“The modern architect is designing for the deaf.” Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer makes a valid point. [1] The topic of sound is practically non-existent in modern architectural discourse. Why? We, as architects, think in terms of form and space; we balance scientific understanding and artistic vision. The problem is, we have a tendency to give ample thought to objects rather than processes and systems. Essentially, our field is ocular-centric by nature. So how do we start to “see” sound? And more importantly, how do we use it to promote health, safety and well-being?
So why does designing for our ears matter? Well, even if you happen to find yourself in an anechoic chamber right now, you’re still surrounded by sound. In 1910, a medical doctor by the name of Robert Koch, considered to be the founder of modern bacteriology, stated that: “One day people will have to fight noise just as relentlessly as they fight cholera and plague.” [2] His prediction came true: studies have shown that sound has a direct impact on our educational system, healthcare, and productivity in the workplace. As Julian Treasure states in his enlightening TED talk, “sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively, and behaviorally, all at the time.” For this reason, sound must be a consideration in the way we design; it is a constant that can dramatically improve or ruin our quality of life.
Meanwhile, the topic of Public Interest Design has gained significant momentum in the past couple years. The keynote speaker at the national AIA convention this year was none other than Cameron Sinclair, the vanguard of service-minded architecture. Teams like MASS Design Group and Sam Mockbee’s Rural Studio have gained international recognition. But taking a glimpse at their magnificent work, one is often left to wonder, did they consider sound? Can sound become a major aspect of Public Interest Design?
Looking at the photo above taken in the Butaro Hospital designed by MASS Design Group, you can easily notice the “big ass fans,” as co-founder Michael Murphy calls them. A major success in the project is the consideration of ventilation, which helps to mitigate transmission of airborne diseases. It is an idea that directly saves lives. But what do those fans sound like? Does the vaulted ceiling increase or decrease the intelligibility of speech? And in turn, do these combined effects decrease hospital personnel accuracy and patient recovery rates? With noise levels in hospitals having doubled in the last 40 years, these are the questions that are becoming more and more relevant – although too frequently left unasked [3]. Perhaps we are afraid of the answers.
So where do we begin? How can we “see” sound? Louis Roberts, an architect out of California, noted that one way he thinks about a design element like light is by asking “how will natural light pull someone through space?” [4] What we can begin to do is inquire about the nature of sound, and how it can “pull us” through space, as Roberts said. What would happen if we imagine sound as a continual mass, if we as architects design according to the patterns by which sound travels around and through space.
For example, the University of Virginia’s Sound Lounge uses an aural understanding to create “pockets” of conversation and increased intelligibility within a larger space. These same ideas can be adapted to a larger scale, within the context of a city, to tackle the problem of urban noise. Expanding further, LMN Architects are using parametric modeling and digital fabrication in their School of Music project to create an integrated acoustic system where lighting, speakers, and sprinklers are all part of a single ceiling surface. We can imagine facades, streetscapes, and interior spaces in the same manner.
In essence, these are general, minor steps, but it is time for architects to take those first steps and begin to truly listen. Let us design schools where children can better hear their teachers, hospitals where patients can fall sound asleep, and offices where workers can hear themselves think. But first of all, let’s ask ourselves the vital questions of “sound” design, and begin by truly listening to the answers.
[2] Kleilein, Doris. Tuned City: Zwischen Klang- Und Raumspekulation = Between Sound and Space Speculation. Idstein: Kook, 2008. Print.
[3] Work Group 44. Rep. no. 512. ANSI, 21 May 2009
[4] Roberts, Louis O.Man between Earth and Sky: A Symbolic Awareness of Architecture through a Process of Creativity. Carmel, CA: Octavio Pub., 2009. Print.
I agree with the observation by E. Baldwin, when speaking about architecture, that "Essentially, our field is ocular-centric by nature" (or by design habits?) and therefore architecture is often oriented toward this primary, strong sense. So as most of our designed (visual) environments. Unfortunately I would add.
But I disagree with the idea that we should "see" what is invisible (Baldwin puts the "", so it is of course not trivial "seeing" that he's thinking about I believe), materialize it in the form of images or objects. When it comes to physiological or invisible parts of our livable environment, it is interesting not to necessarily bring them, again, in the visible field, but to also work with invisibility and physiology. To literally architecture them and make them fully part of our projects, sometimes also just as they are.
Whether in the 1950s studios of Paris or Cologne, the first electronic sounds of the future were forged through graft and experimentation. Now those works speak vividly of their time
Model lineup … Kraftwerk used electronic music to tell us that it was here and now. Photograph: Steffen Schmidt/AP
Nothing dates faster than the future. Listen to any pop record and the thing that places it most precisely in time is the thing that was once so shiny and new. The electronic future is particularly susceptible to this ageing process; the synthesiser solo at the end of Ike and Tina Turner's "Nutbush City Limits" is totally 1973; the Auto-Tune on Cher's "Believe" is a time capsule from 1998.
It seems like a paradox. Part of the appeal of electronic music has always been the supposed neutrality of its sounds. A note played on a cello is freighted with history, but a sine tone is a sound so simple that it seems to exist in the natural world. The electronic music studios of the 1950s, the analogue synthesisers of the 60s and 70s, and the computers that in turn have replaced them have all used these simple sounds as their basic building blocks, but pass a sine tone through an electronic circuit and it emerges date‑stamped with the age of the technology and the aspirations of the musicians using it.
The science-fiction film Return to the Forbidden Planet is a classic example. In 1956, when the film was made, the future was electric, so the film's soundtrack is full of oscillators humming, swooshing and bleeping as the space cruiser C57D circles planet Altair IV. It's difficult to tell where the sound effects end and the musical underscoring begins; indeed, the creators of the soundtrack, Louis and Bebe Barron, appear in the title credits not as "composers" but as creators of "electronic tonalities".
In 1956 the future was alien and otherworldly. By 1974, Kraftwerk were using electronic music to tell us that it was here and now, the robotic repetitions of "Autobahn" an expression of the grids within which we lived our lives. A decade later, in derelict warehouses, looping melodies, bass lines and drum tracks pumped out the message that there was no future: only now, only raving. More recently the future seems to have become a thing of the past. New music is full of old electronic sounds, none more ubiquitous than Auto-Tune, as we yearn for the future that we used to believe in.
It's not just the old sounds that are the subject of this disillusion-fuelled nostalgia; it's the machines that made them, too. The remorseless march of progress, from valve to chip, tape to hard disk, studio to laptop, has been paused while musicians rummage around in the back of the cupboard, pulling out ancient reel-to-reel tape recorders and revelling in the quaint mechanical aura they give to any sound that passes through them. In 2002 the White Stripes recorded their Elephant CD the old-fashioned way, on tape; this year, it has been rereleased on vinyl on Jack White's own label. He denies he's a Luddite: "It's like I can't be proud of it unless I know we overcame some kind of struggle."
In the 50s, tape machines were at the heart of every studio. For the first time in history, sounds could be measured not just in time but in centimetres, as lengths of magnetic tape travelling past the record and playback heads of tape recorders. Sounds could be reversed, slowed down, speeded up and layered over and over again. For his Williams Mix, John Cage spent three years sticking bits of magnetic tape together. The tapes were in six categories – "city", "country", "electronic", "manually produced", "wind" and "small" – and, tying a satisfactory knot in the fabric of music history, they were recorded for Cage by Louis and Bebe Barron, the Barrons of The Forbidden Planet. Everything else was determined by chance: from which of the six sound categories each bit of tape should come, how long it should be, and finally, into which of eight tape sequences it was to be stuck. By 1953 the collage was complete and all eight tapes were played simultaneously: four minutes and 15 seconds of sonic mayhem.
Cage's work was part of a privately funded "Project for Music for Magnetic Tape". In Europe, the use of tape machines was at its most adventurous in the state-sponsored radio stations, nowhere more so than in Paris and Cologne. But there was an ideological split: Paris was the home of musique concrète, music made by recording and transforming the sounds of the world around us; Cologne was the headquarters of elektronische musik, using the applied science of oscillators and filters to construct new sounds for a new world. It's an aesthetic axis around which musicians still orientate themselves. Do you start with a sound recorded from the real world, with all its intrinsic life, or do you build new sounds from scratch?
At its simplest it's a distinction between surrealism and abstraction. The microphone is a lens which allows the sounds around us to be captured, then cropped, stretched, juxtaposed. 'Art exists to help us to recover the sensation of life […] the technique […] is to make things "unfamiliar"', said Viktor Shklovsky in 1916, but it could have been the pioneer of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer, explaining the aesthetics of the Paris studio. Or it could have been Schaeffer's colleague Pierre Henry in 1963 explaining how he transformed the creak of a door-hinge and an exhalation into a series of 25 variations for a door and a sigh.
In fact, Shklovsky was writing Russian literary theory, introducing his concept of "ostranenie" (making strange) – an idea waiting for the technology to turn it from words into sounds. Record, cut, stick, loop – it's an endlessly fascinating technique that probably crossed over into mass consciousness in 1973 with Pink Floyd's cash-register riff on "Money". Certainly the university music text-books of the time were happy to claim the mix of synths and sound collage on The Dark Side of the Moon as an affirmation of electronic music and musique concrète's capacity to engage with a pop sensibility.
But sound recording is always a means of making strange. It's an act of selection: what sort of microphone, where to put it, when to begin, when to end? Opening and closing our eyes is easy; it's much harder to close our ears, so deciding to listen to just this, for just this long, is quite unnatural. Nevertheless, there are composers and sound artists who have devoted themselves to the illusion that the world recorded in sound is the world itself. It's an idea that keeps coming round: in the 1970s, Hildegard Westerkamp and R Murray Schafer tried to document disappearing 'acoustic ecologies' with their Soundscapes project. These days it's called "field recording" and the doyen is Chris Watson, who last year made In Britten's Footsteps, an audio recreation of the landscape around Benjamin Britten's home in Aldeburgh.
My favourite soundscape is a glorious hybrid, Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien (1967–70). It sounds like a field recording – early morning in a Croatian fishing village – but it can't be: first light of day is compressed into just over 20 minutes, artifice masquerading as nature. Perhaps hybrids flourish best. In the 1950s, Stockhausen worked in the Cologne studios of West German Radio and his first tape works, two Electronic Studies, were on the elektronische musik side of the great aesthetic divide. In 1955, however, he decided to embark on a hybrid, and his new work, Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths), combined pure electronic sounds with the recorded voice of a boy singing passages from the Old Testament story of the three young men who miraculously survived after being cast into King Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace.
It is an extraordinarily ambitious conception: at over 13 minutes, it is longer than any other electronic work of the period and, though composed at a time when stereo was still a novelty, it is in five-channel sound. Above all, it's full of life. Stockhausen – in those days a Roman Catholic – had intended to create an "electronic mass", but the vivid juxtaposition of the boy's voice, alone but resolute, amid the bubbling cauldron of electronic sound proved a much better idea. The humanity of a solo voice set in an abstract electronic landscape is a powerful and recurrent musical image, whether in Milton Babbit's 1964 Philomel for solo soprano and tape, or Donna Summer's "I feel love".
Aesthetic breakthroughs … Karlheinz Stockhausen in the mid 1960s. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
Gesang der Jünglinge was a technical and aesthetic breakthrough, but Stockhausen's next studio project was even more remarkable. In Kontakte (Contacts), the real-world sounds are live, played by a pianist and a percussionist, and Stockhausen brings off a series of spectacular aural illusions in which prerecorded tape sounds appear to imitate, anticipate and transform the sounds of the live instruments before taking off into another world of their own. That Stockhausen could bully the banks of oscillators, filters and modulators in the Cologne studio into producing such amazing trompes l'oreille is a tribute to his imagination and his industry: it took him more than two years to complete.
These days, Kontakte would take weeks rather than years. The instrumental sounds could be sampled, analysed and remodelled in any one of a number of readily available software programmes, and perhaps that's another reason why the future isn't as interesting as it used to be. Computers started out in music in the 50s by emulating the simpler electronic devices of the period – oscillators and filters don't need much processing power – and in its early days, computer music was just that: music that sounded as if it had come out of a computer. But as computers grew quicker and stronger, they became more self-effacing; instead of buzzing and bleeping, they began to mimic familiar musical instruments. Yamaha's DX7, the smartest synth in town in the early 80s, used sophisticated maths to produce simulacra of acoustic instrumental sounds. It couldn't replicate them exactly, but, in the midst of a pop-song mix, the sounds were convincing enough, a sort of musical mock-Tudor.
These days, computers can recreate not only the instrument but the acoustic around it. Whether recording and editing the real world, or generating new sounds, it's all easy with a laptop; under the keyboard on which I'm typing this article there is space for the digital equivalent of rooms full of equipment from the old Cologne and Paris studios. All too easy? Possibly. Gesang der Jünglinge and Kontakte are masterpieces. That's why they're being featured in the Southbank Centre's year-long celebration of 20th-century music, The Rest is Noise. But, at least in part, they're masterpieces because of the resistance of the materials with which Stockhausen had to work, the intractability of all that old technology. Perhaps it's time to invent a new future.
• Christopher Fox will introduce Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge and Kontakte in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1, tonight. southbankcentre.co.uk.
Architecture researchers in Edinburgh have completed a breakthrough study on brain activity recorded in situ by using mobile electroencephalography (EEG) technology, which records live neural impressions of subjects moving through a city. Excitingly, this technology could help us define how different urban environments affect us, a discovery that could have provocative implications for architecture. Read the full story on Salon. Also, check out this article from Fast Company about how a similar mobile technology could show us the effects of urban design – not on our brains, but on our bodies.
Personal comment:
One day after the official start of the Blue Brain Project, --one of the biggest joint effort at this day to map and understand the brain-- just a few miles away from our office, there will be undoubtedly an incredible research future in the more than likely meeting of architecture, environment design and neurosciences...
This essay is adapted from Marina Alberti Cities as Hybrid Ecosystems(Forthcoming) and from Marina Alberti “Anthropocene City”, forthcoming in The Anthropocene Project by the Deutsche Museum Special Exhibit 2014-1015
Cities face an important challenge: they must rethink themselves in the context of planetary change. What role do cities play in the evolution of Earth? From a planetary perspective, the emergence and rapid expansion of cities across the globe may represent another turning point in the life of our planet. Earth’s atmosphere, on which we all depend, emerged from the metabolic process of vast numbers of single-celled algae and bacteria living in the seas 2.3 billion years ago. These organisms transformed the environment into a place where human life could develop. Adam Frank, an Astrophysicist at the University of Rochesters, reminds us that the evolution of life has completely changed big important characteristics of the planet (NPR 13.7: Cosmos & Culture, 2012). Can humans now change the course of Earth’s evolution? Can the way we build cities determine the probability of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt change on a planetary scale (Rockström et al 2009)?
For most of its history, Earth has been relatively stable, and dominated primarily by negative feedbacks that have kept it from getting into extreme states (Lenton and Williams 2013). Rarely has the earth experienced planetary-scale tipping points or system shifts. But the recent increase in positive feedback (i.e., climate change), and the emergence of evolutionary innovations (i.e. novel metabolisms), could trigger transformations on the scale of the Great Oxidation (Lenton and Williams 2013). Will we drive Earth’s ecosystems to unintentional collapse? Or will we consciously steer the Earth towards a resilient new era?
In my forthcoming book, Cities as Hybrid Ecosystems, I propose a co-evolutionary paradigm for building a science of cities that “think like planets” (see the Note at the bottom)— a view that focuses both on unpredictable dynamics and experimental learning and innovation in urban ecosystems. In the book I elaborate on some concepts and principles of design and planning that can emerge from such a perspective: self-organization, heterogeneity, modularity, feedback, and transformation.
How can thinking on a planetary scale help us understand the place of humans in the evolution of Earth and guide us in building a human habitat of the “long now”?
Planetary Scales
Humans make decisions simultaneously at multiple time and spatial scales, depending on the perceived scale of a given problem and scale of influence of their decision. Yet it is unlikely that this scale extends beyond one generation or includes the entire globe. The human experience of space and time has profound implications for our understanding of world phenomena and for making long- and short-term decisions. In his book What time is this place, Kevin Lynch (1972) eloquently told us that time is embedded in the physical world that we inhabit and build. Cities reflect our experience of time, and the way we experience time affects the way we view and change the environment. Thus our experience of time plays a crucial role in whether we succeed in managing environmental change. If we are to think like a planet, the challenge will be to deal with scales and events far removed from everyday human experience. Earth is 4.6 billion years old. That’s a big number to conceptualize and account for in our individual and collective decisions.
Thinking like a planet implies expanding the time and spatial scales of city design and planning, but not simply from local to global and from a few decades to a few centuries. Instead, we will have to include the scales of the geological and biological processes on which our planet operates. Thinking on a planetary scale implies expanding the idea of change. Lynch (1972) reminds us that “the arguments of planning all come down to the management of change.” But what is change?
Human experience of change is often confined to fluctuations within a relatively stable domain. However Planet Earth has displayed rare but abrupt changes and regime shifts in the past. Human experience of abrupt change is limited to marked changes in regional system dynamics, such as altered fire regimes, and extinctions of species. Yet, since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been pushing the planet outside a stability domain. Will human activities trigger such a global event? We can’t answer that, as we don’t understand enough about how regime shifts propagate across scales, but emerging evidence does suggest that if we continue to disrupt ecosystems and climate we face an increasing risk of crossing those thresholds that keep the earth in a relatively stable domain. Until recently our individual behaviors and collective institutions have been shaped primarily by change that we can envision relatively easily on a human time scale. Our behaviors are not tuned to the slow and imperceptible but systematic changes that can drive dramatic shifts in Earth’s systems.
Planetary shifts can be rapid: the glaciation of the Younger Dryas (abrupt climatic change resulting in severe cold and drought) occurred roughly 11,500 years ago, apparently over only a few decades. Or, it can unfold slowly: the Himalayas took over a million years to form. Shifts can emerge as the results of extreme events like volcanic eruptions, or relatively slow processes, like the movement of tectonic plates. Though we still don’t completely understand the subtle relationship between local and global stability in complex systems, several scientists hypothesize that the increasing complexity and interdependence of socio-economic networks can produce ‘tipping cascades’ and ‘domino dynamics’ in the Earth’s system, leading to unexpected regime shifts (Helbing 2013, Hughes et al 2013).
Planetary Challenges and Opportunities
A planetary perspective for envisioning and building cities that we would like to live in—cities that are livable, resilient, and exciting—provides many challenges and opportunities. To begin, it requires that we expand the spectrum of imaginary archetypes. Current archetypes reflect skewed and often extreme simplifications of how the universe works, ranging from biological determinism to techno-scientific optimism. At best they represent accurate but incomplete accounts of how the world works. How can we reconcile the messages contained in the catastrophic versus optimistic views of the future of Earth? And, how can we hold divergent explanations and arguments as plausibly true? Can we imagine a place where humans have co-evolved with natural systems? What does that world look like? How can we create that place in the face of limited knowledge and uncertainty, holding all these possible futures as plausible options?
The concept of “planetary boundaries” offers a framework for humanity to operate safely on a planetary scale. Rockström et al (2009) developed the concept of planetary boundaries to inform us about the levels of anthropogenic change that can be sustained so we can avoid potential planetary regime shifts that would dramatically affect human wellbeing. The concept does not imply, and neither rules out, planetary-scale tipping points associated with human drivers. Hughes et al (2013) do address some the misconception surrounding planetary-scale tipping points that confuses a system’s rate of change with the presence or absence of a tipping point. To avoid the potential consequences of unpredictable planetary-scale regime shifts we will have to shift our attention towards the drivers and feedbacks rather than focus exclusively on the detectable system responses. Rockström et al (2009) identify nine areas that are most in need of set planetary boundaries: climate change; biodiversity loss; input of nitrogen and phosphorus in soils and waters; stratospheric ozone depletion; ocean acidification; global consumption of freshwater; changes in land use for agriculture; air pollution; and chemical pollution.
A different emphasis is proposed by those scientists who have advanced the concept of planetary opportunities: solution-oriented research to provide realistic, context-specific pathways to a sustainable future (DeFries et al. 2012). The idea is to shift our attention to how human ingenuity can expand the ability to enhance human wellbeing (i.e. food security, human health), while minimizing and reversing environmental impacts. The concept is grounded in human innovation and the human capacity to develop alternative technologies, implement “green” infrastructure, and reconfigure institutional frameworks. The potential opportunities to explore solution-oriented research and policy strategies are amplified in an urbanizing planet, where such solutions can be replicated and can transform the way we build and inhabit the Earth.
Imagining a Resilient Urban Planet
While these different images of the future are both plausible and informative, they speak about the present more than the future. They all represent an extension of the current trajectory as if the future would unfold along the path of our current way of asking questions, and our way of understanding and solving problems. Yes, these perspectives do account for uncertainty but it is defined by the confidence intervals around this trajectory. Both stories are grounded in the inevitable dichotomies of humans and nature, and technology vs. ecology. These views are at best an incomplete account of what is possible: they reflect a limited ability to imagine the future beyond such archetypes. Why can we imagine smart technologies and not smart behaviors, smart institutions, and smart societies? Why think only of technology and not of humans and their societies that co-evolve with Earth?
Understanding the co-evolution of human and natural systems is key to build a resilient society and transform our habitat. One of the greatest questions in biology today is whether natural selection is the only process driving evolution and what the other potential forces might be. To understand how evolution constructs the mechanisms of life, molecular biologists would argue that we also need to understand the self-organization of genes governing the evolution of cellular processes and influencing evolutionary change (Johnson and Kwan Lam 2010).
To function, life on Earth depends on the close cooperation of multiple elements. Biologists are curious about the properties of complex networks that supply resources, process waste, and regulate the system’s functioning at various scales of biological organization. West et al. (2005) propose that natural selection solved this problem by evolving hierarchical fractal-like branching. Other characteristics of evolvable systems are flexibility (i.e. phenotypic plasticity), and novelty. This capacity for innovation is an essential precondition for any system to function. Gunderson and Holling (2002) have noted that if systems lack the capacity for innovation and novelty, they may become over-connected and dynamically locked, unable to adapt. To be resilient and evolve, they must create new structures and undergo dynamic change. Differentiation, modularity, and cross-scale interactions of organizational structures have been described as key characteristics of systems that are capable of simultaneously adapting and innovating (Allen and Holling 2010).
To understand coevolution of human-natural systems will require advancement in the evolution and social theories that explain how complex societies and cooperation have evolved. What role does human ingenuity play? In Cities as Hybrid Ecosystems I propose that coupled human-natural systems are not governed only by either natural selection or human ingenuity alone, but by hybrid processes and mechanisms. It is their hybrid nature that makes them unstable and at the same time able to innovate. This novelty of hybrid systems is key to reorganization and renewal. Urbanization modifies the spatial and temporal variability of resources, creates new disturbances, and generates novel competitive interactions among species. This is particularly important because the distribution of ecological functions within and across scales is key to the system being able to regenerate and renew itself (Peterson et al. 1998).
The city that thinks like a planet: What does it look like?
In this blog article I have ventured to pose this question, but I will not venture to provide an answer. In fact no single individual can do that. The answer resides in the collective imagination and evolving behaviors of people of diverse cultures who inhabit a diversity of places on the planet. Humanity has the capacity to think in the long term. Indeed, throughout history, people in societies faced with the prospect of deforestation, or other environmental changes, have successfully engaged in long-term thinking, as Jared Diamond (2005) reminds us: consider Tokugawa shoguns, Inca emperors, New Guinea highlanders, or 16th-century German landowners. Or, more recently, the Chinese. Many countries in Europe, and the United States, have dramatically reduced their air pollution and meanwhile increased their use of energy and combustion of fossil fuels. Humans have the intellectual and moral capacity to do even more when tuned into challenging problems and engaged in solving them.
A city that thinks like a planet is not built on already set design solutions or planning strategies. Nor can we assume that the best solution would work equally well across the world regardless of place and time. Instead, such a city will be built on principles that expand its drawing board and collaborative action to include planetary processes and scales, to position humanity in the evolution of Earth. Such a view acknowledges the history of the planet in every element or building block of the urban fabric, from the building to the sidewalk, from the back yard to the park, from the residential street to the highway. It is a view that is curious about understanding who we are and about taking advantage of the novel patterns, processes, and feedbacks that emerge from human and natural interactions. It is a city grounded in the here and the now and simultaneously in the different time and spatial scales of human and natural processes that govern the Earth. A city that thinks like a planet is simultaneously resilient and able to change.
How can such a perspective guide decisions in practice? Urban planners and decision makers, making strategic decisions and investments in public infrastructure, want to know whether certain generic properties or qualities of a city’s architecture and governance could predict its capacity to adapt and transform itself. Can such a shift in perspective provide a new lens, a new way to interpret the evolution of human settlements, and to support humans in successfully adapting to change? Evidence emerging from the study of complex systems points to their key properties that expand adaptation capacity while enabling them to change: self organization, heterogeneity, modularity, redundancy, and cross-scale interactions.
A co-evolutionary perspective shifts the focus of planning towards human-natural interactions, adaptive feedback mechanisms, and flexible institutional settings. Instead of predefining “solutions,” that communities must implement, such perspective focuses on understanding the ‘rules of the game’, to facilitate self-organization and careful balance top-down and bottom-up managements strategies (Helbing 2013). Planning will then rely on principles that expand heterogeneity of forms and functions in urban structures and infrastructures that support the city. They support modularity (selected as opposed to generalized connectivity) to create interdependent decentralized systems with some level of autonomy to evolve.
In cities across the world, people are setting great examples that will allow for testing such hypotheses. Human perception of time and experience of change is an emerging key in the shift to a new perspective for building cities. We must develop reverse experiments to explore what works, what shifts the time scale of individual and collective behaviors. Several Northern European cities have adopted successful strategies to cut greenhouse gases, and combined them with innovative approaches that will allow them to adapt to the inevitable consequences of climate change. One example is the Copenhagen 2025 Climate Plan. It lays out a path for the city to become the first carbon-neutral city by 2025 through efficient zero-carbon mobility and building. The city is building a subway project that will place 85 percent of its inhabitants within 650 yards of a Metro station. Nearly three-quarters of the emissions reductions will come as people transition to less carbon-intensive ways of producing heat and electricity through a diverse supply of clean energy: biomass, wind, geothermal, and solar. Copenhagen is also one of the first cities to adopt a climate adaptation plan to reduce its vulnerability to the extreme storm events and rising seas expected in the next 100 years.
In the Netherlands, alternative strategies are being explored to allow people to live with the inevitable floods. These strategies involve building on water to develop floating communities and engineering and implementing adaptive beach protections that take advantage of natural processes. The experimental Sand Motor project uses a combination of wind, waves, tides, and sand to replenish the eroded coasts. The Dutch Rijkswaterstaat and the South Holland provincial authority placed a large amount of sand in an artificial 1 km long and 2 km wide peninsula into the sea, allowing for the wave and currents to redistribute it and build sand dunes and beaches to protect the coast over time.
New York is setting an example for long-term planning by combining adaptation and transformation strategies into its plan to build a resilient city, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg has outlined a $19.5 billion plan to defend the city against rising seas. In many rapidly growing cities of the Global South, similar leadership is emerging. For example, Johannesburg which adopted one of the first climate change adaptation plan, and so have Durban and Cape Town, in South Africa and Quito, Equador, along with Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam, where a partnership with the City of Rotterdam Netherlands has been established to develop a resilience strategy.
To think like a planet and explore what is possible we may need to reframe our questions. Instead of asking what is good for the planet, we must ask what is good for a planet inhabited by people. What is a good human habitat on Earth? And instead of seeking optimal solutions, we should identify principles that will inform the diverse communities across the world. The best choices may be temporary, since we do not fully understand the mechanisms of life, nor can we predict the consequences of human action. They may very well vary with place and depend on their own histories. But human action may constrain the choices available for life on earth.
Scenario Planning
Scenario planning offers a systematic and creative approach to thinking about the future by letting scientists and practitioners expand old mindsets of ecological sciences and decision making. It provides a tool we can use to deal with the limited predictability of changes on the planetary scale and to support decision-making under uncertainty. Scenarios help bring the future into present decisions (Schwartz 1996). They broaden perspectives, prompt new questions, and expose the possibilities for surprise.
Scenarios have several great features. We expect that they can shift people’s attention toward resilience, redefine decision frameworks, expand the boundaries of predictive models, highlight the risks and opportunities of alternative future conditions, monitor early warning signals, and identify robust strategies (Alberti et al 2013)
A fundamental objective of scenario planning is to explore the interactions among uncertain trajectories that would otherwise be overlooked. Scenarios highlight the risks and opportunities of plausible future conditions. The hypothesis is that if planners and decision makers look at multiple divergent scenarios, they will engage in a more creative process for imagining solutions that would be invisible otherwise. Scenarios are narratives of plausible futures; they are not predictions. But they are extremely powerful when combined with predictive modeling. They help expand boundary conditions and provide a systematic approach we can use to deal with intractable uncertainties and assess alternative strategic actions. Scenarios can help us modify model assumptions and assess the sensitivities of model outcomes. Building scenarios can help us highlight gaps in our knowledge and identify the data we need to assess future trajectories.
Scenarios can also shine spotlights on warning signals, allowing decision makers to anticipate unexpected regime shifts and to act in a timely and effective way. They can support decision making in uncertain conditions by providing us a systematic way to assess the robustness of alternative strategies under a set of plausible future conditions. Although we do not know the probable impacts of uncertain futures, scenarios will provide us the basis to assess critical sensitivities, and identify both potential thresholds and irreversible impacts so we can maximize the wellbeing of both humans and our environment.
A new ethic for a hybrid planet
More than half a century ago, Aldo Leopold (1949) introduced the concept of “thinking like a mountain”: he wanted to expand the spatial and temporal scale of land conservation by incorporating the dynamics of the mountain. Defining a Land Ethic was a first step in acknowledging that we are all part of larger community hat include soils, waters, plants, and animals, and all the components and processes that govern the land, including the prey and predators. Now, along the same lines, Paul Hirsch and Bryan Norton (2012) In Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future,MIT Press, articulates a new environmental ethics by suggesting that we “think like a planet.” Building on Hirsch and Norton’s idea, we need to expand the dimensional space of our mental models of urban design and planning to the planetary scale.
Note: Makezine is currently running a useful online program (tutorials, explorations, projects, etc. --Sept. 24 - Oct. 15) for a couple of weeks about the "make" approach that is typical of the magazine, this time linked to the "civic" use of urban sensors. Obviously, we should quickly multiply these kind of initiatives to offer alternatives approaches if we don't want to end up into big corporate/monetized monitored cities...
- Join our Urban Sensor Hacks Google+ community and connect with makers from all over who are exploring the world around them using off-the-shelf tech and their own ingenuity.
- Discover how sensor-based applications help us understand the urban environment and how people interact within it.
- Learn how sensor platforms make it easy and affordable to build and deploy numerous sensors in urban areas.
- Get started creating sensor-based applications to experiment and learn about the world you live in.
Upcoming online sessions:
10/3 – Sean Montgomery, Kipp Bradford – Bio-Sensing: Feeling the Pulse of a City. At the heart of urban life are people — what they do and communicate, how they think and feel. Bio-sensing is opening a window into people’s behaviors and motivations in a way that will change nearly every aspect of our lives from health to education to retail experience. Learn how you can hack the bio-sensing revolution and change the way you look at yourself and people around you.
10/8 – Tim Dye, Michael Heimbinder, Iem Heng, Raymond Yap – Join the AirCasting crew as they guide you through a step by step process for building your own air quality monitor, discuss the challenges involved in achieving accurate measurements, and detail their work with grassroots groups and schools to conduct environmental monitoring and advance STEAM education.
10/10 – Tomas Diez – Smart Citizen: The largest crowdsourced sensor platform and community on earth. How can we use the information that is surrounding us to improve our cities? Can I become a sensor in my city? Can communities make their neighbourhoods better by sensing and acting in their environment? Smart Citizen tries to tackle these questions by developing an open source and easy-to-use sensor kit connected with an online platform and mobile app. The projects starts with environmental sensors to capture data about air pollution, sound, temperature and humidity in the urban environment, but will grow to more applications in relation with energy, agriculture, health, and its use in the Internet of Things ecosystem. More about Smart Citizen.
Abour Maker Sessions:
Making and hacking: Live online events using a Google Plus community to bring together makers online and at physical locations for hacking and making. Maker Sessions are organized around a theme or a purpose – to look at technologies that enable new applications and to encourage people of all skill levels and interests to participate in the development of ideas and applications.
Hacking the hackathon: Bring makers together where they live and work – at home, at a university or at makerspaces. Explore opportunities to do something cool – something that perhaps nobody else is doing. Learn from master makers about an application area and discover cool maker projects.
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
