What did I find to be the most powerful/productive

sustainable design technique, as I did indeed intend to

discover?
Car-free/pedestrian/slow streets? No. Living rooftops? No again. Urban
parks and gardens, then? No. It’s not quite as simple as all that. Albeit,
these crucial elements of a healthy and sound design strategy, these
rather obvious components, became quickly eclipsed.

The quarter’s research proffers no definitive, straightforward technique -such as, say, lightweight

concrete, recycled blue-jean insulation, or some other material, nor deep green skyscrapers,

public transport, or other lone feature. None are substantial enough to sate my curiosity; as

solitary techniques the aforementioned tend to be isolative and limiting, neglecting and even

ignoring their surroundings, thereby diminishing potential impact. In other words, these creations

often become mere pockets of adjustments in an otherwise unaffected cityscape; lonely pieces

unable to engage with the puzzle. The city is a complex system; the city -as are all our built

environments- is a multi-faceted, interlocking and interacting collection, and it ought to be

treated as such.

Instead the 'technique' of greatest gravity and potential appears to be threefold and urges us to:

reconsider the magnitude and complexity of our cities; imagine advantageous alternatives and

improvements; and, finally, react; I’ll start from the top.

What is the city? “Cities are by far the largest creations of humanity (Register, 2006).” That’s
definitely something. “We’re surrounded by the built environment at almost every moment of the

day; it is the frame through which our experiences are filtered.” Continuing: “Operating them has

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the greatest destructive impact on nature than any human activity (…) yet (they) also shelter and

launch many of our most creative collaborations and cultural adventures, arts, and artifacts.”

Nevertheless, “we have no science, study, discipline, or art of ecologically healthy city building.”

How can this be? That our largest creations -humanity’s greatest destruction and epicenter of

creativity- are unstudied? This had better be an overstatement… otherwise it just may be the

ultimate human folly of all time.

“As we build, so shall we live. The city -this arrangement of buildings, streets, vehicles, and

planned landscapes that serve as home- organizes our resources and technologies and shapes our

forms of expression (emphasis added).” Shapes our forms of expression… “What we build

creates possibilities for, and limits on the way we live.” Is Mr. Register suggesting that our cities

influence us to such an extent as to create us? Do the cities we make, make us? In creating our

built environments, do we create ourselves? Conscious evolution... “It is the frame through

which our experiences are filtered” (Manaugh, 2009). This is the field considered undeserving of

study?

In fact -for lack of any name- Richard Register invented a term to describe such a field of study.

“Where is the science and art of investigating, describing, designing, and building healthy cities?

Not having found it, I have tried to spell out its beginnings here in this book, and propose to call

it “ecocitology” (Register, 2006).

While Richard Register has invented new terminology to expand our understanding of, and our
intimacy with the built environment, one Geoff Manaugh expands definitions. “Rethinking

architecture—rethinking landscapes, cities, and the way we’ve designed our everyday lives—is a

shortcut to rethinking the whole world, and a great deal of this boils down to expanding our

definition of architecture. Where architecture can be found, what it can be, and who created it.

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(…) From airports and shopping malls to blockbuster action films, from Bioshock (a video game)

and prison camps to the canopies of giant sequoias, there are structures and spatial frameworks

everywhere. Mars rovers are architectural; they are structured explorations of landscape and

space. Haunted house novels are architectural. Mt. Everest base camps, Tokyo storm drains,

abandoned biowarfare ranges in the former Soviet Union, and the inaudible songs of Libyan sand

dunes: These are all wide open to architectural discussion” (Manaugh, 2009).

Either way -inventing words or expanding existing ones- it is clear that we need to re-evaluate

our perceptions of the built environment in order to understand it and our relationship to it. As

crass as it sounds, we can barely manage even talking about cities, architecture, or design for

lack of verbal adequacy.

Unfortunately, this challenge isn’t the only stacked deck in the game. These ideas have been so

far removed from the general public that it is almost embarrassing. Because the design of the

built environment drastically affects (some would even say shapes) everyone, naturally it should

necessitate everyone’s awareness (to some degree; at the very least, simple recognition). In fact,

participation should be encouraged and respected for what it is and what it can achieve. At least

someone has wondered: “what do janitors or security guards or novelists or even housewives--let

alone prison guards or elevator-repair personnel--think about the buildings around them? What

do suburban teenagers think about contemporary home design, when their own bedrooms are

right next door to their parent--or what do teenagers think about urban planning, when they have

to drive an hour each way to get to school?” Why aren’t these professions and these people

included in design and planning? Aren’t they affected by design? Yes. Are their lives dictated by

design? To a very real degree, yes again. Pray tell, why are they excluded? Geoff Manaugh

continues to call it out: “These sorts of apparently trivial experiences of the built environment are

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often far more important than simply learning--yet again--how a certain architect fits him- or

herself into a self-chosen design lineage.” In other words, a reconsideration of basic interactive

understandings betwixt us and our made world are necessary. Furthermore, if our built

environments are truly wreaking the greatest damage upon the natural world of any of our

activities, we need everyone’s awareness desperately. Just talking about climate change, or

environmental degradation, species extinction, and energy shortages including -but certainly not

limited to- the head-wrecking reality of peak-oil becomes preaching to the choir; everyone and

their grandma knows about these things now… But what about the built environment!?! Might

our designed and built spaces have something to do with these holocaustic environmental

meltdowns? Maybe even more than something…

Take as a very evident example, the automobile: our cities are polluted by them; they are

congested with them; they are loud because of them; automobiles cause significant deaths and

injuries to humans and other animals; they require tremendous financial and material upkeep;

they spoil and limit human interaction and contact; not least of all, they run on a energy source

that is inconsistent, deeply dangerous, and running out. Okay; and what is our reaction?

Concessions and compromises, excuses for a deep addiction; how do we redesign our cars to

solve the problems that they instinctively create… hybrid, biodiesel, alcohol, hydrogen, electric;

more lanes, greater freeways, new perks and comforts… “It’s no mystery to me. We’ve never

engaged in the big battles. We try to make cars better rather than greatly reduce their numbers.

We try to slow sprawl rather than reverse its growth and shrink its footprint. We keep making

freeways wider and longer, dreaming of “intelligent highways” rather than removing lanes and

replacing them with rails, small country roads, and bicycle paths. We continue to provide

virtually every subsidy and support policy the oil companies want. It’s no wonder that we’re not

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winning the war (Register, 2006).” Can it truly be that our automobiles are so predicated, so

enmeshed in the fabric of our built environment that we cannot even imagine their removal?

“When we build the automobile/sprawl infrastructure, we create a radically different social and

ecological reality than if we build closely-knit communities for pedestrians (emphasis added).”

Here’s a start to redesigning our built environments: what does a city look like and how can it

function without cars? Imagine that. Without cars, it’s immediately a cleaner, safer, quieter, more

spacious, more sane canvas.

The last paragraph begs this one to follow; it’s not as if we can just realistically get rid of all the

cars. For our built environments are now dependent upon them; as -to no surprise- we too are

dependent. “Once communities (town, city, or otherwise) have been shaped for cars, they remain

dependent upon them. Sprawled communities can’t function without their speed. Their addiction

is a structural addiction built into the physical structure of the city.” It should come as no

surprise: our built environments act as a reflection of us, as well as an impression upon us. So

that said, what options to this car-ridden reality do we have? How else can we connect the city?

What alternatives are there for navigating the city, for shipment of goods? Indeed, should our

cities be as big as they are? For aren’t they designed to meet the parameters of the car: its speed,

its size, and its needs -rather than those of a human being? No wonder we can’t understand our

cities, we didn’t make them for ourselves.

We -as in all of us- need to ask ourselves: What should the world be like? When consciously,
integrally designed, how could our cities best operate? What can our built environments look

like? What features of our cities, towns, and villages are good and which are bad; which are

indispensable and why? How do we want to -how will we- live? Piece by piece, the city can

become healthier, more beautiful and fun; more of the things we adore and value, less of those

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we despise and loathe. What is a healthy city, anyway? These greater questions and their myriad

answers are most important, for this is the root and heart of planning and design and architecture.

Furthermore, designing and planning our surroundings has become -for good or ill- our

responsibility. Now, we have become responsible for the sanctity of the atmosphere and climate,

the soils and waters, the great array of earth’s species, ours no less. These questions and concerns

affect us all and there are two responses: to consciously design our surroundings or to perpetuate

this haphazard, helter-skelter design mash-up mess. “And if this is the world that we’ve built for

ourselves—or that someone’s built for us, whether we wanted them to or not—then we should

ask ourselves whether it’s working out as planned (Manaugh, 2009).” Well… is it? Go on… ask

yourself…

Well… then how should we react? Luckily, many have already begun reacting: “There are
millions of interesting speculative ideas out there, with people reimagining what their cities

could be, but the problem is precisely that no one is building them.” I can attest to the truth of

this. Geoff Manaugh’s BLDG BLOG (www.bldgblog.blogspot.com) is single-handedly devastating,

and truly challenges what architecture and the built environment are… from landscapes of

quarantine and the landscape of the blink; even spam architecture; enormous prehistoric canyons

turned music instruments; weather controlling for war and entertainment; London seen in its

future -flooded- and what to do about that; “Link dinosaur fossils unearthed in Arizona to the

Berlin subway system-via heretical theology and the novels of Cormac McCarthy.” There are

hundreds of posts, at least, and nearly as many links to other radical websites, as well as dozens

upon dozens of interviews. Reemphasized, this is one person’s website. As Geoff says, the ideas

are out there, but the problem is that no one is building them. Why not?

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“If you want to see a new project take shape then you have to stop relying on design

competitions, architecture blogs, or industry publications to get the word out –that is, you need to

find another way to convince the public that your design should exist. Why not bypass clients

and experts and just bring your vision to everyone?” Why not bypass everything: all the hoops

and hang-ups, all the monetary fees and costs; all the boring and rote necessities implicit in

mainstream advertising… I am referring here, to ‘gorilla advertising.’ “It's like subliminal

advertising for a parallel future. Why not slip these architectural speculations into pop culture at

large.” Cut the middle-man; have something to say? Then experiment with untried mediums.

Which is exactly what Mitchell Bonus did: “The style of his pitch was strategically ingenious,

well worth both study and emulation elsewhere. Mitchell created a series of trading cards,

modeled after sports cards. He then sealed, laminated, and stuck the cards inside bags of potato

chips, cigarette packs, and boxes of morning cereal. The idea was thus that people would open

up a bag of smoky bacon-flavored chips and find an architectural proposal awaiting them.

Inside their morning oat bran would be a trading card-sized vision of the future. Falling out of

the cigarette box as they light up on the sidewalk would be a portrayal of some strange island

future yet to come. (…) Wait till the ideas trickle out, burning into the collective cultural

consciousness. Isn't that what Hollywood set designers and concept artists have been doing all

along? (…) How incredibly interesting would it be to find that, in every box of Total or, hiding at

the bottom of every canister of oatmeal you open, new visions of the cities around us are

patiently hiding...? A whole new urban redesign of Tokyo awaits anyone who buys a bucket of

popcorn at the start of 2012. (…) It's a genuine challenge: publish your next architectural project

not as a short article in Log, or as a press release on Dezeen, but as a series of trading cards

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hidden inside popular consumer goods all over the world. Slip your vision of the future into mass

consciousness both slowly and subliminally. See what happens.”

What about slipping these cards not into consumable products but: into newspapers, onto
shopping carts and baskets, on tables at your local pub? How about into random books at Barnes

and Noble, into records at Dumpster Values, stapled to dress shirts at Goodwill? Send them to

publishing houses, accomplished writers, thinkers, and doers. Send a deck with your friend when

he decides to go to Guatemala; take a deck with you to Thailand. Hand them out in the streets.

Design them to look like a coupon; like a ticket; a flag; a sticker; as bumper stickers, window

decals, and stencils -and spray the streets. Why not infiltrate the built environment? Hack our

architectural standard with design sabotage. Collaborate with tactical climbers from Greenpeace

and unfurl giant banners down the sides of skyscrapers, bridges, and flag poles.

That’s what I am going to do. To start with…

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Bibliography

Manaugh, G. (2009). BLDG BLOG BOOK. San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC.

Register, R. (2006). Ecocity -rebuilding cities in balance with nature. Gabriola Island:
New Society Publishers.

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