People, places and climate change - an alternative take on 'Unmoored Cities'

End of May, having some time to spare in London, I decided to attend an all-day symposium at UCL, on Climate Change entitled Unmoored Cities: Radical Urban Futures and Climate Catastrophes. “[...] [The] current literature on climate change and cities focuses on the mitigation of rather than adaption to [its] consequences,” wrote the event curators. “This symposium will redress this by exploring imaginative modes of thinking in relation to future cities and climate change, asking how we might think through radical and utopian possibilities for unmoored cities.”

Reading the summary rather too quickly, I missed the word “imaginative” and thought I was off to the usual event on climate change, featuring the latest from science and policy labs from around the world. As a people flow consultant, these talks enrich my vision and understanding of policy making for public spaces. Well, in this case, I may have been wrong about the content but in terms of purpose, I was in for a real treat. 

At Unmoored Cities, I discovered and came to understand how, when done well, the arts are a powerful apparatus to model and analyse complex problems. Intertwined with the discussions on the potency of imagination were also deep insights on placemaking. Setting the scene, the writer Maggie Gee spoke evocatively but simply of the human scale, how tall towers “make us small” and therefore shift the focus to themselves away from humans.

Rachel Armstrong, a professor in Experimental Architecture, gave a passionate discourse on human ingenuity and how people make cities. The departure of local families from Venice, taking along with them customs and an age-old understanding of place, is more consequential than the fact that the city might be physically sinking. There’s always reason for a place’s existence, solutions are found and people adapt, as long as its people don’t lose hope. Reflecting on the life in cities, she also called for a paradigm shift in the way our architects are taught about and how we think around architecture. The practice of architecture is not so much about solid rigid structures as the spaces in between, which fill with life (people) or empty, according to time of the day and other factors. The concept of “life between buildings” is not new, but I felt Rachel Armstrong's vivid language and her metaphors around Venice (with the fluid vitality of water) brought new insights.

Rooting a moving place was the subject of Viktoria Walldin's talk on Kiruna, an arctic town built around an iron ore in Sweden in 1900. The settlement was destined to change shape and move with the ore. Her work as an anthropologist at White Arkitekture helped capture stories from the inhabitants that informed a new strategic masterplan devised for an unprecedented 100 years. The resulting vision is that of city that shifts shape and “crawls” at a pace that’s harmonious with human timescales and individual stories. You can read about Kiruna here, and how Viktoria Walldin tries to bring fresh insight to urban planning.

Humour has the best legs though, at least for me. Under the “Future of Transportation” Rob La Frenais presented a number of projects from around the world, where artists devise alternative means of locomotion for a world without fossil fuels. My favourite from the list was the “Radeau de Sauvetage”, a rail-with-sail contraption from the HeHe collective. I imagined myself navigating the streets of the Ebene cybercity, next to where I grew up, where the space between the tall buildings turn into wind tunnels as they catch the prevailing winds blowing from the South-East. It's opened new perspectives on how I think about city planning, comfort, and design (whether on the physics of mechanical movement or designing with the wind). It's also reminded me of how human imagination can soar beyond the confines of systems and structures, and how our ingenuity helps us devise new solutions and thrive in spite of - at times, self-imposed - challenges. Ultimately I learnt how one “owns” a place.

PS Find out more:

1. There's more to Unmoored Cities; the above were just personal highlights. Full conference schedule and abstracts are online here; the recording of the symposium is on Soundcloud. For a more formal perspective on the symposium's content, Paul Dobraszczyk's (who curated the event) notes are also published here.
2. Venice welcomes 7 million tourists per year, with a local resident count of 55,000 only. You can read about it in this article from The Guardian (November 2016).
3. Jan Gehl’s interview in TagesWoche, a swiss online paper (March 2015) is full of his trademark wisdom and optimism. Two insights that spoke to me were on high-rises, and the explanation on how architecture may have distanced itself from the human dimension (through focusing too much on "form" it became "sculpture" rather than architecture).
4. I read Dune (Frank Herbert’s novel from 1965) for the first time this summer! I know, how could I have missed it, right? Amazed by the prescient quality of the text on ecology and culture (including religion) in these shifting times.