2nd Forum for Urban Landscape, Vitoria-Gasteiz (Basque Country, Spain)

[siam]

Hi all, if you are interested in urban landscape and sustainability, here you have some information about a Forum that will be held in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain) in July.

"This is the second edition of the Forum. It proposes a debate on the philosophy which should govern the city-nature relationship in a framework of sustainability; it also aspires to showing planning and design techniques which improve the natural assets and local biodiversity coherently with urban and regional planning. The conferences are rounded off with a selection of exemplary cases which can give qualified information on the real management of some cities or pioneering regions in the application of ecological planning and management techniques in urban spheres.

Dates held: 04, 05 and 06th July 2007 Venue: Villa Suso Palace, City of Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain) Organized by: CEA. Vitoria-Gasteiz Centre for Environmental Studies, Ministry of the Environment and Department of the Environment and Territorial Planning of the Basque Government."

[gruhn]

I'm interested in many things. None of which are the latest design fad for "Sustainability."

Heck, make that "Design Fad" because, as we all know, it isn't really about design.

[Michael Bulatovich]

Can you really afford to be left behind?

)

[++]

You can't call a design fad something that people have been exploring for 60 plus years.

[Michael Bulatovich]

Do we have that on your personal authority, ++?

[gruhn]

Sure I can. I have no problem with that idea at all. Happens all the time. It's how most fields operate from what I can tell. I'd argue that your inference about the research history of sustainability is wrong, but I don't know how to make that semantic issue understood.

[++]

It's well known and doesnt need my authority. I recall Buckminster Fuller's lectures on the topic at Yale in the 60s and at those particular lectures were considered derrivative rather than evolutionary on topic. People were exploring traditional architecture for more or less natural local solutions to climate prior to that. Sustainable farms were topics in the twenties of the last century.

[Michael Bulatovich]

So we have it on Bucky's authority? Either way, what you seem to offer as argument is "ipse dixit".

Orange is a new fad. (Actually, it's the 'new blue'.) As far as I can tell, orange was invented at least 15 billion years ago, far far away. Does that preclude it from being a fad here and now? Doubt it. Some thought about the nature of fads, and not so much about 'sustainability' is required, IMHO. It's double-edged when the crowd gloms on to you personal 'thing'. For a while, you're cool, but then, when they move on, you're passé. I was reading Bucky and designing passive solar, off-grid buildings in the '70s. It wasn't cool then. It's cool now. What's changed? Just the flavor of the month.

[++]

Sustainable farming and sustainable architecture were called by several names. The concepts have evolved, whether or not one calls them sustainable or , like Steiner, biodynamic, or organic, like those preceding, or simply, natural. Living gently on this good earth htat the earth might survive to shelter us is an ancient and sometimes aboriginal theme.

Perhaps the most sustainable architecture is a cave dwelling? Consider the caves of Bamiyan.Consistently inhabited for at least 17 centuries, some for longer

[Michael Bulatovich]

If you're talking about aboriginal North Americans, I think this is a somewhat romantic view, or maybe a more recent development as they didn't take long to wipe out most of the big species after arriving, factoring in stone age technology.

I fear that we are aren't capable of doing anything sustainable. The concept of sustainability itself really depends on what time frame you choose. In the end we will probably climb out onto a limb and then saw it off behind us, be broadsided by event beyond our control, or perhaps we'll spread like a plague into space. I kind of doubt the last scenario. The timeframe of the planet and the biosphere is of a different order of magnitude than is ours.