Our unit focuses on making the latent accessible, making the invisible tangible and generating strategies for the modern landscape in response to urban conditions. It centres around the desire to implement new infrastructure and research the impact that such projects can have on the urban landscape. As such, we believe that a lot of the aforementioned issues can be solved by taking advantage of the Re_Map philosophies and typologies.
Infrastructure
The major infrastructure that our argument would implement is the invisible infrastructure; digital networks that can support our move away from cars, our visions of self sufficiency and the possibilities of being somewhere without being there. We also seek to encourage the building of infrastructure from the bottom up. As proposed in Cradle to Cradle and Extreme Integration, building up in chunks or prototypes that are independently successful to create something which is greater than the sum of its parts is an ideal scenario. This idea can be used to create a food chain that doesn’t rely so cripplingly on Tesco, or to develop a single environment that incorporates many building elements.
Balancing Social Equity
As briefly mentioned earlier, social equity often draws the short straw in these settings. We cannot suggest perfect solutions or outcomes to these problems, only aims which we think might be able to improve things. One of the main reasons it is so difficult to come up with ideal and workable solutions is because social equity is compromised. Eating local, fresh food that’s in season and hasn’t been the victim of thousands of travel miles and covered in preservatives and gases is all well and good, but it would probably be the domain of the middle classes. At the moment it can only be done by those who can afford it; part of the reason Tesco is so popular is its inexpensiveness. So that would strike a dagger to the heart of social equity as more affluent households enjoy the better, fresher, more sustainable food and the average person is forced to carry on as usual, irrespective of their sustainability views.
The same can be said of the need to separate the biosphere and technosphere. Keeping them apart and creating purely technological or biological products is a wonderful and necessary idea, but without using the many chemicals we currently take advantage of and finding ways to stay within one sphere, we inevitably create more expensive products, which again brings social equity into the spotlight.
Urban Farming
Hungry city revealed the problem of food production, Tesco controls the production and the consumption. As architects we need to think around this control – we need an architecture that sidesteps Tesco. We need to think intelligently to escape this clever system of supply. This is where extreme integration comes in.
Eliminating The Car
The social is also questioned in the argument for becoming more and more reliant on the invisible networks. There are many advantages to phasing out the use of the car and moving towards the informational, keeping people at home and not at work, or at work instead of abroad. Most of these come under the sustainability umbrella and will result in fewer emissions and lower energy use. But what about the lack of physical contact? Would we be sacrificing the personal side of life by encouraging people to work from home and meet their friends online?
We then have to consider the wider impact of, for example, making the car obsolete. The automotive industry is worth hundreds of billions of pounds a year, so getting cars off the roads would likely result in chronic job losses and companies collapsing, and could have a dire effect on the world’s economies. It becomes very obvious that balancing economy, environment and equity is a very difficult and delicate matter.
Printing Your Own Food
The Hungry City text discusses the issues of global food supply and global food movement, highlighting the complexity and fascinating nature of the global food market. Global transport of food is described as 'mind boggling' and in 2002 Defra estimated that British food transport accounted for the equivalent 720,000 trips around the world. The scale and complexity of the operation puts the whole system at a knife edge. So how do we tackle the problem?
The iPhone city talks of improving the software of our systems so maybe we could improve the software of the global food market - could printing your own food be an answer? A team at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Lab (CCSL) are building a 3D food printer, as part of the bigger Fab@home project, which they hope one day will be as commonplace as the microwave oven or blender. Just pop the raw food "inks" in the top, load the recipe - or 'FabApp' - and the machine would do the rest. Whilst this currently seems like a farfetched concept, there’s no reason not to aim at such ideas in the name of self sufficiency and sustainability. Ideas like being able to email your dinner to someone might be the sort of left-field trajectories that we need to embrace as a new approach to tackling climate change. And as with all the concepts we’ve discussed, if we reach a compromise somewhere along that trajectory, since it’s unrealistic to expect everything to be achieved, it will still give us a better environmental footing and improve our future prospects.