The City Refigured

The cofounder of Terreform ONE, Mitchell Joachim, takes green architecture to task for a “bland” aesthetic that, while founded on sound principles, effects only incremental alterations of the urban environment. By comparison with the popular LEED standards for green building, ¹ Joachim envisions a radical “ecological code”: design principles that would catalyze a paradigm shift in urban planning by facilitating collaboration among architects, artists, engineers, ecologists, planners, farmers, and geneticists. ² With respect to this final group, Terreform positions biotechnology as an asset to building sustainable cities. The rise of transgenic organisms—crops, pharmaceuticals, and tissues that cross species at the molecular level—has been of particular interest to Joachim and his collaborators, who are critical of the corporations that control most genetic research and yet curious about whether such technologies can work for the environmental and social “good.” Nor is the group alone. An emerging generation of artists, architects, and writers is conceptualizing biotechnology as a resource for reconfiguring twenty-first-century cities to address ecological and social justice challenges. This unorthodox brand of urban environmentalism signals a movement from postmodernism to a new cultural formation, one centered not on the structures of mass media and consumerism but on scientific practices of research and development. ³