“Wild Cities” – EcoMetropolitanism’s ambitious vision

Every trip I take to Vancouver I am overwhelmed by the city’s urban space and natural surroundings. Perhaps it is because I call bland and poorly-planned Calgary my home — but, I’m not alone. North America — and especially its planning community and urbanophiles — seem to be infatuated with Vancouver. Simply put, the City seems to have figured something out many others have not.

Increasingly, though, Vancouverites and architects and planners are growing more ambitious. Mari Fujita and Matthew Soules, of the University of Columbia School of Architecture are two such people. Almost in a response to an ongoing attention to EcoDensity and “Vancouverism” they have recently launched EcoMetropolitanism as an alternative.

EcoMetropolitanism is an ongoing research project exploring the path to hyper dense, super diverse, and radically optimized cities. Using Vancouver as a laboratory, it argues for aggressive integration between natural and urban environments and a blurring of public/private and natural/human space. It creates a vision of a complex and exciting city, almost a distillation of the more compelling things I’ve come to admire about Vancouver.

Looking Forward

Everywhere is urbanizing. Especially at the coasts. And especially Vancouver. By 2020, the Lower Mainland should be home to more than 3 million people, from about 2.5 million today. The entire province of next-door Alberta is home to about 3.5 million.

With a density of 42,000 people per square mile Vancouver’s coastal central core is second only to Manhattan’s 65,000 people/sq mile among Canadian cities.

Calgary, by contrast, has a population density of 3,522 per square mile.

Vancouver has been well-admired for its thoughtful and successful planning. Accessible, diverse, clean, dense, energetic — the relatively young city has excelled at livable urbanization. And has done so purposefully.

Vancouverism

In the late 1990s Vancouverism came to define the principles of the city’s core environment. This has been the traditional path forward for Vancouver. Soules and Fujita described it as holding these principles:

1. High density housing,
2. Provision of views,
3. A large amount of green and recreational space,
4. Generous spacing between buildings, and
5. Ample civic amenities.

EcoMetropolitanism

Soules and Fujita seek to take these principles even further and address what they see as its weaknesses. In a recent interview with The Tyee:

[EcoMetropolitanism] requires that we rethink our collective fixation on private micro-fiefdoms. “There are very clear ideas about property lines in Vancouver,” notes Fujita, with everyone having (or wanting) a private parking spot or balcony.

The urban philosophy of EcoMetropolitanism is predicated more on the idea of borrowing and sharing and overlapping — imagine human spaces multi-tasking as climbing-vine and/or bear habitats.

What EcoMet effectively posits, then, is that the reduction of privacy and public property is more than compensated for by the new quality of life in the city.

Calling current efforts “passive and objectifying strategies that reveal Vancouverism’s failure to fully capitalize on its natural environment” they identify new principles for planning and architecture. For them, EcoMetropolitanism is Vancouverism 2.0 — an “accelerated” model for introducing density and diversity within a livable framework. In doing so they seek to emphasize the relationship to the natural environment, synthesizing — and in some sense confusing — the built and natural environment.

Principles of EcoMetropolitanism

1. ecoMAX – maximization of common indicators (density, ethnic diversity, food production, and trees and mammals per person).
2. Inverted view cones – proposing new practices that visually highlight internal diversity, clear hyperdense views and promote the urban environment.
3. Intensification of use – multiple functions (urban and natural) for all forms and surfaces.
4. Exploit co-existence – integrating nonhuman and human uses
5. Broaden structure – rethinking private and public and adapting planning/design practices to accommodate bioengineering
6. Maximize building envelope (positive ratio of walls and roofs to floor space) – nontraditional shapes provide opportunities for plants and animals and increase interaction
7. Ecologize the interior – Agriculture and plants brought inside.

Residential towers doubling as bird habitats, wildlife corridors cutting through commercial spaces, and more sustainable and resilient cities and systems — a few more reasons to look to Vancouver for inspiration.

Is Your City Boring? Make It Wild [The Tyee]
EcoMetropolitanism summary document. [PDF]

Tagged as: british columbia, diversity, ecodensity, ecometropolitanism, indoor agriculture, private space, public space, urban agriculture, Vancouver