It is obvious that the myriad ‘eco-city’ projects popping up all around the world would not be viable if not for the fact that they appear against a background of imminent ecological catastrophe – a condition of terrifying proportions – and clearly the rhetoric of sustainability is driven by such fear. (Adams, 1) To understand this impulse, and the fear that lies at the core of today’s urban project – the ‘eco-city’ – it seems appropriate to interrogate the architectural rhetoric and forms of representation used to animate it. (Adams, 1) Rhetoric and forms of representation of the ‚eco-city’ Because in the current political context, urban-scale design has become an increasingly accessible and unregulated venture for private investment, the central occupation of urban design has shifted to the construction of sophisticated, high-profile branded advertisement campaigns used to leverage popular, ‘democratic’ support for large-scale real-estate development. (Adams,1) Ecological topics as advertisement for large scale developments The drawings produced have little need for coherence with that which may or may not actually be built. Instead the success of urban design depends only on the composition of images and text, and their corroboration with the language of sustainability. (Adams, 2) Yet also implicit in such ethical posturing is a kind of imposed state of exception, paralysing the process of architectural criticism. Introducing this silent suspension of judgement, the language of sustainability plays a crucial role in the propagation of such work, for the purpose of urban design ultimately remains to equip the absolutely ordinary with a rhetorical supplement of ethical goodness. (Adams, 2) To speak of the design of such projects is itself a convoluted task, since a truly ‘ecological’ city, rather than resulting from an architectural formalism, must emerge from the multiple systems of nature that prefigure it: it is now the task of the architect to identify spatial systems of nature. (Adams,2) Adams calls for architects to identify spacial systems of nature. In a gracious gesture towards nature, great heed is paid to the habitats and migration patterns of animals dwelling on the site, native flora and fauna are catalogued, efforts are made to account for the unique systems of symbiosis that must be preserved, and so on. From this research, these various organizations of nature are mapped onto the site to provide the basic structural discipline to which the urban shall now submit. (Adams,2) Ironic? … drängt die Überfülle der Natur die Architektur der Stadt bequem in den Hintergrund. Auf diese Weise muss die Architektur als materielle und formale Einheit selbst verschwinden: Sie ist nur eine unglückliche Notwendigkeit der Stadt, auf die diese noch nicht verzichten kann. Stattdessen muss die Architektur von Ökostädten ihre Belastung für die Natur durch die Verwendung von Gründächern, Begrünung an Fassaden und übermäßigen Einsatz von Glas kompensieren – ein triumphaler Akt der Selbstvernichtung der Architektur. (Adams, 2) While major experiments in new formal configurations became prevalent in the late nineteenth century, nearly all products of such work – from Cerdà’s redesign of Barcelona to Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris, to the development of the grid in American cities – rested on the simple idea of combining materially functioning systems with individual points of connection. In other words, through the administrative lens of urbanism, the city was reconstituted as a set of integrated infrastructures, which attempted to organize the city into a singular system of managed circulation. (Adams,3) Thus, with the introduction of the sewerage system, for example, what started as a programme for the sanitization of the city was soon seen as a generalized model for conceptualizing not only other systems of infrastructure but the entire city itself: nodes and corridors, circulation and connectivity, production and consumption all seemed to characterize the generic repeatability of the modern city. (Adams, 4) Der neue „nachhaltige“ Urbanismus fügt sich nahtlos in diese liberale Geschichte des Urbanismus ein. Erstens bleibt der operative Schwerpunkt nachhaltiger Gestaltung auf einer grundlegenden Ebene treu den Infrastruktursystemen und den Strategien ihrer räumlichen Umsetzung verhaftet. Zweitens spielt Unbestimmtheit eine noch stärkere Rolle in der Kategorie „gemischte Nutzung“ – eine Bezeichnung für Immobilien, die im nachhaltigen Städtebau eine zentrale Rolle als eine Art wirtschaftlicher Stabilisator spielt und potenziellen Investoren eine kalkulierbare „Lebendigkeit“ der neuen Stadt garantiert. Diese Kategorie der Entwicklung ist vielleicht der Nullpunkt der Unbestimmtheit, der alle Entscheidungen aus dem Bereich des Designs in den Bereich der Launen des Marktes verlagert und damit die Kluft zwischen Stadtform und Organisation garantiert. Auf diese Weise kann eine Ökostadt, die unter Berücksichtigung von Wetter- und Windverhältnissen, Licht, Wasserableitung und bald auch anderen Faktoren optimiert wurde, genauso „nachhaltig” sein wie eine Stadt, die sich als extrudiertes Firmenlogo gestaltet, um einem Kunden zu huldigen. Schließlich sind die „wissenschaftlichen” Behauptungen, die mit Nachhaltigkeit einhergehen, im Großen und Ganzen eine vereinfachte Wiederholung derselben Metaphern, die im 19. Jahrhundert auf die Stadt angewendet wurden, und schlagen nur erneut die gleiche Einhaltung eines Dogmas des infrastrukturbasierten Urbanismus vor: Metaphern des 19. Jahrhunderts für biologische Systeme tauchen heute als „Strategien” mit willkürlichen Zielen wieder auf, deren einziger Inhalt gute Absichten sind. (Adams, 4) Strategies such as the ‘ecological corridor’ represent attempts to extrude nature, bringing its own patterns of circulation under the reign of the urban. This idea that nature can be reduced to a mirror image of the infrastructural systems that govern the city paradoxically reveals, if nothing else, a tremendous lack of faith in design itself. (Adams, 5) Modernist planners and architects alike have made use of this crisis–reform cycle to marshal political and economic force behind their projects. Le Corbusier’s famous maxim, for example, ‘architecture or revolution’, is precisely such a cry for reform.7 (Adams, 5) A dictum evoked by Le Corbusier in several issues of his journal L’Ésprit nouveau. Die „Ökostadt“ steht als Symbol für unsere gegenwärtige Vorstellung von urbanem Kosmopolitismus, komplett mit ihrer technologischen Ergänzung: dem paranoiden Apparat, der notwendig ist, um ihren liberalen Kern inmitten unaufhaltsamer ökologischer Verwüstung aufrechtzuerhalten. Aus dieser Perspektive wird die Rolle der Ökostadt deutlich: Sie ist lediglich eine phantasmatische Leinwand, die uns davon abhält, uns den wahren Schrecken der ökologischen Katastrophe zu stellen, während sie uns gleichzeitig dazu auffordert, diesen Schrecken stillschweigend mit dem Zusammenbruch des liberalen Kapitalismus selbst gleichzusetzen. Und während die Vorstellung einer liberalen Utopie vielleicht durch die Realitäten innerhalb des Liberalismus selbst gehemmt geblieben ist, hat die vage Leichtfertigkeit, mit der die ökologische Krise behandelt wird, zum ersten Mal in der modernen Geschichte ihre Verwirklichung in der Ökostadt ermöglicht. Der emissionsfreie „Technologiecluster“ Masdar, ein Ökostadtprojekt von Foster and Partners für Abu Dhabi, präsentiert sich beispielsweise als die liberale Antwort auf die ökologische Katastrophe: eine geschlossene, in sich geschlossene wirtschaftliche Freihandelszone. (Adams, 6) One of the chief points of debate was the role of ecology in reshaping society. The MARS group became advocates of environmental sensitivity: “There must be no antagonism between architecture and its natural setting,” they pointed out in an exhibition manifesto of 1938. A drawing of a tree growing through a building was to illustrate that “the architecture of the house embraces the garden. House and garden coalesce, a single unit in the landscape.”2 2. Modern Architecture Research Group, New Architecture (London: New Burlington Galleries, 1938), 20. (Arken 131) As a trained ecologist, Huxley took equal interest in the environment cause. As the secretary of the Zoological Society he enjoyed a spacious residence at the London Zoo, which he had made into a showroom for modernist design. Here scientists, architects, urban planners, as well as the environmentalist circle around Williams-Ellis met for discussions. (Arken, 131) Visitors at the Zoo would observe their own primitive desires in animals, he believed, and it was thus of moral importance to place them in a model home for healthy living. The famous gorilla house and the penguin pool, along with a series of other buildings, were therefore built in the modernist style designed by Berthold Lubetkin. (Arken, 131) Urban environmental renewal was valuable in itself, but should, according to Gropius, also be seen in view of trying to save non-urban nature from suburban sprawl. By making cities livable one could protect their surrounding nature and the larger habitat from further development. This, at least, was what he told his students at Harvard in the early 1950s: “[...] the greatest responsibility of the planner and architect, I believe, is the protection and development of our habitat. Man has evolved a mutual relationship with nature onearth, but his power to change its surface has grown so tremendously that this may become a curse instead of a blessing. How can we afford to have one beautiful tract of open country after the other bulldozed out of existence, flattened and emptied for the sake of smooth building operations and then filled up by a developer with hundreds of insipid little house units, that will never grow into a community. [...] Until we love and respect the land almost religiously, its fatal deterioration will go on.”9 9. Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, (New York: Harper & Brothers, [1943] 1955), 184. Gropius’ emphasis. (Arken 132) One of his students was Ian McHarg, whose Design with Nature (1969) became a phenomenal success and came to define the field of landscape design for a whole generation. (Arken, 133) McHarg was inspired by the astronautic sciences which since the late 1950s were working towards sending humans into outer space. The chief method was to try to build spaceships in which not only water and air but also food would circulate within what was called ‘space ecological systems’.11 The NASA organization would pour considerable amount of resources into researching how to build closed ecological systems in outer space in which humans could settle. McHarg found these unworldly ecosystems for astronauts in outer space inspiring. He saw them as a model for how humans should live in harmony with nature on Earth. To him, these ecologically construed spaceships and settlements came to represent the rational, orderly, and wisely managed in contrast to the irrational, disorderly, and ill managed environments on the Spaceship Earth. (Arken, 133) McHarg was not the only environmental designer enthused by the life of the astronaut and the managerial view from without. “We are all astronauts,” Richard Buckminster Fuller explained in his famous book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), which basically postulates using space ecological engineering manuals for astronauts to solve environmental problems on Earth. (Arken, 133) With the slump in the space industry in the early 1970s, key movers of its technology began marketing space technological knowhow to the architectural community. The result was a surge in ecological remedies such as new waste disposal systems inspired by space recirculation technology, a sewage system inspired by the astronaut’s toilet, solar cell panels, and an energy efficiency system for homes that became known as ‘autonomous’ buildings. Key ‘autonomous’ designers include early British ecological architects such as Alexander Pike and John Frazer, and their students such as Kenneth Yeang and Brenda Vale. Similar projects came along under names such as ‘bio-shelter’ and ‘integral house’ in the US by Sean Wellesley-Miller and Day Chahroudi, the co-directors of the Solar Energy Laboratory at MIT, Phil Hawes’ Biosphere 2, and perhaps most prominently John and Nancy Todd and the so-called New Alchemists at Cape Cod. (Arken, 137) Just like a spaceship was detached from the surrounding environment in outer space, a building designed as a self-sustained microcosm was, at least in theory, to be detached from the Earth. As a consequence, some of these ecological buildings tended to resemble spaceships by incorporating closed ecosystems, space technologies such as solar cells, and by often being isolated from the local realities, cultures, and landscapes they are supposed to protect. (Arken, 137) With the end of the Cold War, most environmental designers broke out of the intellectual capsule ecological space engineering had created for them and abandoned outer space as a source of inspiration. (137) As a substitute for space engineering, some designers turned their interest towards the perceived ecological wisdom of vernacular architecture and design. With the fall of socialism, others would in the 1990s focus their attention on the ways in which ecological design could benefit the client financially as new innovative technologies could harmonize the ecology and economy of a building. (Arken 138)