Who Will Build the Ark?

Seite 4: BEYOND THE GREEN ZONE

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Tackling the challenge of sustainable urban design for the whole planet, and not just for a few privileged countries or social groups, requires a vast stage for the imagination, such as the arts and sciences inhabited in the May days of Vhutemas and the Bauhaus. It presupposes a radical willingness to think beyond the horizon of neo-liberal capitalism toward a global revolution that reintegrates the labor of the informal working classes, as well as the rural poor, in the sustainable reconstruction of their built environments and livelihoods.

Of course, this is an utterly unrealistic scenario, but one either embarks on a journey of hope, believing that collaborations between architects, engineers, ecologists, and activists can play small, but essential roles in making an alter-monde more possible, or one submits to a future in which designers are just the hireling imagineers of elite, alternative existences. The planetary ‘green zones’ may offer pharaonic opportunities for the monumentalization of individual visions, but the moral questions of architecture and planning can only be resolved in the tenements and sprawl of the ‘red zones.’

From this perspective, I believe that only a return to explicitly utopian thinking can clarify the minimal conditions for the preservation of human solidarity in face of convergent planetary crises. I think I understand what the Italian Marxist architects Tafuri and Dal Co meant when they cautioned against “a regression to the utopian,” but to raise our imaginations to the challenge of the Anthropocene, we must be able to envision alternative configurations of agents, practices and social relations, and this requires, in turn, that we suspend the politico-economic assumptions that chain us to the present.

I speak, of course, as an aging Socialist, who still believes in the self-emancipation of labor with the same fervor with which Governor Palin believes in shooting caribou. But utopianism isn’t necessarily millenarianism, nor is it confined just to the soapbox or pulpit. One of the most encouraging developments in that emergent intellectual space where researchers and activists discuss the impacts of global warming on development has been a new willingness to advocate the Necessary rather than the merely Practical. A growing chorus of expert voices warn that either we fight for ‘impossible’ solutions to the increasingly entangled crises of urban poverty and climate change, or become ourselves complicit in a de facto triage of humanity.

Thus I think we can be cheered by a recent editorial (11 September 2008) in Nature. Explaining that the “challenges of rampant urbanization demands integrated, multidisciplinary approaches, and new thinking,’ the editors challenge the rich countries to finance a zero-carbon revolution in the cities of the developing world. “It may seem utopian,” they write, “to promote these innovations in emerging and developing-world megacities, many of whose inhabitants can barely afford a roof over their heads. But those countries have already shown a gift for technological fast-forwarding, for example, by leapfrogging the need for landline infrastructure to embrace mobile phones. And many poorer countries have a rich tradition of adapting buildings to local practices, environments, and climates – a home-grown approach to integrated design that has been all but lost in the West. They now have an opportunity to combine these traditional approaches with modern technologies.”

Similarly, the 2007/2008 United Nations Human Development Report warns that the ‘future of human solidarity’ depends upon a massive aid program to help developing countries adapt to climate shocks. The Report calls for removing the “obstacles to the rapid disbursement of the low-carbon technologies needed to avoid dangerous climate change. … the world’s poor cannot be left to sink or swim with their own resources while rich countries protect their citizens behind climate-defence fortifications.” “Put bluntly,” it continues,” the world’s poor and future generations cannot afford the complacency and prevarication that continues to characterize international negotiations on climate change.” The refusal to act decisively on behalf of all humanity would be “a moral failure on a scale unparalleled in history.”

If this sounds like an sentimental call to the barricades, an echo from classrooms and studios of forty years ago, then so be it. Because if you accept any of the evidence presented in the first half of this talk, then taking a ‘realist’ view of the human prospect, like seeing Medusa’s head, would simply turn you into stone.