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In Germany the added construction costs of passive houses are modest and, because of their growing popularity and an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf components, are shrinking.

But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.

Birth rates steadily declined and are still declining. In the developed world, they average 1.6 children per woman. In the developing world, the rate is 3 per woman. In countries such as Japan , authorities even ask women to have more children. Given existing trends, population will peak sometime at or before the middle of the 21st century, and then will begin to draw down for decades, possibly leveling out at 2 billion late in the next century.

One of the reasons population rates continue to drop is because of cities. A contributing factor to birth control in the world is the urban environment. Population planning is an individual act, but the incentive to plan a family is heavily influenced by urban migration. People are leaving rural areas where children are an asset, and relocating in cities where too many children are a liability.

Urban migration represents a kind of collective wisdom, and how we configure our cities will be critical to our survival. Regardless of the myths about living close to the land, cities are where human beings have the lowest ecological footprint. It takes less energy, wood, material, and food to provide a good life for a person in a city than in the country. Rather than perceive the city as an ecological sink sucking up the resources of the countryside, which cities can do, cities can also be a kind of ecological ark, places where humanity gathers while we peak in population and develop ecological intelligence for a new civilization. There is wisdom in this that is rather extraordinary. It was not predicted that cities might be the best strategy for our long-term survival and well-being. Yet that is exactly what is happening.

The viability of the urban environments, however, is not a given.

The legislative branch has lost much of its political power to the executive, which is usually aligned with global corporate capital.

Privatization removes functions of legislature and shifts them to the private sector

Sassen believes that cities are a critical space for overcoming the hollowing of the legislative body and in their capacity to make informal politics.

As a critical regionalist, Liane Lefaivre seeks to understand the context of a place in order to give it meaning.
 Le Faivre’s current project uses the concept of play to confront major issues affecting European cities, especially the tension between communities. Citing Schiller, Gross, Freud, Huizinga, and the Dutch painting genre “Children’s Play,” she talked about the importance of play in exploring our world and in crossing over cultural boundaries.

Post World War Two, the Dutch chose to instill civic values and a civic experience through play. Aldo Van Eyk designed multiple play spaces in central neighbourhood locations in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam playgrounds were not conceived individually, but as part of a net. They were polycentric, interstitial and participatory.

Michael Sorkin, whose work deals with the investigation of how politics and architecture are ‘conjoined,’ came with a stunning if somewhat ironic talk about slums as utopian propositions. At the core of the urban crisis are slums, where 1.5 billion people live. And though slums remind us of the most desperate of human conditions, and are very real problems, they are paragons of efficiency and democracy. They can respond to our environmental oversights.

 

The canary in the minefield has croaked and the solution is to build sustainable cities.

 

As Jane Jacobs spoke of good cities being self-organizing and morphological, slums, with these and other desirable qualities give us the possibility of thinking of the utopian condition:

 
• high degrees of internal equality, which can be identified as the basis of solidarity
• low levels of consumption
• high levels of reuse and recycling
• logical adjacencies to economic resources
• high levels of self-organization stemming from tight community grouping
• scales that are morphologically adaptable

With neoliberalism shaping globalization, there’s heightened competition amongst cities to attract industry and tourism. Rather than seeing cities as efficient and perhaps aesthetic places to live, they are being reconceived and marketed from the demand side as sites from conferences, festivals and conventions. Susan Fainstein argued that global cities can bear responses to the transitory whims of global corporations, the competition for foreign capital, and the placelessness of global culture.

 

Global citiies are strategic sites for economic control - yet they cannot control themselves - control emanates from them, but its not clear how much control cities have over their own boundaries.

 

While cities are becoming more responsive to global forces, Fainstein thinks we should encourage democracy on the local level to allow for equitable relationships. Inspired by David Harvey’s “Social Justice and the City,” and praising Amsterdam as a city with high social equality without sacrificing prosperity, she listed three factors that allow cities to deliver justice:

 
 
1. the extent to which government is entrepreneurial
2. the amount and quality of planning
3. the amount of focus given to those most in need
 
 

Fainstein praised Sen and Nussbaum for their ‘capabilities approach’ to development which seeks to ensure substantial freedoms to people, and sees poverty as capability-deprivation. One such poverty is environment degradation, which often is caused from distant global forces and reinforces environmental injustice. Global climate change has the potential to disproportionately impact poor communities who may not be able to react to problems they didn’t create. Local populations need to be able to respond to global challenges in a way that ensures social justice.

Anthony Townsend of the Institute for the Future discussed the role of mobile devices in the future of the city. With mobiles, people can record, document, and annotate social space. Ideas, insights and emotions can be transmitted. Townsend calls this functional telepathy “telepathic urbanism.”

Telepathic Urbanism would help us experiment with new social ways of urban living that are based on real-time information and feedback. Thus we could get more out of the existing structures of cities and optimize our lives in them through a better representation of their energy, resource and material realities.

And finally, Robert Jan van Pelt, expert witness in the trial against holocaust denier David Irving, explains in this video (sorry embed not working) how an architectural analysis of Auschwitz proved that the holocaust was not an accident.

we can follow all these decisions and see that their is no practice of killing, then their is a practice of murdering, then there is a policy of murdering…architecture of the camps morphed into the question of answering holocaust morphology…was it intended yes or no?

As for the politics of possibility, Nordhaus and Shellenberger make a case for a massive governmental program in developing cheap, clean energy, as the Defense Department did with microchips or jetliners. It won't happen in the private sector alone, since they "rarely initiate technological revolutions," and there is actually very little innovation going on in the energy sector today. By contrast, when the Pentagon in the 1960s effectively guaranteed the market for microchips, it touched off a revolution that drove down the costs and spread the technology to many sectors of the economy. "An investment of roughly $200 billion would bring the price of solar energy down to that of coal," they estimate.

The authors adopt a politics of hope, rather than fear. "Cautionary tales and narratives of eco-apocalypse tend to provoke fatalism, conservatism, and survivalism among voters -- not the rational embrace of environmental policies," they contend. "Young and grassroots environmentalists are more inspired by the vision of creating a new energy economy than regulating the old one." Got that Al Gore?

In the middle ages, we learned that the earth was not the center of the universe. This understanding was traumatic and widely resisted. However, human beings maintained their sense that their role was central by placing their species outside the web of nature. We continued to assume that we were in charge and that the world would adjust itself to our wishes. It is this hubris which is now recognized by science as being dangerously wrong.  

We are now learning, slowly and painfully, that the underlying dynamics of the universe cannot be understood in mechanical cause and effect terms. We live within a far more complex web of interactions which defy analysis. Sometimes, systems shift rapidly as a result of a minimal impact: for example, an avalanche can be set off by a loud noise if the conditions are right. On the other hand, systems can be so stable that huge efforts will be absorbed without any impact at all. Understanding which leverage points are most effective is one of the higher-level skills.  

One of the primary results of this shift in our fundamental thinking is to necessarily destroy our current faith in the ability of technology to lead us out of our current crises. Jacques Ellul, a remarkable French thinker of the twentieth century, illuminated the result of our current technological emphases. He showed that it resulted in a belief that there was "one best way" to deal with challenges. His book "La Technique" was one of those that demonstrated how our thought patterns gave us no space for alternative ideas.

If coercive power is not appropriate, how do decisions get made at all? This issue shows itself at both the practical and the theoretical level. At the practical level, it is all too often impossible to reach cloture. Decisions are hashed and rehashed endlessly. Even after a decision is apparently taken, those who were unhappy feel the right to continue to challenge its legitimacy. It is this frustration with the current processes which is leading many to withdraw from citizen activities - or to long for the good old days when decisions were made in smoky rooms and could be imposed on the community and society!  

There is a theoretical basis which supports this failure to create effective decisions. There is a quite powerful school of thought which argues that there are no realities or standards which should constrain behavior. If this is true then there is no way to argue that one response is better or worse than another. Each group then can feel justified in pushing for its own agenda and, if it is denied, becoming more and more vociferous - and eventually violent - if its demands are not met.  

The clash between coercive power tactics and the denial of any ability to set standards has led to massive confusion within institutions and the culture in general. This had led to high, and growing levels of stress.

The broader the framework, the more difficult the arguments necessarily become. While a few people are able to deal with this level of explanation, most people do not have the skills or the energy to do so. In addition, the fact that there are more and more competing theories means that no one set of ideas can be expected to become the way in which we think in the future.  

This pattern which leads to ever-greater complexity has occurred frequently in the development of ideas. A model becomes more and more difficult, with more and more exceptions, until it clearly becomes unmanageable. At that time a new, and simpler, explanation is postulated which enables reality to be explained more fully and successfully.  

Current theoretical models are an extension, although a profoundly useful one, of current industrial era patterns. They assume that there is a right way to look at the world and are thus part of the expert/professional dynamic which is currently dying.  

Are we at the point that we can state a simpler view which enables us to see reality more clearly? I am convinced that we are. The alternative view is that reality is strictly situational. Each of us necessarily struggles, individually and within the groups of which we are a part, to find our own understanding of the patterns which surround us. Each of us has to choose our own unique view that will evolve as conditions change around us.  

Each of us necessarily chooses those behaviors which seem to serve us best. While our views are necessarily subjective, the choices we make will only be satisfactory if they are informed and constrained by our knowledge of the feedback loops in which our lives are embedded. The better we are at sorting out the essential from the trivial, the more likely it is that our choices will lead to our satisfaction and that of others.