11.07.2012

Wired UK, Urbaneering by Mitchell Joachim





URBANEERING
THE CITY OF THE NEAR FUTURE WILL BE DESIGNED BY A COOPERATIVE OF EXPERTS AND CITIZENS. WELCOME TO THE PLANET’S NEXT METROPOLISES. 
BY MITCHELL JOACHIM
Editor: David Baker, The WIRED World in 2013, pp. 89-90.

Urban design is at an impasse, unable to heal the rift between theory and practice and stuck in esoteric arguments such as “landscape urbanism” (concepts that favor landscape over architecture in order to plan a city) and “new urbanism” (schemes that promote historical pedestrian-centered neighborhood developments). Think of the Prince Charles-endorsed Poundbury in Dorset versus the West 8-designed interactive open spaces of Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam. Both of these concepts have their merits yet fail to coalesce on a holistic idea of the future city. So who should design our cities of the future? At ONE Lab, we feel we have found a solution with urbaneering: an interdisciplinary approach to urban design that will give us smarter cities. It will incorporate social-media platforms with citizen-design power. Everyday people will codesign alongside interdisciplinary teams to shape a clear lexicon of the future city.
Urban design has always been interdisciplinary, but it has not been revamped since its formal inception in the 50s. Urbaneering will involve urban designers in a huge range of ideas: crowdsourcing; DIY projects; localized renewable energy; shared transport, democratized e-government/e-commerce; high-throughput computation; biotechnology; and landscape ecology. It combines architecture, urbanism, ecology, media arts and community building, and will reinvent the complex mix of the city.
Urbaneers will have a set of skills and abilities that merge previously disparate occupations. Today, city government and grassroots movements have broader and more complex demands than single-discipline professionals can meet. We must break away from insular territories of knowledge. In its simplest form, urbaneering will attract people already working in design or planning, who want to widen their focus on cities in terms of topics such as food, water, air quality, mobility, energy and culture. The profession will include eco-based architect/engineers and action-based urban planners who put forward alternative plans for areas mired in shortsighted overdevelopment. The discipline will be home to almost any recombined professional activities, as long as they meet the constantly changing needs of urbanization. An excel- lent historical example of someone who now would be an urbaneer is Frederick Law Olmsted, the 19th-century activist who combined journalism, social action and landscape architecture to a single political end.
Urbaneering sets out to help people to become part of an initiative promoting the recalibration of the city. Projects such as London’s Canary Wharf, Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, Barcelona’s waterfront, New York’s High Line, Masdar in the UAE and Tianjin in China already demand fresh directives. This new profession will provide them in astonishing ways. 


Mitchell Joachim is co-president of Terreform ONE, a nonprofit design group that promotes green design in cities (terreform.org)