Solving Issues by Addressing its Origins
“Ecological urbanism proposes (just as landscape urbanism proposed over a decade ago) to multiply the available lines of thought on the contemporary city to include Environmental and ecological concepts, while expanding traditional disciplinary and professional frameworks for describing those urban conditions.”
-Charles Waldheim
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We can use urban projects as a social or cultural critique on society. But how? When we look at the work of Andrea Branzi, there is a clear understanding of the spread of capitalism over weaker portions of the nation. In this discovery, he utilizes urbanism to showcase this issue specifically with “weak urbanization” and consumption culture.
We, as architects, can also promote and expose issues in society by how we address landscape and the existing context in which we live and build. For example, if we wanted to focus on an issue like gentrification on the East Side of Charleston, we could showcase the land movement and changes over the years and the growing lack of greenspace being developed and taken from demographics of a poorer income class. We can use our diagrams and logic to showcase real political issues and then solve them with proper land development and urbanism proposal plans.
Jessica,
ReplyDeleteI believe the issue lies in the fact that typically, architects are not in charge of government policy, nor do we get a say in the issues that ultimately lead to gentrification. I agree that it is important for architects to understand these issues as well as their origin, but how do we translate this into real changes in the urban fabric? Do architects need to take on more responsibility regarding local government? Or perhaps it is our responsibility to educate our clients on the impacts of the decisions they make?
We can make changes within the field of architecture and hopefully that can lend itself to making changes to the fabric of our society, so that everyone in the world is focusing on becoming sustainable. Ultimately, the architectural field is only one part of the problem, but educating and speaking out for the environment may lead to changes within the governments across the globe.
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