The Milanese architecture firm “Stefano Boeri Architetti”, who projected the Vertical Forest in Milan, designed the plan for the first Smart Forestry City that will be based in Cancun, Mexico. It is expected to host up to 130.000 inhabitants, by replacing the project of a shopping center. The city will be built on a 5.57 km2, currently employed as a “sand quarry for hotels” (Endel 2019)[1] and 4 km2 will be reserved for green spaces. There will be about 7.500.000 plants in the project and 260.000 will be trees. With a ratio of 2.3 trees per inhabitant, the Smart Forest City “will absorb 116.000 tons of carbon dioxide with 5.800 tons of CO2 stocked per year” (Endel 2019). Public parks, private gardens, green roofs, and green facades will help create a balance within the built environment.
The city has also been imagined to be completely food and energy self-sufficient. Indeed, it will be surrounded by solar panels and agricultural fields. Water will be gathered at the entrance of the city, next to the desalination tower and dispensed by a system of navigable channels in the whole settlement up to the agricultural fields that surround the urban area[2]. Within the city, people will circulate via internal electric and semi-automatic mobility, leaving their cars outside of the city.
The Smart Forest City will also hold “a center for advanced research that could host all worldwide university departments, international organizations, and companies that deal with very important sustainability issues and the future of the planet” (Endel 2019).
The Smart Forest City definitely promotes the idea of sustainable city. In fact, the project seems to create a perfect habitat where human beings can live in total harmony with nature within the urban space. Apparently, this sounds like a perfect solution in a scenario where urbanization is expected to rise in the next years and climate change needs to be handled with innovative solutions. Indeed, this project not only seems to support the idea of reducing urban sprawl by creating dense and compact settlements, but it also seems to avoid one of the main challenges that urban density can bring, which is the lack of green space on urban footprints. Thus, one of the main critiques to the urban density discourse has been the idea that if land is consumed for increasing urban development, areas devoted to green will be necessarily reduced. However, the Smart forest city represents an anti-sprawl and densification project able to reduce urban expansion while increasing the quantity of green within the built city. “A model that connects to the policies for reforestation and naturalization of the edges of large urban and metropolitan areas” (Kucherova and Narvaez 2018: 5)[3]. In fact, as the Stefano Boeri Architetti firm’s manifesto states[4], the reforestation of the urban environment can be an extraordinary help to improve the quality of health and life in a city. Indeed, forests and trees absorb nearly 40% of fossil fuel emissions largely produced by cities every year.
However, there are some challenges which are not self-evident when looking at these projects. First, instead of building sustainable cities or eco-cities out of nowhere, believing that higher densities are necessarily good, planners may better consider that urban design is not enough to make cities more sustainable. As Laurence Crot highlighted, Masdar City (a planned city project initiated in 2006 in the United Arab Emirates) portrayed as the world first sustainable city and the example of Abu Dhabi’s new urban vision, has soon renounced to some of its most ambitious sustainability goals (2012: 2809)[1] such as its car-free mission. Masdar City has been recently rebranded as a carbon neutral project and its previous zero-carbon commitment soon disappeared from the policy agenda. Indeed, eco-cities projects instead of representing the panacea for main environmental and urban challenges seem just able to bring a new label to neoliberal urban development plans, since they rarely innovate and seldom keep their promises of sustainability (Cugurullo 2018: 74)[2]. Another weakness associated with these brand-new urban solutions relates the issue of who could really afford to live in eco-cities or smart forestry city. In fact, density increases the price of land and in turn increases the price of housing. Moreover, reforestation means bringing new amenities in the built environment which represents a new source of housing unaffordability.
Though a project as the Smart Forest City represents a perfect solution to reduce urban sprawl and pollution by increasing green space in cities at the same time; cities are more than their urban form. So, bringing urban design solutions to make cities more sustainable will not work alone, it can only be part of the answer. In fact, as Neuman pointed out, instead of asking ourselves if urban form can produce sustainability, we should question whether the processes of building cities, living, consuming and producing in cities are actually sustainable[7].
FOOTNOTES
[1]Edel, D. (2019), Smart Forest City Cancun Design Is First 100% Renewable Circular Economy City, Available from: https://www-intelligentliving-co.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.intelligentliving.co/amp/smart-forest-city-cancun-first-renewable-circular-economy-city
[2] Stefano Boeri Architetti (2019), Smart Forest City Cancun, Press release available from: https://www.stefanoboeriarchitetti.net/en/urban-forestry/
[3]Kucherova, A. and Narvaez, H. (2018), Urban Forest Revolution, E3S Web of Conferences 33, 01013, pp. 1-11.
[4]Stefano Boeri Architetti (2019), Smart Forest City Cancun, Press release available from: https://www.stefanoboeriarchitetti.net/en/urban-forestry/
[5]Crot, L. (2012), Planning for Sustainability in Non-democratic Polities: The Case of Masdar City, Urban Studies 50(13), pp. 2809–2825.
[6]Cugurullo, F. (2018), Exposing smart cities and eco-cities: Frankenstein urbanism and the sustainability challenges of the experimental city, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 2018, Vol. 50(1), pp. 73–92.
[7]Neuman, M. (2005), The Compact City Fallacy, Journal of Planning Education and Research 25, pp. 11-26
The Business Roundtable has released a new definition of a corporation, which advocates that companies account for all their stakeholders, not just their shareholders, when distributing corporate value. To fully implement their stated intent, companies will need to invest not just in their own strategic objectives but in processes that allow communities to self-determine their priorities and direction.
Earlier this month, Apple announced it would invest $2.5 billion to address the housing crisis in the SF Bay Area. Joining Facebook and Google in their investment, Apple has never placed much stock in “philanthropy.” Why the change?
Corporate investment in socially beneficially initiatives may have finally reached a tipping point. This August, the Business Roundtable released a new statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, the first time this credo has been updated in more than twenty years. Signed by 185 member CEOs, including those of many of America’s largest companies, the new statement stipulated that a corporation would no longer solely seek to deliver profits to its shareholders but would instead seek to maximize value for their broader community of stakeholders.
While in recent decades, many companies have increased their philanthropic investments in social programs that benefit communities where they operate, this statement marks the first time that such a large group or business leaders have explicitly changed their shared understanding of a company’s operational intent.
While the new statement offers cause for celebration, it is likely to be met with a healthy dose of skepticism from social change advocates. Adding a CEO’s signature to a one-page letter of intent, while culturally significant, is a simple act that doesn’t itself deliver any social value. Adapting supply chains, business models, and revenue management to account for the holistic needs of a company’s constituents is orders of magnitude more complex (not to mention, expensive).
Companies should be judged, not on their intent, but on their actions and follow-through. Revised intent will only matter if corporate leaders make investments that drive results. The three big tech giants’ co-investment in Bay Area housing is a promising start. But more of those 185 companies need to make billion-dollar commitments that advance solutions to pressing social challenges.
As more companies seek to make good on their new shared intent, it’s vital that journalists and activists alike scrutinize not just what social issues companies choose to address but also the process they use to make those investments and the way that communities are engaged in determining the parameters of social value and wellbeing.
So who exactly are the “communities” these 185 companies will now seek to benefit? A majority of US corporations are headquartered in cities. In 2010, McKinsey reported that 85% of US GDP was generated by cities of 150,000 inhabitants or more. As such, when companies commit to improving the lives of their stakeholders, they should actually interpret this to mean the ecosystem of the cities in which they operate.
Urbanization worldwide is on the rise. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, including 82 percent of Americans and 41 percent of Europeans. Human consolidation into urban centers helps companies find easy access to skilled labor. But increased human density creates its own slew of hairy problems. Housing is one issue that is well met with a private-sector solution. But what about education, transportation, childcare, healthcare, and general economic inequality?
Corporate leaders are accustomed to using the leverage of hierarchy to make choices from the top down. Based on whatever sources of information they choose to consider, a select group of senior leaders within any one company will typically decide how resources are allocated and utilized. When it comes to making meaningful, long-term investments in the health and well-being of cities and their residents, a top down decision making model will often fail to deliver meaningful outcomes. Indeed, companies could learn from the experience of the international development sector, where many practitioners have finally realized how vitally important it is to involve target stakeholders from the very beginning in the process of defining problems and devising solutions.
Why? Because the most effective solutions to the biggest problems facing the world today cannot be mass produced. Each city, each community is unique and requires an approach that is adapted for its specific challenges and needs. Service designers have demonstrated that those with the most direct experience of a problem often have the best insights into how to address it. For example, if you would like to understand the ecosystem of soup kitchens in a city, the best person to ask would be a homeless person. Yet, involving the users who are most affected by a problem requires that those making the investment appreciate that the process used to arrive at the solution is just as valuable as the process itself.
As companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook seek to operationalize toward their new collective intent, they will likely be rewarded for their attention to how, not just what, they seek to address. In cities, where many of these investments will likely originate, a collaborative process focused on intentional innovation and community involvement is likely to deliver the greatest return.
There is no exact translation for the Japanese approach to urban planning, called Machizukuri. Literally, it means town planning but it is generally associated with a soft way of planning which contrasts with the traditional highly centralized model, conventionally defined as Toshi-keikaku. According to the Professor Masato Kamawamukai, the term Machizukuri combines the building activity with the community-based process aimed at improving the local environment (Ono 2017).[1] In particular, it refers to a variety of actions which involves local residents and local governments working together to make the place where they live and work more livable (Evans 2002: 447).[2]
Historically, the Japanese method of urban planning has relied on a highly centralized top-down process. In 1919, the City Planning Act and the Building Act respectively established a legal basis for land readjustment and controlled the construction of new buildings. The final result of this legislation was that planning became a completely centralized activity, led by the Home Ministry. It was only after the Second World War, between 1950s and 1960s, that Japan experienced a new wave of urbanization and those pieces of legislation resulted outdated. Therefore, the responsibility for planning was transferred to the new Ministry of Construction and waves of unplanned urbanization replaced the highly centralized approach of the previous decade. However, during the 20th century, Japan’s main planning technique relied on land readjustment, through which the Government assembled the various privately-owned land parcels in a given area to provide new land use plans.
In this same period, environmental and political oppositions to neoliberal policies endorsed by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) at the Government, determined the replacement of the then outdated legislation on planning with the 1968 New City Planning Act. The main innovation was the devolution of powers from central authority to prefectural and municipal levels, through the establishment of City Planning Areas divided in Urbanization Promotion Areas. Moreover, for the very first-time public participation procedures were introduced, such as public hearings and plan inspections. However, they remained a mere exercise of public relations without leaving decision- making powers to local residents. In 1992, the City Planning Act was amended and introduced the municipal master plan system where all cities within designated City Planning Areas were required to create their own plans in accordance with citizens’ opinions (Evans 2002: 446). From this point onward, urban planning cannot be considered a mere administrative task in Japan anymore. Decentralisation towards local authorities increasingly deepened.
Only in 1960s, the term Machizukuri started to be employed in the field of urban planning. It gained its momentum in the last twenty years, given the increase of territorially defined protest movements in defence of the environment, the rising decentralisation of planning powers, the strengthening of progressive local governments and the slowdown of urbanisation after the 1973 Oil Crisis (Evans 2002: 448), welcoming a new planning era for Japan.
It was in the southern-eastern corner of Kobe, in the Mano district, where local residents constituted an anti-pollution campaign in 1960s, given the dreadful levels of pollution in the area. In 1982, the campaign, following the constitution of a strong residents’ movement including academics and planners, led to the agreement between the City and Mano community over the plan for making the district more livable and sustainable, in accordance with Kobe’s Machizukuri ordinances. The plan, depicted as the residents’ plan, followed a Machizukuri way of proceeding, employing a gradual and joint approach to include residents, local businesses, the City and establish the Mano Machizukuri Promotion Association (Evans 2002: 451).
However, it is worth noting that no comprehensive model of Machizukuri exists and the enormous diversity in its application in Japan is evident. Its empirical heterogeneity highly depends on the role of local governments and residents, the openness of local and regional governance regimes and developers’ capability to bargain for their economic interests at the local and national level. Machizukuri community engagement is not ubiquitous, often residents have no power to influence planning outcomes and, to a greater extent, the old top-down city planning system remains intact in those contexts (Sorensen and Funck 2007: 273).[3]Nonetheless, Machizukuri contributed to the growth and maturation of Japanese civil society. In the last years in Japan a huge number of Neighborhood Associations and organizations has been constituted. Moreover, the active participation of citizens in community engagement processes and their willingness to spend enormous amounts of time in organizing local collective institutions have tremendously increased.
Japanese urban planners and planning scholars consider, without any doubt, the Machizukuri method a paradigm shift from the top-down urban planning model to a more shared management of urban spaces (Sorensen and Funck 2007: 277).
For example, in Ishinomaki, a costal Japanese city beaten by the terrible tsunami of March 2011, the Machizukuri planning tradition strongly influenced the project of alternative reconstruction under the sign of solidarity design and local participation. In December 2011, a community-based redevelopment program, called Ishinomaki 2.0 started. Ishinomaki 2.0 created a community organization by cooperating with local residents and local government to collectively rebuild the city. Then, architects and urban planners created the Ishonomaki Lab to provide a place for locals to join the city’s rebuilding process. Finally, Ishonomaki Lab inaugurated an activity and animation center called Irori, which means interaction room of revitalization and innovation, where everyone can work and meet to discuss the re-development of the city.[4]
FOOTNOTES
1 Ono Takashi (2017), The Method and Practices of ‘Machizukuri’ movement in Japan based on the idea ‘Linkages’ theorized by Fumihiko Maki, International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET), Vol. 04, Issue 11, pp. 392-399.
2 Neil Evans (2002), Machi-zukuri as a new paradigm in Japanese urban planning: reality or myth?, Japan Forum, 14:3, 443-464.
3 Sorensen, A. and Funck C. (2007), Conclusions: a diversity of machizukuri processes and outcomes. In Sorensen, A. and Funck C., eds. Living Cities in Japan 2007, New York, Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series, pp. 269- 279.
4 Mesmer, P. (2019), A Ishinomaki au Japon, le design panse les plaies du tsunami (In Ishinomaki, Japan, the design groom the wounds of the tsunami), Le Monde. Available from: https://bit.ly/2JRuwdl
On November 8, at the LUISS School of Law (Aula Nocco) in Via Parenzo 11 at 5:30 PM LUISS will host a Debate on “Urban Law, Innovation and Adequate Housing”. Among the speakers, S. Asadi (Human Rights Commissioner and head of the Human Rights Office of the City of Vienna), G. Crispi (UN Habitat, Urban legislation unit), S. Edwards (Secretary General Housing Europe), L. Montuori (Deputy Mayor for Urban Planning of the City of Rome), L. Talluri (President of Federcasa).
The eventi is connected to the applied research projects on the role of social housing in urban regeneration processes based on innovation and sustainability carried out by Luiss LabGov.City and by the recently settled center for research and competences BILL – Blockchain, artificial Intelligente, digital innovation Law Lab, and to the activities carried out within the courses of Land Use, Urban Law & Policy and Regulatory Innovation.
Next to the coastline in Northeast Brazil, close to a mangrove area in the state of Sergipe, lies a beautiful community named Pedra Furada (which means “carved rock”). There, time seemed to have stopped; little houses built with rammed earth by the hands of the local community frame still unpaved streets that are also composed of earth. The houses that do not display the same colour with the streets have painted colourful walls, evidencing both the connection with nature as a source of survival and the care for beauty in details. Children run on the local streets as if nothing could be more captivating than playing. Homeowners sit by the front door watching life on the streets or, just simply observe the beauty of the surrounding natural scenario.
Some of the houses built with adobe (earth).
Aerial view of part of the local community of Pedra Furada.
A place filled with colours, natural beauty, amusing fauna and flora, amazing culinary and people and, a rich culture of folklore, local traditions and circular dances. This is the amusing context for a beautiful school project named Dream School, centred on its community desires.
The project was designed from collaboration between different stakeholders, including the following:
A local NGO who has been acting on the development of the village for over 20 years through a social innovation lens and focusing on technology, education and creative economies – IPTI , led by Saulo Barretto (1);
An architecture and facilitation team, acting through a collaborative and holistic design approach and having at the core Sofia Croso Mazzuco (2), Rodrigo Carvalho Lacerda, Guile Amadeu, Gustavo Fontes, Robernildo Araújo and Diego Regis (3), counting with the support of architecture students Annare Reis, Andresa Oliveira, and Matheus dos Santos;
Together with Martina Croso Mazzuco (4), leading the landscape design for sustainable solutions.
Moreover, the school is being sponsored by private institutions and will be built on an area donated by the local municipality.
Part of the group designing the Dream School.
The idealisation and design of the Dream School was developed through a collaborative approach mindful on community desires – having the architecture team applying a methodology different from that what is currently mostly practiced by architects in Brazil. By this collaborative approach the architect assumes that skills can be summoned between designers’ knowledge and the integrated knowledge brought forward by locals, thus optimizing the result and positive impact of the architectural project, aimed at accelerating holistic development.
The school was idealized through three different community workshops, led by the architecture team that also acts as the facilitation team (facilitators are responsible for facilitating the development of given communities, helping them identify local resources for development). The workshops were structured in a timeframe of 3 months, as follows:
– Workshops 1 (17 May 2018): School curriculum. This first workshop aimed at investigating the real learning needs of the local community, asking what type of knowledge and pedagogical structure would help them thrive socially, economically and ecologically. It was collectively decided that the school will follow a Waldorf pedagogy (with an anthroposophy approach based on Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy), combining social innovation and technical courses.
First introductions and setting personal and collective intentions.
– Workshop 2 (18 May 2018): School architectural design.The second workshop focused on the synergies between the school curriculum and its architectural design, looking at ways to maximise community building, integrated learning (mind, body and soul), and sustainability. The community emphasised the need for a big area where they could cultivate their own food, besides a space for cultural activities such as theatre and dancing, and a technology lab where the agenda run by the local NGO could be taken forward.
The architect Sofia Croso Mazzuco facilitating the collaborative design process.
– Workshop 3 (15 August 2018): Presentation of the school architectural project. This was an occasion to present to the community the school design developed thoroughly during 3 months by the architecture team, based on the conversations and material originating from workshops 1 and 2. Workshop 3 invited the community to either approve or make changes to the overall project, made visible through architectural drawings and physical models. The community was very happy with the result and did not ask to change a single thing; they felt very represented by the project.
Aligning project design and curriculum.
During the whole conception process, it can be said that the community acted both as the client and as the architect. As set by the multidisciplinary team, the Dream School project values local resources and talents, and thus invites the local community not only to conceptualise the project itself, but also to join hands and bring its walls up. Part of the school will be constructed through a hands-on collaborative approach, called “mutirão” in Brazil, and much used as part of the popular culture in Sergipe – where people gather to build their own houses and, at the end of the day, celebrate together through a barbecue feast.
Hands-on community workshops will be guided sometimes by expert community members and sometimes by external experts who have technical knowledge on construction works, allowing the wider community to join efforts for building the new school. A community centre for assembling construction elements such as cement tiles and earth bricks will be settled to manufacture locally part of the school’s construction materials, and will keep being run by the community for commercialization to accelerate local economic development.
As part of the holistic sustainability agenda, the school will count with grey and black water treatment through septic tanks – that make use of specific plants to clean water originating from the kitchen and the bathrooms. It will also host food production, having allotments, orchards and unconventional food plants (UFP) that will be cultivated on a nursery to be set locally during the school construction. That being said, the learning possibilities of the Escola dos Sonhos, or the Dream School go beyond what can be learned in the classroom, and permeates its conception, construction and collective management processes.
View of the school main entrance.
View of the school courtyard.
View of the theatre and gardens.
The Dream School will become a real one very soon since its building process is about to start in November 2019. Interested in helping to build it? If so, please get in touch(5).
School students excited with the new Dream School.
