‘urban’ suggests a higher quality of life, higher standards of living, and more opportunity for the people who live there.” In developing countries particularly, urban denotes a place where people have access to jobs, running water, electricity, and other municipal services.

4)      That’s a much more basic definition of urbanity than a place with skyscrapers and subways. And when you think about “urban” in that context, it throws the spotlight on how many people are still not living with those basic amenities.

RESPONSE

Mr. Berger’s holistic system contains urban, suburban, and rural areas are that are phyla within a Built Domain that is expanding to accommodate growing populations. The expansion is forming a metastasizing pattern we refer to as sprawl across the face of a planet that is its source of life. Each phylum contains Shelter, Movement, Open Space, and Life Support Divisions in quantities that distinguish one from the other. The Shelter Division in all phyla is served by movement, open space, and life support; but the Movement Division is a servant that dominates its patrons.

Focusing on the distinction between urban, suburban, and rural areas overlooks the threat that is facing us. The Built Domain currently attempts to shelter growing populations in a sprawling, pathogenic pattern that is slowly consuming our source of life - The Natural Domain. In other words, there are two competing worlds on a single planet; and The Natural Domain does not compromise with ignorance. We have been given the responsibility to define symbiotic survival; and discussing the distinction among urban, suburban, and rural areas in the Built Domain overlooks the threat we can now see with satellite photography. I’m not arguing that the topics are irrelevant. In fact, our knowledge is extremely limited at the present time. I’m arguing that the results will produce tactical concepts without the adopted policy, strategy, and goals required to effectively battle an enemy that we refuse to acknowledge. Keep in mind that we were told to be fruitful and multiply at a time when it was a world without end, Amen.

I related to quote (1) because it seeks what I have produced for the Shelter Division of the Built Domain in three books over a lifetime of effort. These books have contributed the language and fine grain differentiation needed to guide the cellular contents of sprawl toward symbiotic solutions. My last book, The Science of City Design, needs to be reorganized and rewritten to simplify its message; but it contains everything needed to begin the search for intelligence that is the foundation for successful leadership direction. The reader could also benefit from a cloud-based collection of spreadsheet applications that would make the pages interactive and far more useful to research efforts.

Our traditional approach has focused on shelter, movement, open space, and life support projects. Our ability to survive and multiply is forcing us to focus on the aggregation of projects on a finite planet. Our leadership success to date is reflected by the sprawl and contamination we now contemplate from space. Our leadership ability will only improve when we recognize a threat and improve the language, policy, strategy, goals, objectives, and tactics adopted in response. It appears that our current strategy is to infect other host planets with parasitic policies that ignore symbiotic reality.