ABSTRACT
From an evolutionary perspective, and despite its remarkable impact, the conventional mode of city production in the past century is like a tiny open bracket in the broader history of cites. The fact that we are immersed into this mode to the point of considering it normal does not change the fact that it is, in fact, a historical exception. If we as designers are to be serious about climate change, this is a bracket that needs to be closed now, once and for all.
In principle, there is nothing that prevents our cities from embracing a new resilient and sustainable planning agenda, other than the inertia of the status quo. Make no mistake: this is a formidable, rooted inertia, which will not be overcome through a business-as-usual route. The new urban species that emerged after the Second World War1 and is still dominant in mainstream urbanism globally, is in fact extremely resilient itself. The automobile-dependent sprawled suburbanisation of our cities, with all its derivations, is an exceptionally resilient phenomenon but generates a rather rigid urban form which is environmentally and socially unsustainable.
The question is: how can we urban designers contribute to change the direction of travel of a system – that of urban form, in particular – that is running at unprecedented speed along a clearly nonsustainable track? In other words, how can we design cities according to the way they are and work, and yet steer them to a different track, which would ultimately bring us all to a better place?
