11: Post-traumatic urbanism and radical indigenism

“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

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.

“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

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

New forms of architecture, infrastructure, and organisation will emerge from this, relying on a rebalanced relationship between participatory cultures and corporate interest, public sector and private sector, and the reinvigorated institutions of trusted government. It emphasises shared resources and civic relationships, yet recognises individual d... 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

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.

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

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.