Ecological Urbanism

Ecological Urbanism, edited by Moshen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty, Lars Müller Publishers, Baden 2010 (pp. 656, € 39.90)

The first section of the GSD's weighty publication Ecological Urbanism is entitled "Anticipate" and within that is a graphic spread by JDS architects. To follow the form of the previous review and use a pithy paraphrase, the young Belgian firm identify three problems associated with an urbanism movement focused on sustainability: definition, coolness, and ambition. I have used the issues as a succinct framework for the critique of this mighty book.

The problem of definition applies directly to the rhetoric, (what exactly does it mean to be "green", "sustainable", or even "ecological"?) but also to the physical boundaries of the field (are we really only dealing with the urban, and can it be clearly discretized from the rural?) and disciplinary boundaries (how exactly do architects, artists, engineers, economists, farmers, theoreticians, planners, policy makers, interface in a publication like this?). The book expands the field from landscape urbanism, to embrace issues of environmental and ecological concepts, and to include the expanded disciplinary frameworks that describe the urban condition. The difference between ecological urbanism and landscape urbanism remains indistinct for some and the words ecological, green and sustainable are freely interchanged, echoing the problem of how to define an ecological strategy. Ecology is inherently hard to classify, as reflected in the repeated critique of the narrow confines of LEED and other sustainable guidelines.

This multiplicity of meaning is reflected in the books chaotic organization. Disparate design projects, analytical research and theoretical writings are grouped together under vague headings like "Collaborate" and "Adapt", emphasizing the overall tendency towards informal solutions. In form and practice, many of the methods and designs eschew formal gestures in favor of small-scale interventions, interstitial urban projects, and bottom-up solutions. Many articles cite the self-organizing favelas and slums of Brazil, India, and Africa, and nodes, networks, and fields are the organizing principles of choice. The super-formal remains only anecdotally in the book in Peter Galison's monuments to nuclear waste, and Zhang Huan's methods of raising the water level in a fishpond. Out of the chaos of bringing together the contents of a conference and exhibition comes a temporal order, a "tentative equilibrium" as Mostafavi puts it in his introduction, between looking back on past projects, acknowledging our current situation and the need to retrofit it, and looking forward to solutions for the future. He identifies this movement as a tool to define a more cohesive planning model, the kind that would bring together a diverse group as represented by the contributors to this book, from popular innovators to those evoking nostalgic Gaia theories. Ecology's problem cool may finally be addressed by this publication. The deliberate choice of a deep red cover (rather than the ubiquitous green of eco) and the decadently heavy (but recycled) paper may finally give these issues prominence in architectural bookshops and architects minds. Ecology is necessarily an un-cool topic, requiring "humility" on the part of the architect as identified by Koolhaas, and a return the Deep Economy thoeries of the 1970s encumbered with passé-ist connotations as noted by Kwinter. The problem is not only that sustainability was unfashionable, but was also restrictive and unexciting to practice, making architecture "a task rather than a desire" (JDS), when it should be "liberative rather than oppressive" (Kwinter). This book gives, through a light touch in editing, deeply serious sustainability experts like Koen Steemers alongside tongue-in-cheek artists like Chris Neiman, offering every visual and theoretical stimulation the reader could require to become ambitiously engaged in ecological urbanism.

Mostafavi defines the ambitions of Ecological Urbanism through three international contemporary ecologies, drawn from a daily newspaper, implying the far-reaching potential of these mediums of conference, book, and continued debate. The subtitle of the conference, "Alternative and Sustainable Cities of the Future" is notably dropped, and the content of the book looks both backwards and forwards, suggests testing, measuring, sensing, adapting, incubating, retrofitting, and collaborating, to produce an ecological (in all its guises) urbanism.

Mostafavi's introduction positions the book as a framework - but at first glance it seems more like an encyclopedic compendium of all ideas on ecological anything in the last ten years. It is a catalog, which would have benefited from a little more curatorial definition in its system. In terms of scope, the architectural proposals may begin at the ultra-local scale of trash tracking in New York City, but they extend beyond the architectural scale to encompass infrastructure, ecosystems, and eventually swathes of the planet with OMA's Zeerkracht wind power scheme.

The book is endlessly self-referential, with comments from Waldheim processing Mostafavi's introduction as well as Koolhaas, Bhadi, and Kwinter's contributions, and the blog entries from the original conference offering an edited but "immediate" reaction to the live discourse. The recent symposium conducted at the preview of the 2010 Venice Biennale in August ensured that the questions raised with such eloquence eighteen months ago in Boston continue to reach a sophisticated and responsive audience.