Ecopolis Architecture and Cities for a Changing Climate
From 2008, for the first time in human history, half of the world's population now live in cities. Yet despite a wealth of literature on green architecture and planning, there is to date no single book which draws together theory from the full range of di
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An Epistemology for Urban Ecology
We are the ultimate inheritors of a drive hundreds of millions of years old to build, and thus take charge of the immediate surroundings. For better or for worse, this architectural drive eventually created the kind of mind we now possess (Gould and Gould 2007 p.299) Unfortunately, the guiding metaphors of those who shape the built environment still reflect a nineteenth-century epistemology. Until our everyday activities preserve ecological integrity by design, their cumulative impact will continue to be devastating (Cowan and Van der Ryn 1996 p.18) Perhaps ‘epistemology’ is only another word for the study of the ecology of mind (Bateson 1973 p.372)
2.1 An Heuristic Hybrid? . . .there is a knife moving here. A very deadly one; an intellectual scalpel so swift and so sharp you sometimes don’t see it moving. You get the illusion that all those parts are just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be named quite differently and organised quite differently depending on how the knife moves (Pirsig 1974 p.79)
Legitimacy Exchange The discipline of urban ecology is emerging with multiple trajectories. One is towards the study of urban nature in semi-classical terms that counts the number of different species and identifies their habitats and so on, another is the evolved version of the Chicago School that treats human behaviour in a similar fashion to animal populations; there is the environmental systems approach that deals with urban metabolism and there is the grassroots movement represented by organisations like Ecocity Builders in the USA and Urban Ecology Australia. There are connections between each of these approaches but to evolve as a discipline, it needs a coherent vision. In their early days the sciences of cybernetics and systems theory borrowed from a variety of sources that “reached across disciplinary boundaries P.F. Downton, Ecopolis, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-8496-6 3, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
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Part One – Chapter 2 – Epistemology
and claimed a universal relevance for their new ‘science”’ (Turner 2006 p. 25). Fred Turner’s fascinating study of the co-evolution of counterculture and cyberculture describes how “In this process, two rhetorical tactics played especially important roles: the use of prototypes and. . . ‘legitimacy exchange’, a term that refers to the process by which experts in one area draw on the authority of experts in another area to justify their activities.” (Turner 2006 p. 25). It seems to me that urban ecology is at an equivalent stage in its development and needs to employ a similar approach.
The Knife Moves Epistemology is the science that deals with the origin and method of knowledge; it is about the way we think, how we choose to view and consider the world. An heuristic method is one in which accuracy is traded for speed in order to solve a problem rapidly with something close to the best possible answer based on reasonable estimates and available knowledge. It is a way of allowing or assisting the proc
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