11: Post-traumatic urbanism and radical indigenism

If we then fundamentally reorient that around a hugely increased emphasis on biodiversity i.e. not just human-centred design, stretching from the street corners out to the distant fields of agriculture and landscape that support them, we solve for climate, health, social justice, and pandemic simultaneously. That extends the ideas of social life to... See more

emblematic ideas to take forward could include: * resilient and diverse communities as essential foundations; * the value of trust in government and civic institutions; * recognising the agility and capability latent within the public sector; * and the enormous value of inefficiency and redundancy in systems; * an understanding that there are essen... See more

“Nature-based communities don’t have a voice because [modern] governance structures do not have a place for their voices. These ways of living with the land can disappear so quickly when they’re seen as primitive, not innovative.” — Julia Watson

Cities are not about efficiency, and never have been. The most meaningful urban experiences are generally the most inefficient. But this lack of efficiency is also why they are naturally resilient, if their design patterns follow the purposeful redundancy described above.

In her essay “There are no cars in Wakanda”, Arieff suggests a balance of culture and technology, equitable development and innovation, density and super-green-and-blue walkability, that even the most ambitious urban development projects might learn a lot from. Perhaps most importantly, it describes an alternative future told in different voices, v... See more

With the increased localism that the virus is inadvertently causing, and potentially a rediscovery of local ecosystems, materials, places and cultures accordingly, there is an opportunity to enrich this vision. What’s a Swedish Wakanda? A Chilean one? A Taiwanese one? The point is not to copy the visuals, but to build on the diverse local dialogues... See more

This is counter to much of the efficiency logic of recent decades; witness the growth of super-hospitals, versus more distributed patterns of healthcare. This, despite exemplary work like Stroke Pathways demonstrating the folly of that centralised, efficiency-led thinking.

“Landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human, and not human. The design is clear in the landscape’s ecosystem. But none of the agents have planned this effect. Humans join others in making landscapes of unintentional design.”—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, ‘The Mushr... See more

outside of their dwellings, many people are currently inhabiting the smaller pockets of space in and around their neighbourhoods: local parks, even just copses or patches of grass or playgrounds; the street corners (talking at a safe distance) of diverse, scaled-well high streets, that can actually speak to and articulate the local communities they... See more

The story of humanity is an urban one, a slow 20,000 year drift towards a largely urban condition. A city does the same thing to individualism that a natural ecosystem does to a tree — thriving there is about living well with people who are not like you. Just as a tree revels in those multifarious interdependencies, so we do with cities.