[p2p-research] a must read essay on climate change, why the battle is already lost, and how cities can still save us

[Michel Bauwens]

*(Eric and Nikos: I'm publishing this on the 17th and would welcome your
commentaries)
*

*
*

*Essay: Who Will Build the Ark? The Utopian Imperative in an Age of
Catastrophe<http://brechtforum.org/who-will-build-ark-utopian-imperative-age-catastrophe?bc=>by
Mike Davis in Telepolis
*


**
*From
http://brechtforum.org/who-will-build-ark-utopian-imperative-age-catastrophe?bc=

*

*This is one of the most riveting and interesting essays I have read in a
long while. I strongly recommend it as a indispensable must-read.*

This essay by Mike Davis has two parts.

In the first, Pessimism of the Intellect, he reviews the evidence for
climate change, as well as attempts to change the situation and finds that
most worst-case scenarios imagined by the scientists have already been
exceeded, which means that we may have already reached the tipping point
which makes dislocation inevitable. Because the solution would demand an
enlightened reaction by the privileged, it is highly unlikely that the
necessary changes will take place. In fact, there is evidence that the
elites are already preparing lifeboat scenarios for their entrenched
survival amidst global chaos.

In the second part, the author switches to the Optimism of the Imagination
and finds an unlikely possibility: the greening and democratic reform of
city life. He outlines both the negative and positive aspects of cities from
an environmental point of view.

*Here are the positive ones:*

*urban growth preserves open space and vital natural systems*

*well-defined boundaries between city and preserved countryside;*

*waste is recycled, not exported downstream*

*strict regulation of automobile use*

*environmental economies of scale in transportation and residential
construction;*

*the substitution of public luxury for privatized consumption;*

*the socialization of desire and identity within public space;*

*affordable access to city centers from periphery*

*egalitarian public services*

*large domains of public or non-profit housing*

*ethnic and income heterogeneity at fractal scales of city*

*powerful capacities for progressive taxation and planning in the public
interest*

*high levels of political mobilization and civic participation*

*public landscapes designed with children, seniors and special needs in mind
*

*rich dialectics of neighborhood and world culture;*

*the priority of civic memory over proprietary icon;*

*spatial integration of work, recreation and home-life."*

*Mike Davis:*

*1.*

*"Such sharp demarcations between 'good' and 'bad' features of city life are
redolent of famous attempts in the previous century to distill a canonical
urbanism or anti-urbanism: Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, Frank Lloyd Wright
and Walt Disney, Corbusier and the CIAM manifesto, the 'New Urbanism' of
Andres Duany and Peter Calthorpe, and so on. But no one needs 'urban
theorists' to have eloquent opinions about virtues and vices of the urban
built environments and the kinds of social interactions they foster or
discourage. Especially here in Munich, with a rich conjugation of different
periods and conditions.*

*What often goes unnoticed in such moral inventories, however, is the
consistent affinity between social and environment justice, between the
communal ethos and a greener urbanism. Their mutual attraction is magnetic
if not inevitable. The conservation of urban green spaces and waterscapes,
for example, serves simultaneously to preserve vital natural elements of
urban metabolism while providing leisure and cultural resources for the
popular classes. Reducing suburban gridlock with better planning and more
public transit turns traffic sewers back into neighborhood streets while
reducing greenhouse emissions.*

*There are innumerable examples and they all point toward to a single
unifying principle: namely, that the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far
more than any particular green design or technology, is the priority given
to public affluence over private wealth. As we all know, several additional
Earths would be required to allow all of humanity to live in a suburban
house with two cars and a lawn, and this obvious constraint is sometimes
evoked to justify the impossibility of reconciling finite resources with
rising standards of living. Most contemporary cities, in rich countries or
poor, repress the potential environmental efficiencies inherent in human
settlement density. The ecological genius of the city remains a vast,
largely hidden power.*

*But there is no planetary shortage of 'carrying capacity' if we are willing
to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private consumption,
the engine of sustainable equality. Public affluence - represented by great
urban parks, free museums, libraries, and infinite possibilities for human
interaction - represents an alternative route to a rich standard of life
based on earth-friendly, carnivalesque sociality. Although seldom noticed by
academic urban theorists, university campuses are often little
quasi-socialist paradises around rich public spaces for learning, research,
performance, and human reproduction.*

*The utopian ecological critique of the modern city was pioneered by
socialists and anarchists, beginning with Guild Socialism's dream
(influenced by the bioregionalist ideas of Kropotkin, and later, Geddes) of
garden cities for re-artisanized English workers, and ending with the
bombardment of the Karl-Marx-Hauf - Red Vienna's great experiment in
communal living - during the Austrian Civil War in 1934. In between are the
invention of the kibbutz by Russian and Polish socialist, the modernist
social housing projects of the Bauhaus, and the extraordinary debate over
urbanism conducted in the Soviet Union during the 1920s.*

*This radical urban imagination was a victim of the tragedies of the 1930s
and 1940s. Stalinism, on one hand, veered toward a monumentalism in
architecture and art, inhumane in scale and texture, that was little
different from the Wagnerian hyperboles of Albert Speer in the Third Reich.
Postwar Social Democracy, on the other hand, abandoned alternative urbanism
for a Keynesian mass housing policy that emphasized economies of scale in
high-rise projects on cheap suburban estates, and thereby uprooted
traditional working-class urban identities.*

*Yet the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century conversations
about the 'socialist city' provide invaluable starting points for thinking
about the current planetary crisis. Consider, for example, the
Constructivists. El Lissitzy, Melnikov, Leonidov, Golosov and the Vesnin
brothers are probably not familiar names, but these brilliant socialist
designers - constrained by early Soviet urban misery and a drastic shortage
of public investment - proposed to relieve congested apartment life with
splendidly designed workers clubs, people's theaters, and sports complexes.
They gave urgent priority to the emancipation of proletarian women through
the organization of communal kitchens, day nurseries, public baths, and
cooperatives of all kinds. Although they envisioned workers clubs and social
centers, linked to vast Fordist factories and eventual high-rise housing, as
the 'social condensers' of a new proletarian civilization, they were also
elaborating a practical strategy for leveraging poor urban workers' standard
of living in otherwise austere circumstances.*

*In the context of global environmental emergency, this Constructivist
project could be translated into the proposition that the egalitarian
aspects of city life consistently provide the best sociological and physical
supports for resource conservation and carbon mitigation. Indeed, there is
little hope of mitigating greenhouse emissions or adapting human habitats to
the Anthropocene unless the movement to control global warming converges
with the struggle to raise living standards and abolish world poverty. And
in real life, beyond the IPCC's simplistic scenarios, this means
participating in the struggle for democratic control over urban space,
capital flows, resource-sheds, and large-scale means of production.*

*I think the inner crisis in environmental politics today is precisely the
lack of bold concepts that address the challenges of poverty, energy,
biodiversity, and climate change within an integrated vision of human
progress. At a micro-level, of course, there have been enormous strides in
developing alternative technologies and passive energy housing, but
demonstration projects in wealthy communities and rich countries will not
save the world. The more affluent, to be sure, can now choose from an
abundance of designs for eco-living: but what is the ultimate goal: to allow
well-meaning celebrities to brag about their zero-carbon lifestyles or to
bring solar energy, toilets, pediatric clinics and mass transit to poor
urban communities?"*

*2.*

*"Tackling the challenge of sustainable urban design for the whole planet,
and not just for a few privileged countries or social groups, requires a
vast stage for the imagination, such as the arts and sciences inhabited in
the May days of Vhutemas and the Bauhaus. It presupposes a radical
willingness to think beyond the horizon of neo-liberal capitalism toward a
global revolution that reintegrates the labor of the informal working
classes, as well as the rural poor, in the sustainable reconstruction of
their built environments and livelihoods.*

*Of course, this is an utterly unrealistic scenario, but one either embarks
on a journey of hope, believing that collaborations between architects,
engineers, ecologists, and activists can play small, but essential roles in
making an alter-monde more possible, or one submits to a future in which
designers are just the hireling imagineers of elite, alternative existences.
The planetary 'green zones' may offer pharaonic opportunities for the
monumentalization of individual visions, but the moral questions of
architecture and planning can only be resolved in the tenements and sprawl
of the 'red zones.'*

*From this perspective, I believe that only a return to explicitly utopian
thinking can clarify the minimal conditions for the preservation of human
solidarity in face of convergent planetary crises. I think I understand what
the Italian Marxist architects Tafuri and Dal Co meant when they cautioned
against "a regression to the utopian," but to raise our imaginations to the
challenge of the Anthropocene, we must be able to envision alternative
configurations of agents, practices and social relations, and this requires,
in turn, that we suspend the politico-economic assumptions that chain us to
the present.*

*I speak, of course, as an aging Socialist, who still believes in the
self-emancipation of labor with the same fervor with which Governor Palin
believes in shooting caribou. But utopianism isn't necessarily
millenarianism, nor is it confined just to the soapbox or pulpit. One of the
most encouraging developments in that emergent intellectual space where
researchers and activists discuss the impacts of global warming on
development has been a new willingness to advocate the Necessary rather than
the merely Practical. A growing chorus of expert voices warn that either we
fight for 'impossible' solutions to the increasingly entangled crises of
urban poverty and climate change, or become ourselves complicit in a de
facto triage of humanity.*

*Thus I think we can be cheered by a recent editorial (11 September 2008) in
Nature. Explaining that the "challenges of rampant urbanization demands
integrated, multidisciplinary approaches, and new thinking,' the editors
challenge the rich countries to finance a zero-carbon revolution in the
cities of the developing world. "It may seem utopian," they write, "to
promote these innovations in emerging and developing-world megacities, many
of whose inhabitants can barely afford a roof over their heads. *

*But those countries have already shown a gift for technological
fast-forwarding, for example, by leapfrogging the need for landline
infrastructure to embrace mobile phones. And many poorer countries have a
rich tradition of adapting buildings to local practices, environments, and
climates - a home-grown approach to integrated design that has been all but
lost in the West. They now have an opportunity to combine these traditional
approaches with modern technologies."*

*Similarly, the 2007/2008 United Nations Human Development Report warns that
the 'future of human solidarity' depends upon a massive aid program to help
developing countries adapt to climate shocks. The Report calls for removing
the "obstacles to the rapid disbursement of the low-carbon technologies
needed to avoid dangerous climate change. … the world's poor cannot be left
to sink or swim with their own resources while rich countries protect their
citizens behind climate-defence fortifications." *

*"Put bluntly," it continues," the world's poor and future generations
cannot afford the complacency and prevarication that continues to
characterize international negotiations on climate change." The refusal to
act decisively on behalf of all humanity would be "a moral failure on a
scale unparalleled in history."*

*If this sounds like a sentimental call to the barricades, an echo from
classrooms and studios of forty years ago, then so be it. Because if you
accept any of the evidence presented in the first half of this talk, then
taking a 'realist' view of the human prospect, like seeing Medusa's head,
would simply turn you into stone."*


-- 
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Basic essay at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview at
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html
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