Global Design New York University: Ecocities Illustrated

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Ecocities Illustrated

Richard Register, urban landscape activist and the brilliant imagination behind Ecocities Illustrated: A Book on Ecocity Design (currently in its final design phase), envisions a sustainable, livable ecological city through the artistic lens of futuristic drawings and sketches. Roughly 150 of his original works will be featured in the book, covering topics such as whole cities, plazas, transport, natural features, mapping, ecocity fractals, basic principles and strategies for communicating, and more. Full story.

MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."