The Light Community

VENKATESH PRABHU - CARLETON UNIVERSITY – AZRIELI SCHOOL O F ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM

‘Sustainability’is destroying our humanity and our planet. While the architects’ and developers’
packaged technological prescriptions of architectural ecology proliferate throughout our
communities as proof of their dedication to an ecological and sustainable future, they address only
the symptoms of the real problem: a system of government and industry which forces our
communities farther and farther away from the privileged urban core, fostering individualism and
civic apathy.

Mass consumer hysteria driven by fear has divided our communities and convincedus that our
escape route is paved with convenient products available at our retail stores. We are unable to
see beyond the boundaries that have been drawn up to enslave us, the barricades that imprison
us in this fantasy of consumer sustainability, maintained in part by our refusal to give up the
comfort and luxury of the ‘quick fix for a dollar’. The only thing sustained by the current approach
is profit, not our planet. There is no such thing as sustainable architecture unless it is focused on
tearing down these barricades through the community-oriented redistribution of space.

PART 1: REFRAMING SUSTAINABILITY - AN INSTANT MANIFESTO

“Never has so little been asked of so many at such a critical moment…”

- Michael Maniates, Professor of political and environmental science, Washington Post
(Nov.22/07)

Our contemporary diet of magazines and newspapers promoting the ’10 easy steps to greener
living’ deter the solutions to our sustainable future by promoting and cashing-in oncomplacence
disguised as ‘awareness’ or ‘green activism’. Michael Maniates points out not only the passive
acceptance of our subservience to the urban planners, but also the disproportionate response to
the magnitude of the problem at hand. This is not a time for green trinkets and baubles, light
bulbs and showerheads – they are the blindfoldpulled down over our eyes. We must get off this
road and beat a new path right through the lifeless concrete junglesuffocating the latent natural
landscapes of our urban cores. Our tendencies to speak loudly but tread lightly must be put to
rest.

“Build a better gewgaw, doodad, or thingamajig and the

world will beat a path to your door; design a better
future and it will suspect and marginalize you.”
- Richard Register, Ecocities: Building cities in balance with
nature,2001, p.53
Thus far, we have been plied with the product-oriented ‘fashionably green’ symptomatic of our
culture of consumption; offered largely cosmetic and superficial solutions to a systemic illness;
and denied the kind of urban redistribution of spacewe so desperately require. Our unwavering
capitalism of the ‘green trend’ plainly betrays the decline of our awareness of ‘self’ and of our
symbiotic relationships with our architecture, our community, and nature. Those dark towering
bastions of the free-market stand tall in our city-centers while our beaten and broken communities
beg for rejuvenation and freedom. Any possible ecological design is little comfort to the lifeless
streets and the contemporary urbanite’s undesired and unsolicited anonymity.
 “To the extent that sustainable development agents move from crisis to crisis,
using technological fixes to patch up larger structural problems, they tend to
strengthen the systematic relations supporting unsustainability – especially
when such “band-aid” solutions lead to instances where these deeper
problems fall below the threshold of public attention and the political
momentum for more fundamental change dissipates.” - Richard S. Levine,
Sustainable Development, in conference report of the first International ecocity
conference, Berkeley: Urban ecology, 1990 – p.24.

Therein lies the key to urban sustainability: public attention and fundamental political momentum
– for any architecture to have a chance of promoting sustainability, it must unite communities by
addressing the most basic needs of the human being: our desire for social engagement, proximity
to nature, and jurisdiction over our personal health and subsistence. The circumvention of the
community’s autonomy and self-determination has affected its ability to foster local relationships.
Metropolis-wide zoning regulations meant to subdivide the city into discrete-use districts
ultimately destroy the urban diversity required for a sustainable future, and gradually draw out of
our collective memory that which makes us human, that which keeps healthy the symbiosis
between our mind, our body, our community and nature.

PART 2: REBUILDING MOMENTUM

“We mistake the order of magnitude of what we are dealing with.”

- Thomas Berry, 1991 lecture to the Schumacher Society, ‘The Ecozoic Age’

Although we recognize that a systemic solution to the problem of sustainability would require a
transformation of the roots of our urban neighborhoods, the few proposed systemic solutions, such
as Paolo Soleri’s desert ‘arcologies’, or the fantastical vertical cities, serve only as examples of
new encapsulated cities based on a single stand-alone vision, rather than proposals for funneling
market forces through the patchwork aspirations of our existing communities, the only possible
foundation for a sustainable future. The fact that architects such as Soleri begin their visions on
virgin or abandoned land highlights the main difficulty in developing a solid foundation for
sustainability within existing communities: the presence and inertia of the community itself.

The behavioral inertia of the community is both a challenge and an opportunity for change. ‘What
happened to community involvement, and community pride?’ is a question which has no single
answer, but the continuing degradation of social ties within the community is undeniable: our
foundation is crumbling. It has not simply been pushed aside due to urbanization and increases in
population densities, to be rekindled by town-hall meetings and posters promoting community
involvement as many hope to believe. Rather, it has migrated to, and built momentum in,
another type of community: the virtualcommunity. The intentional community. As opposed to the
geographically and politically bounded incidental and accidental communities in the ‘real’ urban
environment, the intentional communities in virtual space are overflowing with the enthusiasm
and social interactions of their millions of members. We must take the opportunity to drive this
primal community foundation back into ‘real’ communities through architectural incursions in our
urban cores, rebuilding momentum by igniting the spark of transformation. We must learn to
transform what already exists rather than dropping new architectural ideals into unoccupied
spaces.
 “If ecological buildings are not about their relationship
to other structures, public open spaces, and the life of
the whole community, what are they about?”
- Richard Register, Ecocities: Building cities in balance with
nature,2001, p.29
Although Register believes that the most promising sites for transformation are those that have
been abandoned, the greater challenge is the seeding of an existing dysfunctional community
with an architectural incursion where urban spaces characterized by eight-hour days can be
redistributed to thriving twenty-four-hour communities. Increasing residential and agricultural
densities in these intermittently lifeless spaces immediately and drastically improves quality of life
and the integrity of key infrastructural services such as water or transportation. The introduction
of community-building elements in hostile urban areas is the most challenging but most
significant manner in which a sustainable community can be born. To drastically alter the behavior
and the lifecycle of a community with a targeted architectural incursion can generate the
fundamental shift in its ability to re-unite with their members and with nature. It is only through a
fundamental redistribution of space in our urban cores that the blindfold can be lifted.

PART 3: IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU ’D BE HOME

“In understanding the nature of the city, distance is a key factor. The
principle of access by proximity applies to living organisms and cities alike.
Gathering people together reduces distances, which in turn reduces the need
for travel and expenditure of transport energy, the level of pollution produced
and the quantity of land paved.” - Richard Register, Ecocities: Building cities in
balance with nature, 2001, p.57

Three towers of the Toronto Dominion Center, two by Mies van der Rohe plus a third tower on the
same block, are not only an eye sore in a city of eye sores, but a slap in the face of community
building and infrastructure efficiency. It is not their style that is abhorrent but their impact on the
fabric of the community they inhabit. The dark, shadowy triad in Toronto’s financial district looms
ominously as an uncomfortable reminder of the modernist response to increasing urban
commercialdensity. Its limited use of the PATH, Union Station, and the Skydome Stadium
Walkway, appears arrogant and elitist, alive only eight hours a day – a terrible waste of urban
infrastructure and land. The strictly commercial nature of the towers is a blatant misuse of the
amenities of the urban core, especially at a time when the financial sector is retreating from public
outrage.

It is from this unfortunate scenario that ambitious opportunity is born. As the banks flee to the
tops of their dark towers, we are offered a unique opportunity to commandeer the structural
carcass of a failed space and re-imagine the urban core as a clustered community based on long-
term health rather than the survival of the contemporary product-oriented economy.

“to forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” –
Mahatma Ghandi

The opportunity to transform the towers into a mixed-use community of primarily residential and
agricultural spaces would drastically alter our inhabitation of city-centers. The transformation of
the ‘dark towers’ into a symbiotic community of agricultural and residential co-existence would
impact the city in a profound way, altering the fundamental perception of the city-center as a
lifeless grouping of office towers and business-related activities, and affording the new urbanite
previously unexplored possibilities for livelihood. The Light Community would re-connect us with
our humanity and with nature,something that is not afforded by commercialized sustainability.
Co-operation between community members can lead to a shift towards micro-agriculture,
providing healthy organic produce and eliminating thousands of kilometers of agricultural
transportation emissions while reuniting us with our roots. The development of a water purifying
system can localize water infrastructure. The space for technological innovations is not being
erased – they are taking their place as enhancements to the systemic solution rather than being
promoted as solutions themselves.

The attempts of contemporary ‘incredible-machine’ style architecture at sustainability fall

short of a systemic solution because it looks towards a product-driven solution, rather than a
community-led evolution. True sustainability comes from the pedestrianizingof streets, the
localization of infrastructure, and the connections between the architecture, rather than the
architecture itself. These aspects of sustainability require united community efforts, not the
singular efforts of any innovative architect. It is the daily activities and the interpersonal
relationships of community members that will support our sustainable future, not the marketing of
energy efficient light bulbs or low-flow showerheads. The free-market economy is a river which
carries product-oriented solutions complimentary to a sustainable future, however it is the
community which determines the borders and direction of that river, and the relationships
between community members which prevents the erosion of the river beds.