There is no distinct separation between the city and its dwellers, as they are both intrinsic part of the organism and cannot exist without each other, just as an organism cannot sustain itself without either cell structure or cell fluids. By seeing the system as an integrated and interrelated whole, a new order appears. It is no longer man versus nature or man versus concrete, or even man versus money. Looking at it beyond the dualistic discourse, the realization appears that one doesn’t have to be built on the expense of the other. Instead, all the pieces must be interstitched into a patchwork of mutually beneficial relationships.
A successful organism self organizes and evolves naturally. But in order to do that, its basic needs need to be met. Thus defining and meeting those basic needs will be one of the challenges the think-tank will engage in.
The major paradigm shift in such a bionomic approach is that we will be “planting and nurturing” cities and aspect of cities rather than mega-master planning them through zoning and landuse regulations.
It is understandable and by no means invalid that zoning laws came into place after the industrial revolution and mandated a separation between polluting hazardous factories and residential areas. But as more and more separations were deemed necessary and required by law, we have in fact created the modern nightmare of megalopolis life well represented in the ultra-master planned, over segregated city of Los Angeles. The assumptions underlying the zoning regulations have been largely unquestioned. Instead of reviewing their intrinsic validity in full depth, planners and policy makers have focused their energy and resources on patching up eminent problems by creating overlay zones and sub-zones, one problem at the time and one little area at the time. This patchwork of band aids has been costing the city considerable sums of money yet it has never properly addressed the underlying core issues in a way that has a lasting positive impact on the growth of the city. The fact is, that addressing these core issues in a meaningful way will take many people from different backgrounds and fields of expertise to come together to address such problems. The solutions are likely to be multi dimensional.
“You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.” — Albert Einstein
A definite opportunity the low-density development pattern of Los Angeles brings is the potential for improvement by surgically superimposing symbiotic program. Some of the most obvious program to superimpose would include a network of distributed, small scale food and solar energy farming combined with economic nodes and clusters of employment. Just by itself this simple programmatic overlay could substantially change and positively affect the overall health of the city and its dwellers without significantly altering the appearance or density of the current condition.
Zoning and landuse regulations may simply need to be redefined, or a completely new paradigm may reinvent the way to regulate the growth of cities in a completely sustainable way. Clearly, the spatial separations conditioned by current planning laws also encourage cultural, social and ethnic segregations. In fact, the still unproven thesis arises that the amount of segregation in the zoning ordinances is in direct proportion to the amount of social, cultural and ethnic segregation of a neighborhood and a city. As zoning laws have been the staple of twentieth century urban planning only an independent institution would be able to question their intrinsic validity and look beyond them for answers that focus on inclusions and symbiosis rather than segregation.
It is foreseeable that the implementation of such untested answers will appear risky to government and business agencies alike, thus an incremental bottom up approach will be the most likely path of least resistance to the transformation of the metropolitan condition.
At the Institute for Bionomic Urbanism, theories shall inform the practice of the project’s own evolution, and the practice in turn feed the theories in an empirical way. It is the hope that in this way the project site in itself, along with a growing number of other experimental sites, will serve as a testing ground and catalyst for the ideas to transpire into the neighborhood and the city at large and bring about the bionomic condition of our metropolis – the bionopolis.
For the first time in history, the population of the planet has crossed the threshold of 50% of urban versus rural population. According to U.N. projections, the urban areas of the world are expected to absorb all the population growth expected over the next four decades while at the same time drawing in some of the rural population. According to the US Census 2000, almost 80% of US population already lives in urban areas or urban clusters with 60% of the population in urbanized areas larger than 200,000.
The destructive environmental impact of never ending, faceless and anonymous urban sprawl covering huge parts of Southern California is no longer the ugly duckling, a result of a failed experiment for a utopian car city and the gold rush of greedy real estate developers. It is the very stuff that most cities around the globe are made out of. It has become the norm rather than the exception.
From Tirana to Ulaan Bataar to Santiago de Chile, the anonymous agglomeration of urban sprawl has slowly infiltrated the very souls of places and come to signify progress and a forward motion in financial gains. The pretty historic cities on the other hand, let’s say Venice or Rome or Paris have become at their core little more than oversize shopping malls with high price tags. The authentic experience of life in any of these urban jewels is impossible to be experienced within the confines of tourist overrun beauty routes. The authentic has to hide and therefore loses its right to occupy the very places that make these cities so attractive. So while most of the Romans find themselves living and socializing in suburbs that look like anyplace, anywhere, the New Urbanists are recreating the traditional village life with picture perfect Victorian homes and white picket fences.
In a time when finally even the most right wing conservatives are starting to admit that global warming is real and also a real threat to humanity and the planet, when our infrastructure has progressively decayed and our financial structures have proven to be flawed at their very core, one must ask the question, what will be the future city? The city that allows for our next generations to survive and thrive rather than implode in an environmental and social catastrophe? And how can this future city develop out of the circumstances we have at hand? The New Urbanists may be able to go out and recreate the perfect traditional small-town life, but how are the billions of people around the world confined to the already existing metropolitan ties going to do it?
Considering that the majority of people around the globe live in an urbanized condition, these are some very important questions. Between the spread out transportation needs and inefficient energy consumption of the buildings these urbanization patterns account for a huge share of the current environmental crisis and global warming.
The outcome of the choices that will be made in our generation will most definitely influence the chance of survival of our very own species.
Therefore it seems imperative to start fundamentally rethinking the way we plan, build, organize and occupy cities. The bionomic think-tank’s sole purpose is just that.
Considering the magnitude of importance of the future destinies of our cities, there is currently a very limited debate about the subject.
The think-tank on bionomic urbanism hopes to expand the debate and continuously redefine its priorities by including a broad cross section of minds in all fields. In order to address the complexity of the challenges at hand experts from fields shall include but not be limited to social studies, biology, ecology, economics, architecture, planning, agriculture, renewable energy, horticulture, permaculture, anthropology, art, science, technology, history, spirituality and philosophy.
What fundamentally differentiates bionomic urbanism to traditional urbanistic approaches is its underlying premise. The premise of bionomic urbanism is to look at a city as a living organism. Each intrinsic aspect of a city makes up its organs and molecular structures and is set in a connection of relations making up its overall ecosystem.