Wednesday 19 May, 2010, auditorium Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam. Open: 4:30 pm, start: 5 pm. Entrance fee: € 5, reduction fee € 3 (students, Friends of the NAi). Register here.

Speakers will include Ole Bouman, Hani Asfour, Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf, and Ronald Wall.

Following the release of Al Manakh Gulf Continued, a special issue of Volume Magazine, the NAi will organize a debate in collaboration with OMA, Archis/Volume and Pink Tank. Al Manakh Gulf Continued offers readers another view of urban development in the Gulf region. This time focusing on how the cities remain re-invent themselves and about their position related to the rest of the world.

Just in time before Christmas we launched Volume 22, The Guide and Beyroutes at the Athenaeum magazine shop. There were ‘bitterballen’, sparkles, booze and a spectacular last minute arrival of the issue straight from the printer. Enjoy the photo’s together with the warm wishes from the entire Volume crew for a happy christmas, good parties, and a incredible new year.

Signed; Lilet, Arjen, Valerie (who made the pictures) Rory, Timothy, Jonathan, Christian and Edwin

Author: Volume

Did you know that the term Sustainability first appeared in a German forestry manual in the 1700s?
Did you know that some people feel paranoid about an alleged conspiracy plan of world domination behind global warming?
What did French philosophers in the Seventies think about ecology?

Discover all the different attitudes of humans towards Nature throughout history. Learn more on the architect’s approach to environmental design and get inspiration from a wide utopian fiction bibliography!  Impress your friends with a full set of fresh notions!

The Complex History of Sustainability is a timeline of trends, authors, projects and fiction made by Amir Djalali, with Piet Vollaard. originally published in Volume #18 -  After Zero, the timeline has been converted to an interactive website using mashing-up Google maps, using it as a way to navigate this extensive timeline. The technology to do this, Google Maps Image Cutter, has been developed by CASA Go to: The Complex History of Sustainability

Artist, writer, architect, educator, ecologist and radical gardener Fritz Haeg is a key figure to foresee and imagine developments in tune with the issues raised in this blog. From edible estates to animal planning…

The 18th of October 2008, in London, he will be talking in London at the Frieze Talks.

Animal estates

Part of the installation at the Biennale is an archive of projects, news, definitions and opinions  surounding the three  scenarios  presented.  Here are some examples of the info cards made for each issue. boeristudio_wilderness

boeristudio_agriculture

boeristudio_high-tech

The idea behind the Boeri Studio’s Biennale installation is to present three different and extreme scenarios of an urban future radicalized around notions of sustainability. These visions can pass very quickly from utopian ideas regarding new relations between nature and the city to nightmarish scenarios that could also make the city unlivable.

A series of eclectic materials (models, diagrams, books, an archive of projects and news, etc.) display the stories behind the three radically different urban visions while a video by the Flocking project shows the way in which flocks of birds invade Roman skies and the tactics used to shift them away: an example of the thin line between the utopia or dystopia of a sustainable future.

By Ole Bouman

This month Archis trains its spotlights on ecology. Whatever that might mean. Ecology in some or other guise is of course a thematic presence in practically all the articles. They forward various ideas about the link between architecture and environmental consciousness. The potentials for a more nature-aware architecture are explored from a variety of different angles. And all the authors are interested in the balance between the reserves of worldly riches and their social consumption. All in all, the contributions have enough in common for us to speak of a special issue. In this respect, Archis is trying to do justice to a social sector, a domain of thinking and an important force field in our culture. Yet the subject of ecology is too broad to stay in a little world of its own. Ecology is an umbrella concept that covers far too much for there to be any such thing as ‘an ecological issue’. It is a subject that relates to everything: to matter and mind, art and science, market and society, heaven and hell, earth, air, water and fire.
Ecology is more an attitude than a theme. It must not be allowed to become the small change of a specialism. Yet this is precisely what happens. Ecology has long been annexed by specialists. It has been appropriated by morality specialists, by environmental specialists and by specialists in imminent doom. Environmental activists of every category not only tend to be pigeonholed together, but are often much too keen to construct their identity around their own certainty about what is good and what is bad for this world. From that point of view, a comparison with the computer world is not out of place. Although this device has wormed its way into every corner of existence, there still exists a separate world of enthusiasts and connoisseurs, of nerds and whizz-kids, of cybergurus, digimoguls and ICT experts. The rest of us are just computer illiterati. Ecology lacks a comparable term for its legions of innocents, but from the viewpoint of the ecological movement we are the ignorant, the still unawakened or even the guilty. This judgement is based on practically inexorable questions: how can the environmental debt we have built up ever be redeemed, how can new debts be avoided and further loss of biotopes be halted, and how can progress be made in these respects without impairing our level of consumption in a way that will result in serious social tensions?
There is no such thing as a neutral, value-free practice of ecology. The necessity of change is always audible behind the message. Ecology is almost invariably concerned with major changes in our world view: we must cease adapting to the social reality of a technocratic, market-driven world, but instead adjust our world view to the necessity of change. Although much of the specialist debate going on in architecture might lead us to think otherwise, here too the ecological argument comes from outside the professional discourse. This argument can always be dissected into an existential argument and a scientific one. We must change – on the one hand because we are morally obligated to do so towards the world, and on the other hand because we prefer to survive as part of ecosystem Earth.
Despite fine-sounding words, ecology in architecture seldom goes any farther than paying lip service to these arguments. Reality speaks a different language. Since architecture is generally also real estate, it is bound hand and foot by the demands of ft market. The maxim is always ‘more’, ‘faster’ and ‘cheaper’. The claim made on natural resources continues to exceed the supply. In architecture alone, for example, more wood is consumed worldwide than is replaced by planting. The turnover rate of buildings is increasing and the write-off time is growing correspondingly shorter. The renewed focus on the consumptive demand side as a criterium of building production prevents true planning for a lowered production volume or lesser space requirements. Nor is there much toehold for a durable future in the plannable space between buildings. On the contrary, suburbanization is rising, with corresponding implications for infrastructure and car usage. The volume of traffic movement is growing in duration and numbers. Vehicle journey distances are increasing all the time. All that generally remains is a desperate output of regulations that are knocking their head against a brick wall, and non-committal moral patronization in the form of political pep-talks and TV awareness-campaigns. Nobody really slows down, so the path of least effort is further investment in sustainable environmental technology, together with a bit of ‘nature management’, the craft of running nature or whatever is left of it within its prescribed zones as a business.
You hear it from every quarter: the 21st century is going to be the era of ecology. Radical decisions cannot be put off. Architecture has hitherto devised only a small repertoire of ‘solutions’: regionalism, alternativism, biologism and – naturally – the countless high-tech designs. Practically all these approaches set store by showcasing the ‘right’ outlook in their iconography. And that may well be exactly the problem.
Ecology is invisible. As long as ecology is recognized in building only as a separate aspect, and as long as the builders insist on making a show of it, their efforts will by definition remain marginal. Besides ridding the discourse of guilt feelings and doommongering, and besides the efficient implementation of suitable measures, the important thing now seems to be to investigate ecology as a vital dimension of tomorrow’s building task. Ecology should not be seen as a correction but as a new mandate for architecture. With the synthetic power needed for this, the classical opposition between ecology and architecture as an art form could be transformed into a splendid union.

This article was originally published in Archis, # 2, 1999

author: Lewis, Matt
Are carbon neutral cities, Eco-cities and sus tain able cities discursive cover ups for synthetic design in the desert of Abu Dhabi or something stemming from an honest utopian desire? Questioning Foster’s scheme for Masdar, Matt Lewis reaches revealing conclusions on the marketing of design in the Gulf.

In a world in which human egos dominate, where more is better, bigger and taller are the only aspirations. Places like Dubai are an architect’s playground. Here we see one ego trip followed by another through an architecture of excess. In a parallel world, however, the Mies van der Rohe’s words ring true again, though in a different context. ‘Less is more’ now applies to our carbon footprint and an architecture of performance. Yet as these two worlds begin to intersect a new competition is born – the race to become the world’s first sustainable city.
Abu Dhabi, an early front-runner in this race, has already developed some promising strategies for addressing the problem of polluting cultures. Global alliances have been created as part of the Masdar Initiative, a long-term plan for the sustainable future of Abu Dhabi. This program will help Abu Dhabi position itself as global leader in renewable energy and sus – tainable technologies. The flagship of the program will be the Masdar development, a carbon neutral city master planned by Foster + Partners. Given the desert environment, the Initiative’s commitment, and the financial backing of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Com pany, Foster appears to be living a planner’s fantasy – building a city from scratch.
In the process, however, Foster + Partners are ignoring current discourse to create their own sustainable utopia. One discourse is the conceptualization of modern – or global – cities, the other, a means of achieving sustainable environments. Both notions are upended by a machine mentality and the creation of a closed system. This negates any notion of the open, continuous landscape that currently defines the next generation of city models, and natural, sustainable systems that are defined as a fluid area constantly shifting between change and equilibrium.
Foster + Partners deliver a socially engineered cocktail to the marketing team at the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company – a synthetic culture for their synthetic city.
Located adjacent to the Abu Dhabi International Airport, nearly 20 miles outside the center of Abu Dhabi, Foster + Partners employ the traditional planning techniques used to build ancient Arab cities. The city is populated with dense, low-rise buildings to create a compact community with narrow streets for climate mitigation. All this is contained within a city wall which defines the 6 square kilometer development. Construction has already begun on this ambitious project, with completion of the first phase expected in 2010. Subsequent phases will span 8-10 years before Masdar reaches its target resident workforce of 47,500.
Measuring the success of a project like this can be difficult, but there does exist a generally accepted definition of sustainable development. The criteria are simple, suggesting that three conditions – environmental, economic, and social sustainability – must be met but execution proves extremely difficult.
To face this challenge, a ‘dream team’ of sorts has been assembled to support proper development. Foster + Partners are providing the planning and the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company will provide the financial support to cover the projected $22 billion price tag. The World Wildlife Fund is the last member of this team and has been brought in as a resource to develop the goals for environmental sustainability. This group should be able to address all three conditions with a strong level of responsibility and accountability.
Environmentally Masdar is a highly calculated system designed to achieve carbon neutrality. This will be pursued through the following methods: zero waste, sustainable transport, local and sustainable materials, local and sustainable food, and sustainable water.
Most of these are not new sustainable practices, nor are the specific systems applied, they are just happening on an unprecedented scale. Most importantly of all these is the area in which Foster + Partners appear to hold the most conviction – mobility.
First and foremost, fossil fuels are not permitted within Masdar. This naturally means no automobiles. Residents and commuters will rely on a three-tiered transportation network. The first mode is Abu Dhabi’s light-rail which cuts through the heart of Masdar creating a spine for spatial organization. The second mode is a personal rapid transit system, or PRTs, which will provide the principle means of travel above the third mode, which encompasses foot traffic.
This third mode, effecting people most directly, also has the largest impact on the urban form. Based on studies from European urban development agencies, a maximum walking distance has been set at 200m. The plan is compact, producing narrow pedestrian streets which further mitigates the climate.
Having solidified a maximum distance, Foster + Partners can now calculate an appropriate design density: roughly 400 people/hectare. They can thus calculate a population range within which Masdar can maintain its performance.
What is curious, however, is the reliance on an outside workforce to make this plan viable. Only 30% of the development is envisaged for a resident work – force. Does this mean Masdar is only 30% efficient?

Economically the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company is in a position to invest $4 billion of its own capital to initiate the project, but will have to leverage its assets to borrow the rest. To help the project pay for itself they have raised funds on in an unprecedented manner and on an unprecedented scale. Since Masdar will perform better than any pollution regulations require, they are selling carbon emission offsets to companies that do not meet local standards. This should provide an immediate return on investment, in addition to the annual savings of a carbon neutral system.
With a built-in method to reduce the time frame of recouping initial costs, Masdar has the opportunity to address even longer term issues of economic sustainability. Therefore the real question becomes: how does this city create a built-in system for sustainable economic growth?
To this end, the infrastructure is being developed around the research and development of sustainable technologies anchored by the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. The aim is to foster innovation and funding to attract current global leaders to relocate their operations to Masdar which will permit them to build a financial foundation through the cultivation of products and expertise.
Reaping the economic windfall of this emerging market, Masdar can leverage its early entry to become the authority of the sustainable movement.

Socially this project becomes more controversial purely from the large pendulum swing required to move Abu Dhabi from one side of the sustainable spectrum to the other. Lifestyles must change, or so the thinking goes among Foster + Partners. In their proposal they have rewritten the script of daily life within the walls of Masdar.
Starting with a blank slate – alas, tabula rasa is back – they are able to eliminate contradictory preconceived lifestyles. With a fresh palette Foster + Partners plan to create new standards of consumption and waste through a process of redefining norms. This new, sustainable lifestyle is contextualized against the maximum capacity of Masdar, a limit visualized by the wall zone.
This perimeter wall serves as a gate, filter and container of purity. Within these walls the air is cleaner, the people are smarter and all systems are in harmony. Perfection, right?
Visitors and residents will have to get used to checking their liberties, like a ‘potentially dangerous’ bag at a museum of antiquity, at the City Gate. Residents’ cars will be confined to parking garages within the wall, and not permitted within their own city. Commuters who do not rely on public transport will also be stripped of their cars at the perimeter. Thus Foster + Partners have replaced the car culture with a ‘personal rapid transport’ culture, leaving the machine analogy not far off.
Of course this does not solve all the problems. There is still water use, energy consumption and waste to optimize. Foster + Partners are not blind to these challenges.
‘Individual behavior can have a significant effect on energy consumption, and thus [greenhouse gas] emissions. Individuals accustomed to a certain mode of living to could find it hard to instantly change their behavior once working/living at Masdar.’

Foster + Partners
They have developed a few tactics to negotiate deeply ingrained individual habits. The first of these they borrowed from the public health profession: education. Promoting awareness is not just for condoms anymore.
The second strategy is much more of what we’d expect from an architect. Their mission is to make ‘energy- and water-efficient living as ‘easy’ as possible.’ Apparently all you need is an intelligent energy management system, a little calibration, and the residents of Masdar are capable of new lifestyles.
This path is likely chosen because incentives do not yet exist to encourage people to make the necessary, radical changes required of a carbon neutral environment. Thus, Foster + Partners must rely on these ancient Arab methods of city planning to control Masdar’s environment. Control applies to both the residents and the climate.
So, is Masdar purely about social engineering or is there some broader context at work?
On one hand, traditional planning methods help mitigate the climate, but they also serve a not-so- hidden agenda. On the other, we are seeing similar eco-cities across the East for China is joining the Middle East in the development of sustainable cities. In this way Foster + Partners’ model may appear to be a popular trend to address the looming environmental crisis. We don’t have to look as far as China to under – stand Masdar as a contextual response to the Persian Gulf, however. Additionally in the UAE, Ras al Khaimah and Dubai join the ranks of Abu Dhabi, where Rem Koolhaas has planned Gateway Eco City and Waterfront City.
Strikingly similar.
This leads me to ask: is an architecture of control the only means to create sustainable development? Perhaps, but perhaps this isn’t the right question. Koolhaas would posit this clear definition of the urban edge is a means of trapping urban energy rather than keeping it out. This sounds viable, but what we’re seeing can be attributed to creating a product
Masdar, for instance, appears to leave very little room for error, almost as if it has been conceived as a packaged product. After all, each party of the partnership is out there marketing Masdar’s carbon neutrality and they need a way to measure it, achieve it and defend it. So, perhaps we’re over-analyzing here and it is purely about selling utopian sustainability to the investors.

Excuse me, my PRT is here…

Scott is one of the most profound critics of high-modernist human development planning. He believes that the process of state-building, leading to what he calls the legibility and standardization of society, fosters control and domination rather than enlightenment and freedom. Scott started his academic career studying small village communities in the forests of Malaysia. When he left the rain forest he took with him a number of vital observations on how nation states organize their society. His monumental book, Seeing Like A State (1998)[1], became the basis for a fundamental and elaborate critique of how governmental planning for the advancement of society can go utterly wrong: compulsory villages in Tanzania, scientific forestry in Prussia, high-modernist Brasilia, industrial agricultural planning in the USSR and its modern day variant the Millennium Development Goals. According to Scott, these are all examples of rational-utopian blueprint thinking that proved fatal.

Erik Gerritsen: How did you reach the conclusion that society cannot be engineered?
James C. Scott:
During my research in South East Asia I was confronted with the dramatic failures of development projects. I found that successful rural communities were all but destroyed in the wake of well- intended development aid and I tried to understand the deeper causes of these failures. It occurred to me that in order to have ambitious plans for a society, to change it and intervene in any way at all, the state had to create a certain kind of society that could then be manipulated. It had to create citizens with identities. It had to create citizens with names that could be recorded, with matching addresses, put down in cadastral surveys. I found myself mesmerized by the fact that part of the struggle of state-making in early modern Europe was to create a legible society that could be understood before it was possible to intervene. And it also occurred to me that in the process of making society legible it changed it radically. They way early-modern states changed the society they governed is very much comparable to the way the World Bank is changing the Third World nowadays.
The example I give in the book is that of scientific forestry. This was a form of transforming the forest so it would produce a single product, neglecting everything else about the forest. It ended up creating a forest that violated the natural processes of forest regeneration. It was an abject failure, but not before becoming the world standard of scientific forestry. I was intrigued by that insight and tried to apply it to the well-intended planning fiasco of Brasilia and compulsory villagization in Tanzania in which seven million people were moved into villages that didn’t work. Finally, I looked into the industrialization and collectivization policies of Soviet agriculture.
I worked out a critique of what I call high- modernist planning. That is, the nineteenth century ideology grounded in the believe that a scientific- technical trained elite could take responsibility for the social planning. The high-modernists claimed to know how parents should bathe their children, how they prepare their food and the design of their houses. The hubris of the high-modernist led them to believe in unitary and singular answers to all social problems and that solutions to them could be either imposed on the public or a public could be persuaded that these schemes were in their own interest.
EG: Since you published Seeing Like a State in 1998, the world seems to have profoundly changed. Making society ‘legible’ through standardization has now been implemented on a global scale. Are we witnessing the building of another, higher level of state? A world state?
JCS: In a way. The World Bank tries to control devel – opment processes in the Third World and by doing so is fundamentally changing those societies. This is comparable to what we saw in early modern Europe. The World Trade Organization, the IMF and the World Bank try to implant the institutions of North Atlantic liberal capitalism and liberal democracy throughout the rest of the world. Just look at the massive emphasis on the development of central banks, the creation of private property, the protection of intellectual property, the repatriation of profits, and also what I call ‘cadasterization’ and the collection of statistics according to UN-standards. The wonderfully accurate word they use for this development is harmonization.
It is all a magnificent piece of propaganda. Of course it means making sure that the institutions match one another and comply. What’s interesting to me is that these institutions are the peculiar, odd, vernacular institutions of North Atlantic capitalism around the turn of the century. They are now traveling back to the Third World as a universal standard, being imposed by these large multinational institutions. The logic of their projects is that a businessman from, let’s say, the Netherlands, can get off of a plane in Assuncion or Kinshasa and find a perfectly familiar world of institutions and structures. They are familiar because they are the institutions from the world which this businessman came from in the first place. We must never forget that these are vernacular institutions which represent themselves as universal, but they carry all the cultural baggage of their particular history.
These tendencies may point to an irreversible path towards the global village, very much along the lines I described in my book. Luckily, reality is more complex. For example, a World Bank program of rural development ends up being colonized by the counter- planning of thousands local farmers who find that the scheme doesn’t quite serve their needs. They start deforming it and twist the grand scheme to suit them. Although there’s no way they can resist this conditionality, the actual projects in the Third World often have very little resemblance to their original design. The sad part is that most of the deviation is a con sequence of a particular government’s effort to increase its own power and project it into the countryside.
Another relevant development in this respect is the enormous increase in financial capital and the volume and pace of communication. These techniques make a kind of detailed control possible that was not possible earlier. But it also makes collective failures both instantaneous and widespread; we have just witnessed how the American sub-prime mortgage crisis was instantaneously ramified throughout the world. It seems that the speed and volume of things which can spin out of control is just as fast as the speed with which they are the subject of new forms of control.
EG: From the state to the world to the city. What is your take on big city engineering and the extent to which planners and people can actually bring change to the city?
JCS: It happens that I teach in a city, New Haven, Connecticut, which has the highest per capita government grants for urban renewal in the entire United States. It implemented those plans to the point that they actually destroyed the city. In twenty years of urban planning they’ve moved people two and three times. New Haven is almost a test case of urban government planning gone bad. There was a saying in Victorian times ‘three moves equal a death’. Once you pick people up from a neighborhood where they have roots and friends and routines, even if it’s not the best neighborhood in the world, such a move comes at great social costs. If you move people several times, some react by not putting down roots at all because it’s too painful to pull them up again.
Jane Jacobs wrote a brilliant book on this subject in 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She tried to work out the principles of a successful community: not a community created by urban planners, but a community that over time had created a successful neighborhood that was safe, prosperous and in which people wanted to stay. Jacobs introduced the concept ‘un-slumming’. Rather than ‘slum clearance’ the way high-modernist would just bull – doze an area and rebuild it from the ground up, she saw the ‘un-slumming’ capacity of neighborhoods. She argued that if people were permitted to stay in an area where they wanted to stay and made sure there was a stable job environment and credits to improve their homes, this neighborhood would ‘un-slum’ itself. Unfortunately, most communities don’t have the time for slow regeneration.
No city planner has ever created a successful neighborhood. Ever. The best a city planner can hope for is to identify the workings of successful neighborhoods and to preserve them, rather than destroy them by getting in their way.
EG: Your critique on the engineering of society has
been judged as a plea for the free market. Yet you
are a self-acclaimed anarchist. Could you explain?
JCS :Some consider Seeing Like a State a right-wing book because I had an occasional good word to say about people like Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. My answer to that charge is that I’d like to write a book about the ways in which large capitalist firms rely on standardization in exactly the same way as do nation states. Take a look at McDonalds and their tools of management and control. The only difference with a nation state is that they have to make the standardization pay in terms of profit.
On the other hand, there are people who would like to pin me down on anarchism. I’m the kind of anarchist who is very impressed with the anarchist point about mutuality without hierarchy, about the accomplishments of very complex collective coordination over time without any state involvement. Take for example the creation of agricultural terraces all around South-East Asia. Personally, I live by what I once described to students as ‘Scott’s law of anarchist callisthenics’. The idea is that at some point in your life you’re going to be called upon to break a big law and everything will depend on it. In order to be ready for that moment, you have to stay in shape. So I dedicate myself to breaking a law every day or two.
EG: You are currently researching why the state has always been hostile towards non-sedentary people. To what extent can this be seen as a new chapter in research into the limits of social engineering?
JCS: States seem to be completely unequipped to deal with people who’ve chosen alternative lives. Whether the people in question were Berbers, Bedouins, gypsies or homeless, they interfered with the oldest state project sedentarization.
I had a student not so long ago who had broken his leg and decided he would use the time to live as a homeless person in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For two weeks he followed an elderly homeless person who collected things from dumpsters. My student was greatly impressed with life as an urban hunter-gatherer. The homeless man was not just a sad alcoholic living on the streets, but a man with unbelievable survival skills from whom you can learn a tremendous amount about the city.
If you’re interested in successful social engineering, I guess you want to take this approach seriously. If you’re in charge of urban services for the poor and homeless of a city, you ought to do something like this. Live on the street for a few weeks. And have everyone who works at your department do it as well.
EG: You research, you write…and you farm sheep. What do they teach you?
JCS: Sheep are used as a metaphor for mindlessness and obedience. We talk about people being sheep if they do what they’re told, behave in crowds and don’t have any individuality. But anyone who has ever seen a wild sheep in action knows they are unbelievably individualistic by nature. We’ve been breeding sheep for 8000 years and selecting for docility. Now, having accomplished that, we have the nerve to insult sheep for becoming what we turned them into! We get the sheep we deserve!

NOTE:This interview is part of the current Volume issue 16 on ‘Social Engineering’

[1] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven
(Yale University Press), 1998.

James C. Scott on Wikipedia

 ’A precondition for starting a significant architectural intervention is to define a project in consultation with those parties involved in its implementation (the government, the local municipality, private investors, developers, construction companies, planners, designers and architects).’ This preamble to a recent international conference on ‘architectural interventions and transformations’ is typical for an ‘all-inclusive’ way of thinking about processes these days. Plans and policies are no longer defined and implemented by a few specialists;they are developed with all stakeholders (another popular contemporary notion). All parties? The user/consumer/resident, usually the subject and victim of intervention, is conspicuously missing from this description.
When the post-war, large-scale,top-down planning machinery began to increasingly malfunction in various political systems, ‘the market’ was allowed to resolve it.From a certain level of prosperity, it is assumed that demand leads to supply.Everyone ensures they have enough of what they need and politics need only concern itself with protecting the weak, security and (international) competition.Society need not and can no longer be made. Indeed, citizens determine for themselves what they want.This has considerable consequences for the role and position of the architect.Aldo van Eyck once described the role of the architect as helping to provide someone with a roof. (He added, ‘which is no easy task.’) The practice had been for architects to simply propose what users might want. Yet Van Eyck’s description is increasingly becoming the norm.The growing portion of individual clients in home construction is giving rise to a direct relationship between designer and user which until recently, at least in the Netherlands, was largely lacking. In addition, here and there in Europe and the U.S. a radical form of citizen influence is being experimented with on a small scale whereby budgets for urban development are determined by neighbor hoods, districts or villagers themselves.The (municipal) government merely facilitates what is decided locally.
This means that the architect is unexpectedly called upon to be capable of presenting futures, a faculty which he had largely appeared to have lost in our consumer society of commodity logic.A neighborhood is perfectly capable of choosing between a day care center and a café as an addition to a service packet, but for the restructuring of a factory complex or obsolete housing some help is indispensable.
These are issues which are completely marginal on a worldwide scale.A substantial part of the planet’s population continues to provide for their own housing and everyday environment; the other part is almost entirely provided housing.The annual Chinese production of cities does not take this kind of subtle arrangement into consideration. However, marginal isn’t the same as meaningless.The search for new balances between governments and their populations in determining what can and must be yields future models which are needed badly.This is true not only in planning paradises such as the Netherlands and western Europe.Permitting local populations in post-conflict areas input into redevelopment is likely to contribute to avoiding future conflicts.And in those areas where the authorities now dominate, increasing prosperity along with the increasing political independence and individual responsibility of the citizenry to see to their own needs and desires will compel the creation of different relationships. Hardcore social engineering may have fallen from grace (as a term, for as a practice it is still on the table), the market does not solve every problem.An additional challenge is to make that long-lasting, but that’s a subject for another time.

[This is the editorial to Volume 16 - Engineering Society]