Sustainability

Architecture 209X, Spring 2007

Words and Cities: The rhetoric and meaning of statistically improbable phrases

Nicholas De Monchaux

Qing Wang

Sustainability

The readings recalled me Fuller’s article. Both of them think our living condition in a large ecological system. There are complicated systematic connections related with each component in this system. The relationship of these connections might be still ambiguous, but the certainty of the connection reminds us that we couldn’t neglect this anymore. One following thought after this systematic thinking is sustainability. Once men realize every single behavior they did will affect the much larger system. They have to reconsider what they did in their ordinary lives for centuries and reevaluate the cities they had once built for honor and power. The city expands and contains more people. The city becomes the place of mass production and mass consumption. In the globalization, the resources of the whole earth are transported into cities and consumed by the cities and finally become the waste. More importantly, the resources are not infinite and the speed and amount of resources that cities consume exceed the speed they can regenerate. The cities in the developed countries are struggling with what they have done already. The sustainable strategy is a make-up for those cities, but is the solution when the moment city expands, which happens in many developing countries. Shanghai is a case. In last century, Shanghai was still a city mixed agriculture and industry. It grows in a more autarkic way. Every morning, the farmers gather from the periphery of the city to farm market which located in every community. The organic wastes are delivered back to the farms after the day. This less sophisticated ecological system wasn’t involved any sustainable consideration. It was directly caused by daily life experiences. Farms and citizens know how they live synergistic with each others based on the shared understanding of nature. Industrialization obstructed this connection. The mass production and power of machine makes people believe that they can be free from the natural rules. The following years, Shanghai like other developing cities tries to duplicate the success of western metropolitans as New York City. The old urban system dissolved by unplugged more facilities off cities, relocated new infrastructures. They city need to be changed towards a better way. More importantly, it needs to be changed in a more sustainable way systematically.