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.
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)