Seite 3: Case for the Defense: OPTIMISM OF THE IMAGINATION

1. THE CITY AS ITS OWN SOLUTION

Academic research has come late in the day to confront the synergistic possibilities of peak population growth, abrupt climate change, peak oil (and in some regions, peak water), the possible collapse of entire agricultural systems, and the accumulated penalties of urban neglect. Although the German government, the CIA, and the Pentagon have all published reports on the national-security implications of a multiply-determined world crisis in the coming decades, their insights have been more Hollywoodish than oracular.

This is not surprising. As last United Nations Human Development Report observed: “There are no obvious historical analogies for the urgency of the climate change problem.” While paleoclimatology can help scientists anticipate the non-linear physics of a warming earth, there is no historical precedent or vantage point for understanding what will happen in the 2050s when a peak species’ population of 9 to 11 billion struggles to adapt to climate chaos and depleted fossil energy. Almost any scenario, from the collapse of civilization to a new golden age of fusion power, can be projected on the strange screen of our grandchildren’s future.

We can be sure, however, that cities will remain the ground zero of Convergence. Although forest clearance and export monocultures have played fundamental roles in the transition to a new geological epoch, the prime-mover has been the almost exponential increase in the carbon footprints of urban regions in the Northern hemisphere. Heating and cooling the urban built environment alone is responsible for an estimated 35 to 45 per cent of current carbon emissions, while urban industries and transportation contribute another 35 or 40 or per cent. In a sense, city life is rapidly destroying the ecological niche – Holocene climate stability – which made its evolution into complexity possible.

Yet there is a striking paradox here:

What makes urban areas so environmentally unsustainable are precisely those features, even in largest megacities, that are most anti-urban or sub-urban:

• explosive horizontal expansion, accompanied by the degradation or sheer destruction of vital natural services (aquifers, watersheds, truck farms, forests, coastal eco-systems)
• downstream dumping of waste and pollution
• grotesquely oversized environmental footprints
• the monstrous growth of traffic and air pollution;
• urban form dictated by speculators and developers
• absence of democratic control over planning, development and tax resources
• extreme spatial segregation by income and/or ethnicity
• unsafe environments for children, elderly, and special needs
• gentrification through eviction
• disintegration of traditional working-class urban culture;
• low-intensity warfare between police and subsistence criminals
• the growth of peripheral slums and informal employment;
• the high costs of providing infrastructure to sprawl;
• the privatization and militarization of public space;
• bunkering of the wealthy in sterilized historical centers or walled suburbs

By contrast, those qualities that are most ‘classically’ urban, even on the scale of small cities and towns, combine to generate a more virtuous circle.

• urban growth preserves open space and vital natural systems
• well-defined boundaries between city and preserved countryside;
• waste is recycled, not exported downstream
• strict regulation of automobile use
• environmental economies of scale in transportation and residential construction;
• the substitution of public luxury for privatized consumption;
• the socialization of desire and identity within public space;
• affordable access to city centers from periphery
• egalitarian public services
• large domains of public or non-profit housing
• ethnic and income heterogeneity at fractal scales of city
• powerful capacities for progressive taxation and planning in the public interest
• high levels of political mobilization and civic participation
• public landscapes designed with children, seniors and special needs in mind
• rich dialectics of neighborhood and world culture;
• the priority of civic memory over proprietary icon;
• spatial integration of work, recreation and home-life.

6. THE UTOPIAN ECOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF THE MODERN CITY

Such sharp demarcations between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ features of city life are redolent of famous attempts in the previous century to distill a canonical urbanism or anti-urbanism: Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walt Disney, Corbusier and the CIAM manifesto, the ‘New Urbanism’ of Andres Duany and Peter Calthorpe, and so on. But no one needs ‘urban theorists’ to have eloquent opinions about virtues and vices of the urban built environments and the kinds of social interactions they foster or discourage. Especially here in Munich, with a rich conjugation of different periods and conditions.

What often goes unnoticed in such moral inventories, however, is the consistent affinity between social and environment justice, between the communal ethos and a greener urbanism. Their mutual attraction is magnetic if not inevitable. The conservation of urban green spaces and waterscapes, for example, serves simultaneously to preserve vital natural elements of urban metabolism while providing leisure and cultural resources for the popular classes. Reducing suburban gridlock with better planning and more public transit turns traffic sewers back into neighborhood streets while reducing greenhouse emissions.

There are innumerable examples and they all point toward to a single unifying principle: namely, that the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far more than any particular green design or technology, is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth. As we all know, several additional Earths would be required to allow all of humanity to live in a suburban house with two cars and a lawn, and this obvious constraint is sometimes evoked to justify the impossibility of reconciling finite resources with rising standards of living. Most contemporary cities, in rich countries or poor, repress the potential environmental efficiencies inherent in human settlement density. The ecological genius of the city remains a vast, largely hidden power.

But there is no planetary shortage of ‘carrying capacity’ if we are willing to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private consumption, the engine of sustainable equality. Public affluence - represented by great urban parks, free museums, libraries, and infinite possibilities for human interaction – represents an alternative route to a rich standard of life based on earth-friendly, carnivalesque sociality. Although seldom noticed by academic urban theorists, university campuses are often little quasi-socialist paradises around rich public spaces for learning, research, performance, and human reproduction.

The utopian ecological critique of the modern city was pioneered by socialists and anarchists, beginning with Guild Socialism’s dream (influenced by the bioregionalist ideas of Kropotkin, and later, Geddes) of garden cities for re-artisanized English workers, and ending with the bombardment of the Karl-Marx-Hauf - Red Vienna’s great experiment in communal living – during the Austrian Civil War in 1934. In between are the invention of the kibbutz by Russian and Polish socialist, the modernist social housing projects of the Bauhaus, and the extraordinary debate over urbanism conducted in the Soviet Union during the 1920s.

This radical urban imagination was a victim of the tragedies of the 1930s and 1940s. Stalinism, on one hand, veered toward a monumentalism in architecture and art, inhumane in scale and texture, that was little different from the Wagnerian hyperboles of Albert Speer in the Third Reich. Postwar Social Democracy, on the other hand, abandoned alternative urbanism for a Keynesian mass housing policy that emphasized economies of scale in high-rise projects on cheap suburban estates, and thereby uprooted traditional working-class urban identities.

Yet the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century conversations about the ‘socialist city’ provide invaluable starting points for thinking about the current planetary crisis. Consider, for example, the Constructivists. El Lissitzy, Melnikov, Leonidov, Golosov and the Vesnin brothers are probably not familiar names, but these brilliant socialist designers – constrained by early Soviet urban misery and a drastic shortage of public investment – proposed to relieve congested apartment life with splendidly designed workers clubs, people’s theaters, and sports complexes. They gave urgent priority to the emancipation of proletarian women through the organization of communal kitchens, day nurseries, public baths, and cooperatives of all kinds. Although they envisioned workers clubs and social centers, linked to vast Fordist factories and eventual high-rise housing, as the ‘social condensers’ of a new proletarian civilization, they were also elaborating a practical strategy for leveraging poor urban workers’ standard of living in otherwise austere circumstances.

In the context of global environmental emergency, this Constructivist project could be translated into the proposition that the egalitarian aspects of city life consistently provide the best sociological and physical supports for resource conservation and carbon mitigation. Indeed, there is little hope of mitigating greenhouse emissions or adapting human habitats to the Anthropocene unless the movement to control global warming converges with the struggle to raise living standards and abolish world poverty. And in real life, beyond the IPCC’s simplistic scenarios, this means participating in the struggle for democratic control over urban space, capital flows, resource-sheds, and large-scale means of production.

I think the inner crisis in environmental politics today is precisely the lack of bold concepts that address the challenges of poverty, energy, biodiversity, and climate change within an integrated vision of human progress. At a micro-level, of course, there have been enormous strides in developing alternative technologies and passive energy housing, but demonstration projects in wealthy communities and rich countries will not save the world. The more affluent, to be sure, can now choose from an abundance of designs for eco-living: but what is the ultimate goal: to allow well-meaning celebrities to brag about their zero-carbon lifestyles or to bring solar energy, toilets, pediatric clinics and mass transit to poor urban communities?