Introduction
What is ecological urbanism?
Ecological urbanism is inspired from ecology and is a kind of urbanism which is more inclusive and sensitive towards environment. It emerged as a critique of Landscape Urbanism demanding a more holistic approach towards design and management of cities. At a Conference at the University of Oregon (2003), the phrase “ecourbanismo” was first published in a Spanish book by Architect Miguel Ruano. In Intervention Architecture, the phrase was again highlighted by Mohsen Mostafavi (2007). The question that would boggle our mind is- what is the need for ecology based urbanism now? The reason is very evident to a learned mind that it is the extreme exploitation of the limited resources of nature which is bringing in new concepts of urbanization. Both individual and cities are responsible for the immense strain on the ecology. Now every year the cities are feeling the devastating impacts of the ecological strain. As Beatley (2000, p.15) uphold in ‘Green Urbanism,’ “Sustainability has been endorsed through the legislation and directives of the European Union (EU) as a primary Europe-wide objective.”Now the environmentalists are also feeling the need to have designers who can address this challenging reality successfully. Various writers are researching on the subject as to how to integrate the complex systems and social processes in such a way that it becomes fundamentally more humane. Jeb Brugmann (2009) said we need to become “masters of a stable, just, and ecological urbanism." For Brugmann, “The first step towards ecological urbanism is increasing the energy and nutrient productivity within the city, but the only way to move sufficiently from extractive mode to a sustainable productive mode is to think, design, and develop at the scale of the City.” At Peiking University (2010) a conference on New Aesthetics and Ecological Urbanism was held to explore the subject of ecologically sustainable urbanism.
Practically we might think the phrase “ecological urbanism” is an oxymoron because a city is always struggling with its mechanisms of consumption and insatiable demand for food. The relationship of organism with environment is of extracting kind. Therefore we can simply say that the project of urbanism is very much counter to ecology. We need speculative design innovations because our planet has become very fragile and the resources are very limited. We should not promote technical legitimation for conventional designs and solutions. There is utmost need to define a new approach that can give an effective solution confronting our cities and regions but at the same time it should not be environmentally extractive. We require new sensibilities instead of maintaining status quo on the subject of urbanism. Therefore we can say that the territory of urbanism involves the capacity to incorporate and accommodate the inherent conflictual relation between ecology and urbanism. Charles Anderson expanded on the subject saying “ecology is concerned with the relationships between all organisms and the environment. Together and coupled with aesthetic and expressionist design principles, they form the foundation for urban design.” The Brundtland Report (1987) and various scientific studies on global warming turned out to be a warning of the scale of challenges that lie ahead. Earlier researches only focused on innovating technologies to produce energy and recycle waste. As Beatley (2000, p.4) mentions in ‘Green Urbanism,’ “..even among cities in developed countries, there is considerable variation in their ecological footprints.”The challenges of rapid urbanization and the limited amount of natural resources have created pressing demands for alternative designs to create sustainable urbanism
The issues confronting architects:
The increasing world population has led to migrations from rural to urban areas. There is great deal of skepticism and resistance which matches the growing concern for environment. United States, Canada and some Gulf states are among the largest users of per capita energy in the world. As a result United States was not even able to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Even the Copenhagen summit failed to bring up a legally binding agreement revealed the various milestones in achieving ecological urbanism. No doubt Architects have been aware of the challenging issues but the number of architects committed to the new approach has been small. As Beatley (1997, p.3) states in ‘The Ecology of Place,) “To many sustainability and sustainable development are just the latest buzz words to make their way into the planning field.sustainability and sustainable development require definition and elaboration”. It has been observed that the work produced by these architects on sustainable and ecological practices have been of poor quality. The new kind of sustainable architecture meant a life of renunciation which is stripped of much pleasure. Things are changing since sustainable designs are now becoming popular in mainstream profession. The problem lays in the fact that moral imperative of sustainability and the implication of sustainable design seems to supplant disciplinary contribution. Thus we cans say ecological urbanism does not always upheld design excellence or design innovation. This situation creates tension and provokes skepticism among those promote disciplinary knowledge and those who harp on sustainability. As such a new approach should be developed including novel ways of architectural designs which satisfies the needs of both the domain. Another issue confronted by the architecture is scale. Since most of the projects taken by sustainable architects are very limited in terms of scope. The urban includes various complex relations such as political, economic, cultural and social will definitely require a complex range of perspectives which would successfully address both current situations and also future possibilities. The aim of sustainable architectures should be to conjoin both ecology and urbanism and also provide knowledge, methods, and clues of what the urban would become in the coming future.
The three narratives:
The Guardian Newspaper in United Kingdom had published articles that were addressing the fundamental questions faced by sustainability. We all know about the challenges of sustainability around the globe. These challenges have become a norm occurring on a daily basis and it does not belong to the category of exception. It is presumed by astute entities that the urbanization of nature not only shapes the material form of the city but also the way in which power circulates and is stabilized (Gandy 2002)
The first is the oil bloom connecting Iraq and Alberta. A Canadian political journalist Naomi Klein discovered the connections that existed between the invasion of Iraq and the oil bloom in Alberta. It has been almost for years since Iraq and Alberta are connected to each other through an invisible see-saw. The article by Klein threw light on how large territories are devastated in search of oil. Alberta has large deposits of Bitumen which is the largest hydrocarbon deposits in the world. Theprocess of turning tar sands into crude is both complex and also costly. It has several methods. One method includes open-cast mining. In this large forests have to be leveled and the topsoil removed so that specially designed machines dig out the bitumen and place it in dump trucks. The tar is then chemically treated so that the oil rises up. The waste products are then dumped into ponds. According to Klein these waste products are more than the surrounding lakes. There is another method which involves drilling of large pipes that push steam underground to melt the tar. After this a second pipe transfers it through various stages of refining. Conventional oil drilling is cheaper than both these processes. They also produce huge amounts of greenhouse gases. In spite of this they become financially viable after the invasion of Iraq. As a result Canada has left behind Saudi Arabia as the leading supplier of oil for U.S.A. A non-profit think-tank of Pembina Institute and Ecojustice has presented several documents that revealed the damaging effects of oil-sands on Alberta’s fresh water resources. All this devastating damage is done to the environment in search of cheap oil for the consumer and hefty profits for oil companies. This is a warning and also a vivid reminder to discover alternative and efficient ways of using energy resources.
The second story involves the construction of a high profile residence in Mumbai for India’s rich business tycoon Mukesh Ambani. He is the chairman of the county’s largest private sector company, the Reliance Group. The building is named after a mythical island “Antilla”. It is a sixty-story tower block which provides accommodation for Ambani, his mother, his wife, three children and 600 full-time staff. The tower comes with its own helipad, health club and six floors of parking space. According to a local newspaper there is growing anger among the masses towards such absurd spending. This kind of mindless spending is making the divide between rich and poor totally obscene. The name of the residence itself is suggestive of the desire of autonomy and separation from Mumbai. As such there is need for evaluating the impact of the buildings on the city including its aesthetic appearance and also its ethical performance.
Another story revolves around the making of a film called “Grow Your Own”. This movie projects the progress of a group of traumatized asylum-seekers in their inner city allotment gardens in Liverpool. It tried to reveal the therapeutic and physical benefits of gardening.One of the producers of the film had said that there are many refugees who left places like Angola, Somalia and the Balkans in horrific circumstances. War had robbed these people off their homes and also their identities. With time those refugees were given a plot of land which helped them to open up. These stories were not limited to refugees but it also included people from the local community who got entangled in the conflicts of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The participants in tending to their vegetables in the plot along with their neighbors were able to collaborate and create a productive ground for integration and communication.
These three stories actually depict how individual and community action shape up the contemporary domain. The most important aspect of this argument is the interrelations between individual responsibilities and group actions which effects the environment. The alternative approaches to ecological urbanism should not be rooted in science but it should embrace a new "ethico-aesthetic" perspective as their primary source of inspiration. As Mostafavi (2010) observes in ‘Harvard Design Magazine’:
“The ethico- aesthetic dimension of ecological urbanism- defined through the registers of mental, social, and environmental ecology- is directly concerned with the articulation of the interface, the liminal space, between the urban and the political. Unlike some other forms of revitalization, such as the City Beautiful movement in the past or New Urbanism today, this approach does not rely on the image, nor on social homogeneity and nostalgia, as its primary sources of inspiration, but rather recognizes the importance of the urban as the necessary site of conflictual relations.”
It mainly tries to reshape human intervention in the objectives of the production of both material and immaterial assets. If this new approach is applied to the urban domain would create a new form of urban design practice that does not only take into consideration the fragility of the planet and the limitation of the resources but also regards these as determining factors for the new form of creative imagining. Graham (2001) and Martin (2001) maintain that in the contemporary era, underinvestment in, and the privatization of, networked infrastructure has led to a splintering urbanism, perhaps more representative of the post-Fordist or neoliberal movement.
What is sustainable architecture?
During professional training the architects should be educated about the environmental issues so that they could help to achieve environmental sustainability. The entire faculty should aid in environmental awareness to introduce and inculcate environmental ethics among students and accordingly shape up their knowledge and skills. Gordon (2000) argues “sustainable design has now gone mainstream- After decades of intense effort by designers, architects, individuals, and organization, a tectonic shift in design thinking has occurred.”At present sustainable architecture has become a subject based more on ethic than science. We need to bring about a change in our lifestyles and attitudes towards the local and global environment. To achieve environment sustainability a building should be holistically balance and integrate all three principles:
- Economy of resources
- Sustainable design
- Life cycle design
These principles should be kept in mind in construction, design, maintenance, operation, recycling and reuse of architectural resources. To implement a sustainable architectural design it is very necessary to have conceptual framework. This framework will help the architects to seek solutions rather than giving them prepared solutions. These principles will help emanate specific design solutions which are compatible with given design problem.
How to achieve ecological urbanism?
The ultimate aim of sustainable design is to find win-win solutions that provide quantitative, qualitative, physical and psychological benefits to architects. The three principles of sustainable design are:
- Economy of resources
- Life cycle design
- Humane design
These strategies are intended to foster an understanding of how a structure or building interacts with the internal, local and global environments.
Economy of resources
Sustainability of architecture involves conserving energy, water and materials. These methods are classified under two types:
Input-reduction methods: this controls the flow of non-renewable resources to buildings.
Output-management methods: this helps to reduce environmental pollution by requiring low level of waste and proper waste management.
Lifecycle design
This principle embodies three strategies namely pre-building, building and post-building. These strategies are very helpful in yielding specific design methods which improves the sustainability of architecture. These strategies just help in reducing input in architectural designs. In manufacturing processes consuming fewer materials lessens the environmental impact. This will help to reduce the eventual output of the building ecosystem and creating great degree of sustainable architecture.
Humane design
This principle is further effective in bringing out sustainable architecture. It embodies threes strategies such as preservation of natural conditions, design for human comfort and urban design and site planning. It aims to improve the sustainability of architecture while creating urban designs. It primarily focusses on improving the quality of life of humans and other species.
What are the advantages of ecological urbanism?
It has become a universal fact that sustainable buildings are a smart way of living and has become a necessity. It is so because it is these buildings which consume large amounts of materials, energy, fresh water and also wood harvested in the world. Thecost of sustainable materials is becoming more economical therefore it has become really cost- effective for both design and construction. Nowadays it comes under the budget therefore we cannot make money an excuse for not emphasizing on sustainability. The various advantages of ecological architecture are:
- It is economical- sustainable buildings save money from the very first day of construction. A study by the California Sustainable Building Task Force (2003) revealed that a sustainable building investment of just two percent would produce savings greater than ten times the investment made initially as compared to conservative twenty-year building life span.
- Tax benefits- efforts are been made to implement tax incentives for energy-efficient sustainable buildings for both residential and commercial. Many state and local governments are thinking of passing tax provisions to encourage energy efficient buildings
- Improved sales- a California survey of 100 stores found that sales of sustainable buildings were more as they used skylights instead of electric lighting. These factors again harp on the fact the sustainable buildings actually help in making money.
- Lower utility demands- one benefit of sustainable buildings has been overlooked which is less consumption of electric, gas and water utilities. This simply means these infrastructures do more with fewer inputs. This will help in lowering the utility cost in the long run.
- Improved quality of life- after adding up all the architectural and sustainable benefits of these buildings, it enhances the lifestyles shared by society at large both economically and environmentally.
Conclusion
Since we are moving into an era of smarter technology and more expensive natural resources we have no other option but to adopt sustainable architectural designs. It is ecological urbanism that considers the city with multiple instruments to achieve sustainability. It has got a world view which is fluid in scale and disciplinary in focus. This tries to connect ecology with urbanism in a successful way ending the contradictory relation. Therefore we need to bring together artists, policymakers, engineers, scientists creating a multilayered, diverse and nuanced understanding of ecological urbanism. The new ethics and aesthetics of the urban should be brought to the forefront. We need an ecological approach which is both imaginative and practical for addressing the existing cities as well new ones. As argued by Edwards (2001) and Hyett (2001) “a large part of designing sustainability is to do with energy conservation.” With climate change sustainable architecture and green technologies have come to the forefront. There are some who actually respect the concern and care about the planet while others take advantage of the situation by making profitable brands. Therefore ecology has become the most popular word nowadays. Ecology is now directly related to architecture for minimum and effective utilization of resources. With our conscious efforts we would soon make the world a better place to live in.
Bibliography
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