MAIN FEATURE
And so, despite the long-term shock of living in psychologically oppressive environments, people have not yet realised that the building industry has disregarded their mental and physical health. The architectural media are keeping silent on this point, and not putting the blame where it belongs. Either they don’t care or cannot reverse decades of praising such psychologically hostile interiors as wonderful, judged purely on visual style.
RESILIENCE IS MATHEMATICALLY RELATED TO HUMAN-SCALE DESIGN
Resilience is the ability of a working system to withstand perturbations. The degree of resilience is how far a system can be displaced and still bounce back, maybe to a new stable state. The keys to achieving resilience are:
1. Use the biological analogy of multi-scale interlinked systems. 2. Understand how natural structures evolve in time, and enable the system to readjust its functions dynamically.
3. Short-term fixes often create long-term fragility by masking deeper problems! 4. A complex system’s resilient limit is fixed by its most fragile subsystem. 5. Narrow efficiencies create fragility, so we need built-in redundancy. 6. Human and urban systems work far from equilibrium; therefore, a neat appearance is misleading. 7. A resilient living system has an infinite variety, and many more connections compared to 20th cities.
-century
Ordered city geometry that is built today is meaningless for energy cycles. Resilient networks contain inherent diversity and redundancy, with optimal cooperation among their subsystems, yet they avoid optimisation (maximum efficiency) for any single process. They require a continuous input of energy in order to function, with energy cycles running simultaneously on many different scales.
Short-term urban fixes only wish to perpetuate the extractive model of cities, not to correct its underlying long-term fragility! Today’s power-driven culture of glass and steel skyscrapers typically focuses upon a single efficiency, and ignores everything else. Twentieth-century architects and planners optimised city morphology strictly for fast automobile traffic.
Resilience comes from linked processes and structures working on many different scales. Solutions are found in self-built spontaneous settlements and in traditional cities. Historic evolution took place towards healthier environments through biophilia and design patterns, but the city form, as decided by design ideology linked to power, cannot re-configure into a new system. By worshipping ‘images of the future’, society doesn’t reuse older successful solutions, and this limitation prevents resilient systems from forming.
ENERGY POLICY COULD RESET UNSUSTAINABLE URBANISM We learn how cities actually function by following their energy flowsxxv
. How are buildings fed with energy,
and how much embedded energy did they cost to erect and maintain? Construction projects conceived and marketed purely as giant sculptures obscure these points. Spendthrift nations with vast fossil energy reserves that construct glass towers in the desert set a poor precedent. Other nations copy this profligate practice just to keep up with a wasteful architectural fashion.
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AnnaTamila/
Shutterstock.com
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united photo studio/
Shutterstock.com FUTURARC 51
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