Abstract
One should consider the potential for a new kind of urban ecology, when speaking of spatial and natural capital in the horizontal metropolis. This could become a radical landscape project for the contemporary city, capable of embracing cultural and topological complexities, as well as placing biodiversity, energy and resilience at the forefront of societal concerns. But are we actually capable of casting such an ambitious project in today’s diffused and confused cities? Michel Foucault saw the 19th century as a period obsessed with its history and the fossilization of time in architecture, whereas the late 20th century he understood as an epoch of simultaneity, juxtaposition and dispersion where the world was seen less as something set over time, and rather as a network of connecting points intersecting with its own skein. What if the role of temporality in the 19th century and of spatiality in the 20th century were presently superseded by a phenomenal change in nature? If that were the case, what would the underpinnings and rules driving the natural capital of this new biologically and climatically driven world be?
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Notes
- 1.
We have grown accustomed to a definition of the “production of space” through the post modernist writings of Henri Lefebvre further interpreted by Edward Soja with his notion of trialectics. The definition of the “production of space” rooted in 19th century Marxist theory further refined through Michel Foucaults concept of heterotopia dates from a pre-ecological age. One must imagine how this field of theory can adapt to the changing climatic circumstances of the present; indeed one asks—can the production of space come to play an effective role in the face of environmental adversity? (Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1996).
- 2.
Since 2010 Dr. Veronique Bohbot a researchers at the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre at McGill University has presented evidence suggesting that GPS navigation may have a negative effect on brain function, especially on the hippocampus, which is the seat of cognitive mapping and spatial memory (Bohbot et al. 2011).
- 3.
Taking Marc Augé’s seminal book on “non places”, (non lieux) where he speaks of the destruction of the public realm through architecture and engineering, are we able to conceive a new kind of of public space in tune with our age. Or are we simply, as Pau Virilio suggest an era of medial dissolution? (Augé 1992; Virilio 1996).
- 4.
We live at an epoch where the figures of representative assembly are hard to distinguish, as if the relationship between individual and milieu had become confused. This in turn affects the production of space in our cities. In her seminal essay with the title: “Mapping in the Age of Electronic Shadows”, Alessandra Ponte, following the precepts of Simondon, notes that individual and milieu are not separate but rather the result of each other (Ponte 2007).
- 5.
The office of Kate Orff, Scape has come up with a method approaching urban ecology in a different way, dealing with complex issues like the coastal protection of the Staten Island sea front, it has created the possibility of establishing an entirely new relationship between coastal communities and the ocean (Orff 2016).
- 6.
In this respect the work of Nicholas de Monchaux comes to mind, his approach is quite different than the conventional garden city approach of Raymond Unwin and his followers. What he proposes is an agglomeration of haphazard pieces of urban nature brought together in a stochastic mode (De Monchaux 2016).
- 7.
In a recent essay Kristina Hill exposes brilliantly the dilemma facing biodiversity strategies in an age of urbanization and climate change (Hill 2017).
- 8.
Current research at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory under the direction of Professor Peter Edwards is studying the possible benefits of a systematic approach to urban planting that would help reduce the urban heat island effect in Singapore. By combining plant physiological research with applied landscape design and modelling it hopes to present an ecological service method capable of improving significantly thermal comfort at the heart of the South East Asian metropolis.
- 9.
Examples of strong cross-disciplinary collaborations are showing the way towards solutions for some of the most environmentally disturbed cities in the world. The experiment developed by the ETH Future Cities Laboratory along the Ciliwung River in Jakarta Indonesia (2010–2015), points towards a new interdisciplinary mode of operation in the city (Vollmer et al. 2015).
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Girot, C. (2018). Horizontal Metropolis: Spatial, Social and Natural Capital Statements. In: Viganò, P., Cavalieri, C., Barcelloni Corte, M. (eds) The Horizontal Metropolis Between Urbanism and Urbanization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75975-3_15
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