Welcome to the ECOCITY 2022 Interactive Programme

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Very often urban planning is presented as a progressive discipline, just as cities are normalized as progressive landscapes representing human “achievement”. And so people often take a surface view of the ‘problems’ of the city and efforts to 'remake' our urban spaces within frameworks of sustainability, livability, equity and access. But what about questioning the urban form and governance system itself? The stories we tell ourselves about how we got here and what is possible? In the North American context, and in other lands shaped by colonialism, urbanization has been fueled by the continuous 'goldrush mentality' of terra nullius, the Doctrine of Discovery, harmful ideas about the land as commodity and so on. The city in these contexts stands as testimony to continued efforts to eradicate the First Peoples, to exploit Black and racialized people, to extract resources in the frontier expansionism of nation-building. Meanwhile, this violation of pre-existing Indigenous laws and ways of living, well-established governance systems and economies based upon sophisticated place-based knowledge systems funded wealth and prosperity of the colonial states. And here we are in an ecological crisis and the people with the deep sustainability knowledge and relational legal orders continue to be left out of the stories and decision-making processes for rethinking cities. There is minimal listening to, and acknowledgement of, the truths that colonization continues to form the foundation of the imbalanced, extractive, non-relational ways of living on the land and mistreating humans and all beings who share these urban places. Can we speak truths about the depths and brilliance of Indigenous laws and knowledge systems as the missing link to rethinking the dominant culture of cities? Focusing on the power of story, Kamala Todd, Cree-Métis adjunct professor, urban community planning professional, and filmmaker will bring her 20 years of experience within Vancouver to share about the necessary and promising work of Indigenizing and decolonizing our cities. She will share how the work to revitalize Indigenous laws, for example, offers great hope for restoring relational ways of living on the (urbanized) land.

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The environmental emergency and the crisis of the political, economic, and social processes, have been experiencing massive saturation in recent years. This environmental crisis is connected to a more anthropological crisis of the moderns and is deeply-rooted in an anthropocentric and western-world vision of the human-being which does not consider a whole series of other agents that compose our world. The problematic relationship between human and non-human agents is particularly evident in those environments in which artificial settlements, clashing with natural ecosystems, try to reduce the latter to energy, health, and aesthetic factors.

This process of anthropization and alteration of the natural environment is a key aspect that characterized urban realities for centuries: cities are not designed taking into account the natural aspect of the belonging ecosystem and over the years are experiencing a series of ecological and social catastrophes. While anthropologists are searching for new paradigms to harmonize the differences between human and non-human agents, designers are exploring ways to reframe and shape a world more conscious about old connections that has to be healed and strengthened as well as new bonds that need to be triggered. Human beings have to understand this complexity by shifting in a new Post-Anthropocene era in the name of the interdependence between all agents.

The paper explores the role of Design in activating, sustaining, and orienting practices and processes of social change with the aim of envisioning a new assemblage composed by human and non-human agents. The project investigates new possible participatory design actions to be activated with citizens in local contexts, promoting a more eco-systemic design dimension in the name of a widespread sense of mutual care and well-being between the agents. The presented contribution is part of a PhD research linked to a research project still ongoing in the NoLo district (Milan, Italy) conducted by the Polimi DESIS Lab, a research group of the Design Department of the Politecnico di Milano.

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Today climate action, adaptation, and mitigation are everyone's responsibility. Whether you are an entrepreneur, engineer, planner, landscape architect, community worker, teacher, parent, student, non-profit or government employee or just a member of the public, how can we come together and better serve our environment and communities now and into the future as our urban cities continue to expand? Ideally, we need ways to discuss and share compelling thoughts and ideas. And that is why we all need to understand the place of design thinking and the visual arts to facilitate action addressing biodiversity and climatic resilient cities.

This presentation and discussion with Climate Design Strategist, Sylvia Grace Borda based in Vancouver (Canada), Dr Ann Borda, Associate Professor in the Centre of Digital Transformation of Health, University of Melbourne (Australia), and John Gray, Planner, City of Dundee, (Scotland) invites participants to consider design thinking, visual arts processes, and citizen science, along with other opportunities in applications of creative problem-solving and community engagement in order to co-create community climate change solutions.

Indeed for a resilient, durable and sustainable future we need to repurpose, reinvent, remake and rethink how our human-made world can transform with responsible action in cities across the globe. Nature and art can sustain, surround, support and encourage people and communities to think more critically about becoming engaged actors in the sustainable growth of their own cities. In this discussion, the speakers will offer insights into a series of active arts-design thinking projects that they are leading. They will describe how integrated arts-climate strategies can create agency by becoming effective means to open up community learning, support healthy living and align with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In particular the talk provides actionable insights of how our civic spaces can become examples of climate adaptive and eco-cultural spaces for climate adaptation, public awareness and custodianship. This presentation is relevant to anyone who is interested in the wider discussion about design thinking and arts as tools that can help us build and achieve more sustainable eco-cities.

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With the coronavirus slowing down the global economy, and the 1.9 T stimulus plan starting programs to help people, now is the time for us to build something new. President Biden’s slogan, “build back better,” needs to be put into motion at lightning speed. Arcology is a car-free architectural concept brought forth by the last architect Dr. Paolo Soleri. Using a whole-systems-design/science revolutionary approach to build both is an external shell and its social interior space, arcology could be a container for us to survive abrupt climate changes on Earth. It might also serve as an urban laboratory to test how we might live in new worlds. Arcology focused on a whole-of-government approach to its building methods could provide us with a way to both mitigate and adapt to extreme weather events our new climate normal in the Anthropocene.

Even though Soleri attempted to build a prototype arcology in the Arizona desert, it failed to reach his critical mass goal of 5,000 residents. It’s time now to make arcology for, let’s say, one million arcology pioneers using a superpower public/private partnership funding strategy that enacts the Defense Production Act. An experiment in circular economic practices, it’s a prototype in regenerative urban agriculture, green energy, AI-run infrastructure that could be modeled around the world. Using 3D printing and robotic automation, arcologies could be manufactured with unprecedented speed to reach our goal of building zero carbon emissions, solar-powered civilization by the year 2050.

Such an approach is necessary to reach our target since, as Bill Gates says in his climate change master plan about the demand for new construction, “we are effectively adding a New York City to the planet every month for the next 40 years. From greener materials to cleaner industrial processes, we must find ways to build and use buildings without emitting carbon.” If we want to build back better, we must connect all the brainpower of the university and research centers around the world together using a blueprint of supranational Arcology Now.

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MASTERING PRACTICAL LEARNING FOR REGENERATING CITY/BIOREGIONS

This session shares the applied activities of collaborators Integral City/Populus Planning, Ubiquity University and University International Cooperation, initiated by their Humanity Rising encounters on the topic of regeneration.

We were inspired in 2020 and 2021 by our week-long explorations of “Bouncing Beyond to a Regenerative World” focusing on 3^RD Horizon change in bioregions and “Cities Rising for a Regenerative World” focusing on transformation of human systems in the context of the living city.

As a collaboratory, we set out to create a global consensus around the imperative to move beyond sustainability to regeneration, while linking learning about regeneration with what students, activists and practitioners need on the ground for effective and informed action. Our goal in service to bioregional development and the regeneration of cities became a collaboration to co-create a “Masters in Regenerative Action”.

This workshop will share how in developing a globally informed curriculum for the Ubiquity University degree, we can all mobilize regenerative action in ways that serve the wellbeing of cities/communities, bio/ecoregions and the living system of Gaia.

We will share how we rapidly activated the curriculum with courses on: Fundamentals of Doughnut Economics; Global Survey of Regeneration; Foundation Soft Skills and UN SDGs; Integral City as a Living System; Integral City Regeneration; and How Citizens Serve Cities and Cities Serve Citizens.

We will engage the workshop audience in an exploration (and even sponsoring) of their suggestions for practicums for the degree, based on work in the field of regeneration, that students can pursue.

Supporting resources include recordings, blogs, e-books from collaborators Humanity Rising, Integral City Meshworks and others.

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With the global promotion of sustainable development, developing countries have sought to innovate their urbanization strategies. China is leading a pro-environmental movement in the developing world by experimenting with nature-based solutions for decarbonization, climate adaptation, and green growth. It has built some of the world’s most ambitious eco-developments featuring eco-cities, low-carbon cities, Sponge Cities, ecological restoration, and a green economy. These eco-developments have allegedly integrated some of the world’s most innovative ideas in environmental planning and design. They have been conceived as model cities that would grow in harmony with nature and could be replicable in other developing contexts. Building on the interplay between worldviews and local politics of green transitions, this study examines some of China’s highest-profile eco-developments to assess their conception of an ecological future and their sociopolitical impact. Assessing China’s so-called “ecological” transformations in city-making, this paper sheds light on accelerant factors for environmentally sensitive, socially responsible planning and governance in developing contexts. Many critics condemn China’s eco-cities as mere greenwashing or eco-branding, attributing their failures to the inherent contradictions underlying a green-utopian ideal and a technocratic approach to eco-modernization. This research acknowledges the limitations of these eco-developments caused by systemic issues in China. However, tracing the evolution of China’s eco-development, this study finds that despite the failures, eco-developments are China’s innovation incubators. These places continue being the demonstration sites for green technologies and low-carbon transitions. They are also the testing ground for innovative policies that promote environmental governance and climate adaptation. Trial-and-error through these eco-developments educates decision-makers about ecosystem services, environmental governance, and climate adaptation. Such processes normalize eco-environmental mindsets among officials, experts, and citizens, which further enables institutional learning, promotes environmental policy, reshapes city politics, and forges pro-environmental social networks. Therefore, experimenting with eco-development has played a crucial role in institutionalizing sustainable development in China while facilitating pro-environmental transitions in local cultures and sociopolitical systems. These places are standard setters, demonstrating China’s “statecraft” in engineering new territories, new ecologies, and new societies. They symbolize state legitimacy and facilitate the power expansion of “Global China.”

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A New Urban Model, based on the principle of replicated fractal patterning can be used to integrate high density urban living with the biophilic experience of forest bathing. Mapping the patterns of resources – as stocks, flows and yields – provides a foundation by which to order the hierarchy of daylight access, cross ventilation, and free harvest from the sun, wind and precipitation, to discover the fit of these factors to the benefit of an urban population.

This design approach reaches beyond the binary choice of isolating built form from nature and instead posits the urban form as an integral ecology of non-living and living systems; which most importantly is scalable from the individual, to the urban block, to the district, to the full city form.

The modulation of that integral ecology, using fractal patterning, enables the ‘making’ of urban form as an expression of growth; much in the spirit of the lessons of nature, wherein underlying patterns of order frame the reaching for, the responding to, and/or the accommodating of, the complex emergence of pioneer and succession systems of habitation – not only those of nature but also those of human population.

Nature teachers that the key element of all growth is the cell and that form is an expressive result.

Our cities can borrow from that lesson, and, as is shown in the New Urban Model can place all occupancy in close reach to nature; wherein Healthy Urbanism measures the mutual health of our communities of population and our communities of ecology – as patterns of fractal integration.