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Ecological Urbanism, Circulation, and the Immunization of Nature

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Ecological Urbanism, Circulation, and the Immunization of Nature Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 32, pages 12 – 29 doi:10.1068/d17012 Natura Urbans, Natura Urbanata: ecological urbanism, circulation, and the immunization of nature Ross Exo Adams The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, Faculty of the Built Environment, Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0QB, England; e-mail: [email protected] Received 20 September 2012, in revised form 9 July 2013 Abstract. While ‘ecological urbanism’ promises the introduction of a new generation of apparatuses, exacting control ever more deeply within the social whole, the logic by which such networks of power operate has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. This paper will demonstrate the persistence of this logic by placing ecological urbanism within a genealogy of the concept of urbanization. Looking at the work of Spanish civil engineer, Ildfonso Cerdá, I will examine his remarkably prescient theory in which he proposed to replace what he saw as the ‘anachronistic’ ciudad (city) with the ‘modern’ figure of the urbe—a generic, scaleless template of territorialization engulfed in expansive urbanización. The first part of the paper focuses on Cerdá’s concept of vialidad (roughly, ‘circulation’), which formed the basis of his theory of urbanization and provided its origin in ‘nature’ itself. Urbanization was an effort to free mankind from political domination and recover it’s ‘natural’ destiny by unifying a latent global society in a single, interconnected global urbe. However, not only did Cerdá’s theory introduce a new, far more pervasive technological relationship of power between government and population; it also set free to circulate what was previously fixed in the space and form of the city: the apparatus. In the second part of the paper I reexamine ecological urbanism with regard to the founding relationship between urbanization and nature. Now, because it is nature that has become pathological to humanity, it is nature which must be immunized. Ecological urbanism thus reinvigorates the capacity of the urban to stave off the end of the world, not only by rhetorically reaffirming the natural origins of urbanization but also by inverting this relationship: ecological urbanism proposes to reconstruct nature as urbanization. Keywords: nature, circulation, infrastructure, urbanization, ecological urbanism, immunization, urbe, vialidad, Cerdá, apparatus, state, private property, pharmakon In February 2011, the office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA’s) (Rem Koolhaas) research studio, AMO, along with the WWF and Ecofys, published The Energy Report (WWF et al, 2011), a comprehensive ‘roadmap’ which would see the world transition to a coordinated network of renewable energy by 2050. As a point of departure, the report makes its first claim in appropriating Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map of 1943 to depict the Earth today. Flattened to its two-dimensional projection and oriented vertically, the Dymaxion Map provides the perfect neutrality through its technical ‘correctness’ while cleverly centering the world around perhaps the most contested political and geographical void in the world: the North Pole. Throughout the report, the Dymaxion Map serves as the template for displaying various forms of information. However, it is in the two most conclusive images of this publication where the map begins to speak beyond the gravitas of fact-deluge. The first is an attempt to reimagine statehood in terms of regional energy and resource specificity. The second proposes a new global energy grid, linking all of the world’s energy ‘region-states’ into a singular network (figure 1). Ecological urbanism, circulation, and the immunization of nature 13 Figure 1. Map of ‘world energy regions’ and ‘world energy grid’: The Energy Report by AMO in collaboration with the WWF and Ecofys (images courtesy of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture/ AMO). While such imagery may appear somewhat facile in its content, it reveals far more than the simple narrative carried on its surface. In fact, it is precisely the simplicity of these images that is significant. For they mark an endpoint in a certain collective imagination where it is now possible to envision the entire globe parceled into functional, apolitical blocs joined together as a single, interconnected union of network confluence. Lines that once politically divided the world into territories will now unite it in universal circulation—the technoneutrality of urban planning made global. What is implied is twofold: on the one hand, we can now fully imagine the world reduced to a single, unified, human population—a global society, in Hannah Arendt’s (1958) terms, whose homogeneous needs are to be organized and satisfied through the administration of services. On the other hand (and because of this), we can imagine the space of the world only to be determined by patterns of movement. Today, everything that matters circulates. Circulation is the central activity through which value is made visible. It is the concrete register of progress. For this reason, infrastructure now appears as the default apparatus by which such a global society mediates its needs. It is the source of our problems as well as the diagram for their solutions. And because of this, infrastructure also defines the ultimate limit of society’s material and political imagination. Fuller’s clever interpretation of the world as a single continent has found its fulfillment in a technologically unified machina mundi. In spite of the creative tropes of Koolhaas’s AMO, the content of this imagery noticeably lacks the usual daring bravado because it articulates sentiments that are already part of the general psyche: to speak of a globally interconnected society today no longer has the charm it had in the 19th century. In fact, in comparison with the work of Spanish engineer Ildefonso Cerdá, one can read AMO’s proposal only as a kind of contemporary reformulation of a far broader one put forward in Cerdá’s seminal work, Teoría general de la urbanización (1867) 14 R Exo Adams (figure 2). In this text, just as in AMO’s proposal, Cerdá presented a world whose compounded crises were to be solved through modern infrastructure and joined together in a new kind of universal network of peace: material circulation to conspire against the political stasis of the state. He would accomplish this through the power of what he called urbanización—a term he coined 150 years ago, giving life to a concept and laying out the framework for a new, concrete order of modern life. Figure 2. Frontispiece of Teoría general de la urbanizatión, Cerdá (1867). Ecological urbanism, circulation, and the immunization of nature 15 Far from delivering on such lofty ambitions, urbanism and urbanization have today become background terms. They are terms whose definition, meaning, and history are simultaneously vague and unquestioned. Originally a neologism conceived in 1861—the future object for his monumental Teoría—the term circulated throughout Europe alongside the great urban reconstruction projects of the time, eventually adopting its younger French derivative, urbanisme, as a more generic term for the same. By 1884, the words emerged in English, at which point they began to accrue distinct meanings (Cerdá, 1999, pages 90–92). ‘Urbanism’ came to refer to the ‘scientific’ knowledge of the city, its growth, demographic makeup, distribution of resources, etc, while ‘urbanization’ generally denoted the imminent, material processes constituting the city’s growth over time. Since then, their distinction has gotten muddled. Together, they have come to serve as a receptacle for all processes relating to the city that remain beyond question—the repository of facts we do not wish to doubt. They are words which no longer have meaning in themselves but instead persist as a set of universal constants—homogenous containers inside of which human action is expected to gain effective purchase. In short, they have come to describe a naturalized background against which the ‘artifice’ of human inventiveness can take shape. Precisely for this reason, the various adjectives we find preceding them bear witness to an equally growing sense of immutability we ascribe to the terms themselves (primarily, to urbanism): unitary urbanism, new urbanism, landscape urbanism, participatory urbanism, integrated urbanism, sustainable urbanism, new suburbanism, to name but a few. What remains unchanged in all interpretations is, of course, the term ‘urbanism’. ‘The urban’, it would seem, is conceptually a fait accompli. But why is this? For one, the urban remains a faithfully ambiguous category due to the vastness of the practices and processes that have come to accumulate under the banner of urbanism—a term whose meaning is so broad as to render it useless without some qualifying adjective. Furthermore, the processes either term describes tend to be bound up with (neo) liberal capitalist expansion occurring at a global scale, seemingly under the control of noone and everyone simultaneously. Urbanism and urbanization each depict a condition of ‘reality’ presenting in equal proportion crisis and opportunity—a reality which is to be understood only by learning from its tendencies; by monitoring its processes, mapping its effects, and issuing prognoses in order to know when and how to intervene. No doubt, such a blinding reality forecloses any critical access to the terms themselves precisely for the same reason. What is startling is how quickly urbanization
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