Last night I finished “FTA and the City: Imagineering Sustainable Urban Development” by Rattcliff, Krawczyk and Kelly, recommended reading by my tutor Diane Nijs.
Obviously, the title itself is captivating as it touches on two themes that are important on the investigation for the thesis: Imagineering and Sustainable Urban Development.
I am very intrigued by the concepts they use of the biosphere and technosphere and how these separate entities interact and the promise that lays in this interaction. Also, I have found in their paper several reinforcement for arguments about the need for a ‘broader’ approach to the generation of urban solutions, not only considering the shortcomings of individual practices like urban planning, governance or business trying to be one-off saviors but also considering the ever-expanding complexity of cities growing in numbers (and with it, bringing about new complications).
The proposed use of a ‘futures oriented approach’ to guide cities into a transformation to solve urban problems is on par with discussions my tutor and I had about the use of images as guiding elements in transformations. The benefit coming from the shift from incremental solutions that seem more reactionary to a more proactive approach to getting to a desired state and shaping the path to fit that desired image (often with disruptive change).
My main querry (and where I believe that internet-based crowd collaboration models come in) is who is constructing such image or future (or scenario) and who will be in charge of translating that into actions?
Towards the end of the paper, the authors mentions the need to:
“demonstrate how the individual agents and actor within the city technosphere contribute to collective action within the city, and how that process leads to the structuring and institutionalization of the city milieu and the deployment of it’s resources.”
This I believe is a great need and deserves even more attention. In fact, this is why I have decided to study with the thesis. I believe in the marriage between the biosphere and the technosphere lays the solution to a farther reaching outlook of the city that can even help reclaim community ties based on geographical commonality, something constantly weakening to technosphere communities based more on affinity.
This is not to say that these (internet communities brought together by affinity transcending geographical boundaries) are wrong, yet I believe that reclaiming some affinity based on the geographical setting we live in can help improve this space (for delimitation purposes, let this space be as proposed, the city).
Bringing together the different people, with different inputs, talents, knowledge and domain that reside in the highly concentrated population of a city may help us create a greater aggregation of ideas, solutions and images that can help achieve urban sustainability. Through citizen participation, one insures that information will be propagated to a wider base.
This is increasingly important to cities in the context of differentiation from others in the competition as a desirable place for the attraction of new businesses, talented workers and greater flow of tourists.
To sum up, this paper has contributed to the process of my thinking about the thesis as it has reintroduced the concept of drawing up a desirable future image as a goal for the process, and put it squarely on the context of urban sustainability and I believe that all of this I have written about will be important in the development of the upcoming chapters of the thesis.
