Urbanffffinds 027

Apologies for the lack of Urbanffffinds last week. This week, please accept this double-shot of urban imagery goodness as a peace offering. And some more happy news: part-time employment has been secured, and regular posting will resume at Where, starting with almost three weeks of great arch&urb stuff in a hearty linkdump, tomorrow morning.

Sustainability and the Unimaginable City

A recent post at WorldChanging offered up for discussion a fantastic Bruce Sterling quote about sustainability: "The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century's frontier."

That's a pretty profound statement. To think that the world around us, the things that we consider familiar and take for granted, will be to our great grandchildren what the Roman Aqueducts -- or even British colonial forts -- are to us: relics. Of course, much of our built environment (especially the unsustainable portions) are considerably less visually appealing than crumbling arches and turrets. It's fun to imagine that, somewhere outside Cincinnati in 2108, there will be a tour bus that rolls past long-abandoned McDonald's huts and IHOP psuedo-ski lodges, describing to wide-eyed tourists how these strange buildings used to be used as restaurants back when people were willing to drive twenty minutes for food that had been flown across an ocean. But the likelihood of that scenario is slim.

Most likely, metropolitan regions will adapt to changing conditions, with cities and suburbs both densifying and growing and connecting in new ways. But what will become of the buildings and structures that are left in the sustainability craze's proverbial dust? As people become more educated on and concerned with sustainable buildings and neighborhoods, it seems logical to assume that demolitions will become less frequent than they are now as architects and planners seek to preserve structures with bones worth saving, and to reclaim materials when demolition is required. Politicians will mandate it; high tear-down rates will spell doom at the voting booths.

Even moreso than buildings, large chunks of our infrastructure could very well become obsolete, and will need to be repurposed. A post today at Loud Paper described a recent live design and model-building competition with a very novel premise: the two teams of architects were asked to design futuristic outpost buildings in the Alaskan wilderness, and their primary material was repurposed oil pipeline. Take that general concept to the city; what pieces of our current urban infrastructure -- even, or especially, the invisible pieces -- might we be trying to reuse as a construction materials once the large-scale shift to renewable energy sources has taken place?

And now, another Sterling gem to throw into the mix: "To me, 'sustainability' means a situation in which your descendants are able to confront their own problems, rather than the ones you exported to them. If people a hundred years from now are soberly engaged with phenomena we have no nouns and verbs for, I think that's a victory condition."

Whoa. Kind of re-frames the whole "repurposing" thing, hey?

It is easy (and, I think, quite common) to assume the perpetuation of current conditions. Humans like to think about the future, but we are stuck living only in the present. This means that our experience of the present has a very, very heavy influence on how we envision things ten, fifty, or a thousand years down the line. We live in fairly hectic period, so it can sometimes be difficult to imagine a world where the problems are completely different from those we face today, much less that we don't even have words to describe! My question is (inevitably, if you've ever read this blog before), how will this affect cities?

It's a silly question, really. After all, the very idea being discussed here is that the problems to be faced by a post-sustainability humanity aren't even conceivable to us now, so how the heck do we go about coming up with what those problems might entail? Of course, the answer is: we don't. We can't know what these problems or their solutions will be, but we can use the scenario to appreciate the massive opportunities presented by the challenges of creating a sustainable global society. All we need is a framing device.

Enter: the Air Tree. Madrid's recent announcement that they will be building three of these miraculous little structures (which were originally the result of a design competition in 2004) marks a very important moment in architecture and urban planning that is easy to overlook: the birth of an entirely new building type. The Air Tree is a temporary structure that marks what will hopefully be a permanent change in how cities will be built in the future, since its existence signals the arrival of the building with the sole purpose of acting as a unit of production for Quality of Life. These three futuristic pavilions will create for madrileños gathering places that use natural processes to filter and cool the air. The space beneath the Air Tree is not just social; it's cleansing and renewing.

Many common features of contemporary urban areas -- not in the least the Air Tree -- would have been unimaginable to people living a century ago. Stop and think about that for a second. Now try to imagine the unimaginable city of the future. Pretty thrilling, isn't it?


Links:
The Ruins of the Unsustainable (WorldChanging)

Architecture Gone Wild (Loud Paper)

What we get if we win... (WorldChanging)

The 'Air Tree' (Architecture.MNP) (Photo credit)

Speeding Succession

I've been searching for over an hour trying to figure out how many trees are felled to produce the average suburban McMansion. I hope you enjoy fuzzy math because you're about to read some pretty hefty guesstimates.

To start out, Habitat for Humanity of Midland, Texas estimates that, to build a 1104 square foot home, they use about 600 two-by-four beams. Wikipedia's page on McMansions lists the average square footage of a suburban home today as being between 3000 and 5000 square feet! (Coincidentally, it also provides the image for today's post.) That means a McMansion requires something between 1630-2717 two-by-fours. An article at How Stuff Works that estimates how much paper comes from one tree provides some numbers that allow me to estimate that the average pine tree produces roughly 161 2x4s. That means that, lowballing the average suburban home at 3000 square feet, just over ten trees (with one tree being 1 foot in diameter and 60 feet tall according to HSW's formula) come down to produce the skeleton for one Mcmansion. That's right -- just the skeleton.

So what's with all of the numbers? We'll get to that in a minute. First, some news: I read last week about a plan by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to plant more than 9 million trees in areas of the world that have been deforested by refugee camps. This made me think back to an article I wrote for a local paper last summer about ecological succession, the process by which nature reclaims developed land that has fallen into disuse. It's easy to spot, even in urban areas -- just take a look at the shaggy grass growing through those endless miles of rusting, unused train tracks all over the US.

The UNHCR plan, then, sounds almost as redundant as it does brilliant. If nature will simply reclaim areas deforested by displaced humans over time (and it doesn't take as long as you might think for ecological succession to kick in), why bother wasting time and resources to plant a bunch of trees? What saves this particular project from being an exercise in ceremonial hubris is that the refugees are being involved in the replanting process. From the WorldChanging article: "They [UNHCR] are seeking to involve refugee populations directly in environmental management and rehabilitation activities, in the hope that such stewardship can have positive effects long after displaced populations are able to return home."

This is total and complete awesomeness on several levels. First, it's just a great project to get a large number of disenfranchised individuals involved in creating positive change in their immedeate surroundings, which always earns gold stars. More importantly, it creates this kind of souped-up, hybridized process of ecological succession that makes humans part of the natural progression of the earth's self-healing process. In other words, people, in this instance, are part of enhancing and actually accelerating a natural progression. It's all very warm and fuzzy and Circle-of-Life, I know.

And at last, back to the fuzzy math! (You'd almost forgotten, no?) In these post-Kunstler days of the "green" cultural awakening, the question of what to do with the suburbs does occasionally come up. And what, really, will we do with our vast swaths of tract houses and prefab, peaked-and-dormered McMansions if things get even half as bad as Mr. Kunstler has predicted? Assuming that the pendulum will eventually swing back, and the population flow will once again move toward dense, urban cores, something will have to be done with the suburbs.

Why not help along the process of ecological succession? As urban areas around the world begin to reimagine and reconfigure themselves as more localized, sustainable places, people stranded by a fuel crash or a series of eco-disasters could get work replacing suburban communities with trees. For every house torn down and mulched, ten trees could be planted. These sapling armies would grow into massive forests over time, knitting together to form fabulous greenbelts around urban centers. They would provide recreation and clean air to cities and, depending on the kinds of trees planted, even food.

Imagine if, just fifty years from now, visitors to the top of the Empire State Building could look out over New Jersey and see, not far past the Hudson, a seemingly endless expanse of tall pines and white oaks. If you had told someone in 1957 that in just half a century the view from that very point would be of houses as far as the eye could see, they probably wouldn't have believed you. If nothing else, human beings have shown that they are very capable of drastically altering the face of the planet in a relatively short period of time. But for almost (or more than?) a century, we've been swimming upstream, a fact that is reinforced every time we see weeds poking up through the cracks in the sidewalk. So let's try going with the flow, for a change. Imagine how fast we could change things then.


Links
Midland County Habitat For Humanity Statistics

Wikipedia entry for "McMansion"

How many sheets of paper can be produced from a single tree?

A Billion Trees to Help Refugees (WorldChanging)