Photo courtesy of FHD Consultants Pvt Ltd


The window for less-harm has, in fact, closed for many Asian cities.


We’ve grown accustomed to thinking the opposite, that the city is an agglomeration of static elements (buildings, neighbourhoods, infrastructure) that are stitched together by networks (roads, grids, services lines). Resources move in linear pathways, exiting the system as waste. But can these flows be multidirectional? In place of monocentric urban structures, with a few producers and many consumers, can we envision a polycentric urban form in which buildings are also producers, where waste becomes a resource?


In the postgraduate programme that I teach, students were asked to test this idea in the context of Singapore. They found that if all buildings were to generate some of the energy, water and food they need, the city could become substantially self-sufficient (see sidebar Systems Thinking and Resilience: How Buildings Can Create Self-Sufficient Cities).


. The index is made up of five metrics to guide decisions at the building scale. For instance, Ecosystem Contribution is the degree to which a building supplements a city’s ecosystems. A development that provides food and shelter for wildlife scores better than one that does not. Self Sufficiency is a project’s


Whole systems thinking is powered by connectivity. This lets us activate change in many ways. Complex systems are transformed when a few elements are altered or when the DNA is rewritten. In their book Garden City Mega City: Rethinking Cities for the Age of Global Warming (2016), Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell of WOHA, a well-known Singapore-based design firm (see their article in this issue, Rethinking Sustainability: Form Follows Systems), propose a Generosity Index as a way of recoding urbanism11


34 FUTURARC


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