everyone uh warmer welcome to today's event my name is simona sally i'm a senior lecturer of urban design at james cook university singapore and i have the honor and the pleasure to share today's book launch predatory urbanism with the metabolism of mega projects in asia by agatino rizzo and anindita mandal and published by edward elgar as part of their city's series and this volume predatory urbanism explores the link between urbanization and resources especially in the global south and it focuses mainly on irma mega projects particularly on mega urban developments which are implemented either by the state or state linked agencies the book stresses the importance of rethinking the resource urbanization lexus towards a more let's say socially and environmentally just urbanism and especially by exposing the limitations of today's predatory organism in the global south today's book launch aims a few shed lights on some i would say very pressing challenges facing contemporary cities in the global south and also aims to addressing the context but also complicated interrelationships between the city making or ahead and all the resources needed for its design for its implementation and for its production beforehand this session has the form of an open debate in which speakers will be reflecting on the various issues that are treated in the book with basically discussions led not only by the two authors of the volume but also by leading experts on urbanization and city making in the global south um okay so as i was mentioning in addition to the authors of the book the panel discussion will include presentations from alessandro melissa natalie vadim with each of the presenter to be given about 15 minutes or so for a further speech um before we start i kindly remind the audience i think this is already done but just to be sure to mute your mica and only open it when you have a question to pause actually you have the opportunity to ask questions throughout the presentation so and you can do so via the chat box um during i mean we will have all the presentations first so the authors and the presenters i will talk first and then we will have some time at the end of the session for a dedicated q and d so the presenters the authors and the presenters will be of course very happy to answer any questions or address any comment again at the end of this session so let's get started as i was just mentioning we will see the various panelists covering divers but equally important issues and challenges on urbanism in the global south and particularly on dedication of local resources but i just want to open the discussion um with mentioning two pressing topics i believe that need to be addressed and that i believe require further research when discussing urbanization in the global south and those are the vulnerability of those environments first of all and then actually the role of design in this and the need for a design approach that is more people-oriented and more community-centric so when we talk about vulnerability and especially vulnerability in the global south we have to remember that you know the majority of global south cities lie in the tropics or a subtropics region and this is an area of the world that is home to nearly half of the world's population has actually huge population growth forecast and also has unfortunately significant economic and social inequality challenges so if we think about southeast asia for example of course there is a massive urbanization underway but just to give you some some figures by 2030 so in less than 10 years an additional 990 million of people are forecast to move to those cities so the asean cities the urban populations overall are expected to triple by 20 50. so definitely in this context the issues like poverty and inequality and sustainable energy consumption declining infrastructure all these somehow in shape not only government decisions but a business decision as well for the many years to come um so in an action we see those environments organizing faster and faster but actually very very often we are unable to cope with that is a fast urbanization process not only to cope with it but to adapt to uh those challenges that are brought by by these changes actually and here i have like three slides just to show some of you know the urbanization going on in this region so what you see here is the city of the uh capital of qatar the state of qatar so you can see from this slide the incredibly amazing uh special evolution that the city has undergone in just a few decades the same for dubai for singapore sorry we showed in a while so you see the same exact you know area of the city uh 20 years ago and and today so urban environment has changed and finally dubai same things so same exact area and same transform so um probably the question once again we have to ask ourselves is what processes can be used to reduce uh you know to somehow face a disorganization but also to be used to reduce inequalities injustice and most importantly also resource depletion in the global environment and um in this sense actually some of the lessons that can be derived from the volume are predatory urbanism and the three that at least according to me i have uh highlighted in these slides so first of all understanding historical context matters uh secondly understanding people matters and lastly understanding the um environmental place matters so understanding historical context matters because um looking at history actually i think it's a very useful tool for you know understanding the origin of a problem um analyzing past experiences analyzing their precedence normally not only provide us a big picture and lead us to a better understanding of a problem usually this is what happens but also it may um suggest the potential solutions and different solutions um indeed if you look at the landscape around us around us this is an expression of our civilization we can look at monuments somehow as a symbol symbols of our you know values uh civic values moral values over religious levels and indeed a successful sustainable and i stress they want to sustain work design strategy should consider you know the existing verbal fabric possibly using a methodology that is a centered on the interpretation of you know the pre-existing context so in this sense we should look at the old urban fabric as a source of generative ideas and design principles that are embedded into the historical layering of design concepts and here looking at the history is important because another relevant urban challenge that is faced by those fast-growing and globalizing cities in the global south is the issue of identity and culture and so the role of cultural heritage in the transformation and evolution of the city and its territory and again in this sense historical memory probably should be you know one of the factors uh included in the in the planning process um by uh considering the territory as a police of you know historical and cultural stratifications uh which is capable of communicating the values of successive societies and their settlement methods so i was also mentioning understanding people matters and here what i can say is that learning from people in local communities is important but also empower local communities is key and in this sense all members of community all members of the community require some level of awareness uh through for example inclusive education through training through capacity building and this because participation processes allow to educate communities especially about you know problems that maybe are poorly understood or maybe about policy issues and also allows building understanding and incentives for collaboration for improving local communities self-reliance to increase social justice and also to foster participatory design making and um you know brought the public involvement creates also the potential to expand the understanding of problems and uh also to develop a stronger set of policies for for dealing with them and finally understanding the environment or also you can say the place of matters and um here um i mean when we talk about sustainability um we normally say that the integration of nature in the big environment is a key concern of sustainability it's a key concern of resilience over adaptation and i mean on one hand we see that several studies have shown the um that the proximity um being close to green spaces and being close to parks to housing facilitator community interaction facility well-being satisfaction and actually that there is a direct connection a direct link between urbanization on one hand and rising mental disorders for example behavioral disorders increasing social isolation increase the prevalence of lifestyle related diseases like i don't know hypertension diabetes obesity this is one thing but on the other hand actually what we experience and we see and especially in cities in the global south is that in spite of the um overwhelming evidence pointing to existence and the severity for example of climate change uh although i mean climate change is there uh governments have a largely uh failed to deliver their obligations to the communities to you know respond to climate change and prepare those communities and then face it so um this is somehow my personal take away from the book and like my personal reflection on the volume um so what i think in a nutshell is that we need a design processor that of course it's a multidisciplinary that is multi-scale but i think most importantly um you should also for a notion of plural sustainabilities rather than you know having a single definition of sustainability um we also needed to reflect on how urban sustainability has mainly been developed in temperate zones and mainly in the west and then transferred to the global south and also i think we need a process a design process that recognize that some shared aspects in these plural sustainabilities including for example aspects are relating to climate change environmental challenges but also histories of colonialism post colonialism culture social economic effects on people and the people living those in those areas of the world so i conclude by you know presenting these uh conceptual framework uh which there's a the idea of these multiple situations or multiple sustainabilities into three overlapping perspective of place past and in people and so my personal reflection is that you know as with the normally as with the kaleidoscope in which the reflection of a particular object can reveal various numerous patterns according to how we adjust the device uh the idea is that this conceptual trio of placed past 10 people brings to light again not a single idea of sustainability but a plurality of sustainabilities with each one and that is showing us that is revealing us some nuances and differences but also showing us a reflecting a shared background that we need to explore and yes and allows us to explore in the various dynamics of sustainabilities in the group itself okay so um i think at this end my short introduction and my personal reflection on the volume i'm very conscious of time so i would like to go straight away to um the first presenter and i would like to invite agatino to formally open this session and agatinovitzo is the chair the professor and head of architecture at lulea university of technology in sweden he works at the intersection of planning design and geography um in context so different as the arctic europe and asia his main interests are the study of the resource urbanization boxes and how to transition from predatory to resourceful urbanism his original theoretical production includes the nobel concepts such as the intrarural divides transdisciplinary urbanism knowledge mega projects predatory urbanism and degree resilience between 2009 and 2013 adatinoritsa worked as a scholar in malaysia and qatar and his work has been funded by the qatar national research fund european commissions framework programs the swedish energy agency and the formers so i'm just sharing my screen and over to you thank you so much simona thank you so much i think next time i should write a short representation of myself but uh thank you and i think the best way to start is first to thank all the people who contributed to this book and uh i will start with uh first of all and indeed we join in the book like on on the project of the book like a year ago and it has been great also to work with there and it has been like great to share also the struggle to to to put the book together and uh also i want to also thank alessandro alessandro meres who is also the director of the italian pavilion in venice uh for writing the forward and also like for his support and uh yeah well as we wrote in in the book once upon a time we were sitting in the same university in auckland and that that is incredible how the the urban and architectural world is so small worldwide and then i want also to think to thank also natalie and badim for the like endorsement statement to the book and also for uh also for like um for anonymous reviewers who checked the the first proposal of the book and uh yeah we we try to address some of the issues and hopefully we did we we tried to do the best we could i also had to thank sorry boring but i think somebody has to do that so i also have to thank simona for this job for sharing this event uh it's been great and uh i met simona a long time ago in qatar she did their phd student in doha and now she's in singapore so again uh it's it's great and now the speakers actually are located in many parts of the world from russia to us from from sweden down to singapore so that's that's that's incredible uh of course uh many thanks also to the publisher it will help eat with elgar because they were very sporting and actually just today i got the art sorry you cannot see it because there is this trick with zoom but there is this hard copy of the book so that that was great and also of course i thank all the colleagues and everyone who supported like in this ten years like in a way research because the book i'm going down to share my screen because this book basically like in a way was put together also joining materials from myself and indeed and uh where where we work separately like in a number of case studies in the global south working to a certain extent to with metabolism and but with different slightly different approaches and one case study uh it is actually described in the book is that that of iskandar malaysia george baru uh you see uh it's basically like george buru is the city next to singapore within this like red box that basically represents like a let's say a discontinuous urbanization stretching from singapore to kuala lumpur which is a connection of many infrastructures on railway highway and so on actually simona is actually sitting in singapore at the moment and as you see like in the case study like in this case that is we we i went through like uh like the project of iskandar malaysia which is a mega project it's a large mega projects which involve the clearing of a a forest and then like a construction of like a v last several compounds and also like like several like office buildings and like actually an entire city but at the same time we zoom also like into the case of existing indigenous communities in the area which were also like part of this process and actually pay some of the consequences of this like large urbanization processes another case study that is actually treated in the book is that uh that of doha and again uh yeah once upon a time i was sitting also there at the qatar university simona was also there and yeah we we basically like uh well i study like a number of case studies in the city but in the book i actually treat more the pearl which you see here this offshore development over here an education city over over here and again the type of analysis goes through architecture architecture is in a way my background and planning but it's also like into the complex uh environmental like and social like in the relationship when when it comes to the development of a new place uh which perhaps i'm going to talk later on or or maybe like yeah study a little bit later and uh yeah well the lens uh with which like we we try to frame this work which actually started in 2009 2010 up to now it is actually that of a predatory urbanism it has taken a long time for me actually to come up with uh with something with an overarching actually framework because i first started with empirical case studies and it was like a process also for me to learn about urbanization processes in in asia coming from europe of course a different perspective also trying to understand how the theories i study in europe whether they made any sense or whether they could be adapted to the to the process is going on uh also also in asia and uh a little bit like uh i think also simona touch on this and it's i i try to focus on three uh main uh aspects and it's actually in a way also like uh uh a little bit also related also to an indies work also in in india just done of course with a different like style and techniques but um for me predatory urban consisting looking at upon resources the extraction processes of these resources and the commodification looking at this from an urban point of view so when i talk about resources i'm talking about images images branding and i'm talking about also bodies laborers and and people uh like are involved involved in these developments and also nature uh into into like let's say into a wider definition of nature and then when i when we look about extraction we we are thinking like about actually the chip extraction of these three resources so we look into the displacements both landscape and social displacements in this case that is and also as i was saying before we look into the green urbanism and and the large mega projects dynamic that that consolidates so in a way we go and look at the if if we want to put in a statement like in the urbanization of resource extraction in this in this case studies that are in india in southeast asia and in west asia in qatar and the uae and i will go very very quick because i want to actually leave more space to other people to talk but these are some of the case studies that we treat in the book and yeah well when i talk about images and branding this is what i have in mind so how basically like large mega projects large master plan mega projects actually like uh exploit in a way or use deploy like uh images from different parts of the world in this case we are talking about venice which is very connected actually to to the to the actually to the biennale into the to the italian pavilion but as you know as all people who have cross traveled through dubai there are many actually images that are mobilized into the making of these developments and these are done uh well there are there are processes that are cited in the book like for example like the traveling of practices from the north to south but also like they issue the theme of the global consultants the consultant companies they bring these ideas but these are also there is a issue of branding and there is also issue of of city making like in a way uh yeah sometimes also nation building uh and then another aspect of predatory urbanism is that of nature and here there is like actually a screenshot of over uh impacts basically study about the impacts uh of on the environment on the nature of the gulf uh of the water of the goals uh in the in the yeah in the persian gulf region and you can see like that of course most of the impacts are caused by the oil traffic and uh yeah actually the the the the exporting of oil from these countries to the rest of the world but at the same time if you zoom like into the coast of the uae also dubai and bahrain and the saudi arabia you can see that some of these impacts are actually related also not only to the oil extraction and fishing activities but also to the population pressure and the transformation of the waterfronts which sometimes is very drastic like in the case of dubai in abu dhabi in the in the gulf region and then another aspect of predatory urbanism is that of of course bodies and laborers migrants that are extracted from parts of asia or parts of africa or other parts of the world actually for that matter also from europe and other parts of the world and are deployed in these countries to either like power like this uh fast instant organization or for other type of activities i take here some screenshots from a documentary which was put together by bertolder and roberts and roberto zankan some years ago these are also yeah screenshots but also issues that in a way we treat in the book and as i was saying before we look of course into the displacement that are related to these large transformations whether we are talking about biogeophysical which in a way it's landscape displacement or social displacement and of course we try to like describe in the book and try to analyze uh like this this type of displacement that are whether they are like the clearing of a total clearing of forest of mangroves and what this means also for the livelihoods of people fishing communities or people working with agricultural activities in these areas whether we are talking about instead like issues related to uh yeah for example like uh yeah nation building or for example like the mobilization of racialized worker for for the construction of this area so what what it means on this so we try to connect also with the lots of literature to those of the people who are today attending this this this work this book launch presentation is also done so i'm very also much interested in the way they reflect on the book but also like in the way also like uh yeah the the type of research and and and how like this book connects or maybe like also missing threat misinterpret some of this uh so in a way for me the book is a way also to build a dialogue with the many people also that have been involved in studying this as yeah there is not that much that i want to say i'm not sure how much time i have used uh perhaps i can also come later and add more more aspects or more feel more with this so thank you so much thank you thank you so much tino for uh for your presentation and now it's the turn of the second author of the book mandala so is a doctoral candidate at lula university of technology student she has a bachelor in architecture from mumbai university india and a phd in architecture from the university of auckland new zealand her main research interest is in the field of sustainable urban development and resource efficiency in particular the research has involved understanding and analyzing human psychological factors affecting the development of one second so please join me in welcoming anandita over to you [Music] hello everybody good afternoon uh thank you simona for uh sharing this session and for introducing uh introducing the book um i would like to begin by introducing myself like simona mentioned i'm a second year phd student at ltu uh but the work he that i'm gonna present here about mumbai is part of my uh first phd which is from auckland from the university of auckland i would like to thank tinu for making me a part of this book and my supervisors at university of auckland for the guidance and support with the work and finally to the editorial team at edgar uh who made this book possible so thank you everybody um the well like i mentioned i come from india and i have lived in a number of indian cities including mumbai for almost 11 years and mumbai being considered the financial capital um of india is has a number of problems and one i mean including um water shortages holding housing shortages flooding everything uh but the one particular event that i remember the most is walking through 10 kilometers walking 10 kilometers through waste deep water in july 2005 when the city basically shut down because of heavy rainfall and flooding that makes you really wonder why in spite of all its problems is mumbai planning on more intensification and more development when it should actually be focusing on its infrastructural deficiencies first so this case study um focuses on redevelopment of the old historic core of mumbai which consists about sixteen thousand old dilapidated buildings and um which are planned to be replaced by these new swanky towers the main method or the main theory that i have used is that of urban metabolism so metabolism is defined as the sum of the biological biological chemical and physical processes that occur within an organism or an ecosystem to enable it to exist indefinitely and cities have been compared to living organisms in the sense that cities transform raw materials fuel water and material water into built environment human biomass and waste so urban metabolism is the sum total of the technical and socio-economic processes that occur in the cities resulting in growth production of energy and the elimination of waste urban metabolism is influenced by several factors such as the energy and material that flows in its potential to harness or harvest energy and water its shape its architecture its morphology the population densities and a lot of other things um and there there have been different models and the different extent extensions proposed uh but the one that i looked at particularly was proposed by minx and her colleagues which provides three extensions to the standard model which is intake of energy that goes through the urban system and waste and the extensions are the environmental impacts the urban quality and also what is happening within the urban system the patterns and the drivers that define this urban system um so uh to just provide a quick history of mumbai um the seven islands that come to constitute mumbai were inhabited initially by fishing farming and toddy tapping communities and they were ruled by a number of kingdoms for for several centuries until the portuguese settlers came in in the 19th 1530s and then they passed it on to um to the british in uh 1961 when uh their prince got married to the british uh princess got married to the british prince and then it was given to the east india company seven years later who set up the trading post so uh this this is the seven islands which over a period of time have undergone a lot of uh infrastructural development and reclamation to to become what it is today so over the years um sorry over the years uh east india company changed its policy from trade to conquest and they started doing a lot of infrastructural projects large scale reclamations construction of roadways railways housing commercial districts and the principal reason for mumbai's transformation is considered to be um the development of the cotton textile industry and post-independence um mumbai continued growing along then toward growing northwards um they're forming the greater mumbai and subsequently in 1967 the mumbai metropolitan region so it's been growing into the main uh mainland from being just a combination of seven islands so that that's the urbanization history of mumbai um so initially there were no because it wasn't planned to become a big city or a central central hub there were no plans of how to develop the city it just grew organically and the the development control development controls based on spatial dimensions were introduced in the 20th century but the development plan actually came into being only in the 1960s only in 1964 and in 1939 the first major legislation for mumbai's rent restriction act was enacted which basically flows the existing rents and the control rents resulted in poor condition of the housing since the rental income was inadequate to pay for repairs so as a result in 1969 says taxes were introduced and a levy was placed on landlords by the municipal authorities to who overtook over took over property repairs and and reconstruction if necessary so says buildings uh were constructed in the 1970s uh these these ones in the front that we can see and and over the years the government has been trying to encourage more development into the in the city but because of the low fsi uh proposed in the development plans it has not been able to do so so it has tried to increase the fsi um a few times in the past but nothing really happened because these are already very dense developments and then finally in 2009 the development control rules uh 33 79 was introduced which is basically to promote cluster developments so this uh project uh we are looking at or which was the first main case study is is one of those projects um vendi bazar is located in in the north of seaward uh in the island city of mumbai and the existing site consists of mostly low rise buildings ranging from one to seven floors um with an average height of about three to four floors excluding two existing towers on the site and the 266 buildings in the existing development are to be replaced by these 23 independent structures which includes this 15 towers over five podiums so that is going to drastically change the form urban form uh in this part of the city as you can see from what it is in the it what it would still be in the surrounding areas and the proposed development is funded by the construction and sale of additional floor space uh mainly for residential use so that is going to increase the number of units it's like it is about 1400 extra residential units will be which will be constructed to fund this project so the fsi increases to almost 10 from being about four four or five which was currently um so the site coverage and and here you can see the development in in in a cross section and how the heights and the distance between the buildings are going to change that complete change in build form um the existing stall towers are gonna basically become drops uh so the site coverage would reduce by 15 percent and the active front range would reduce by 69 percent so the density of the development uh would increase by about 25 percent to about 1000 units per hectare so that is like a big increase in a already really dense development um again i will not go into the details um because you can always refer to them in the book uh but what i would like to focus on is that the increase in in in the metabolic flows the water consumption which is in support which is expected to increase 198 percent and the electricity consumption also uh is exp the residential electricity consumption is supposed to increase by 121 percent you can see how the how the differences are in the different types of uses and also the reason why the residential electricity use actually increases and then the commercial electricity is used is also supposed to increase by about 110 percent also mainly because of the increased use of air conditioners due to the change in the built form and also the social aspirations of the people and of course uh with increase in intake comes increased output um which is like increasing the solid waste generation but more importantly it also in the carbon emissions now the carbon emissions are mainly from two main sources which is electricity uh from within the buildings usage and and from the vehicles but uh as we can see the major increase is from electricity um but the thing is since the the source of these electricities are the source of the electricity is usually outside the cement city limits uh their their effects are usually not really considered so um so this this is this is one of the uh predatory uh effects of of these dense large uh developments which which really um take the resources away from um from other places uh and like by the construction of dams or the construction of um um so thermal power plants which are which have a very negative effect on the environment and all the people living around it but not on the actual settlement but but also the increase in emissions from vehicles which is gonna affect us which is which is expected to happen within the site of course uh so in terms of urban quality uh the idea is to improve the infrastructure by providing more civic and amenities and providing more open spaces and new technologies are supposed to be incorporated but their potential to actually produce or supplement the increase is very minimal and um while the while the infrastructure is supposed to be developed within the site the connecting sites are not taken into consideration so the pipelines for example or water supply and drainage pipes within the site are supposed to be new new pipelines are supposed to be put in but they still connect to the old system so unless there is a systematic development of the infrastructure it is not going to be uh useful uh and and then comes the accessibility um and there is supposed to be an increase in the um increase in and pers in the use of personal vehicles with more provision of parking spaces um but not much thought has been given to the public and semi-public modes um the housing quality is supposed to increase because improve uh because the new houses are supposed to be one bigger newer and have more amenities but the the but it has a negative effect on the um like we discussed on the metabolic flows and employment can come in in terms of employment and community uh like i mentioned before the the active frontage is actually going to reduce and a lot of the in this lot of the commercial activities in this area is basically based on being visible to the to the users so that that would be affected drastically and we are we expect the the kind of commercial activity that takes place now would change quite drastically and of course like i mentioned before um the there is increase in there would be an increase in in the pollution levels so after having a look at this particular site uh we extrapolated the data to all all of these previously discussed properties which is um basically all these gray areas within the island city and that's about about 16 000 um buildings like i mentioned before low-rise buildings um and which are expected to be replaced by um tall towers and the redevelopment of the site would result in an increase in population of about 25 percent greater than the existing um than the existing uh and in terms of metabolic flows um without going into the numbers if if we just look up we look at the broad picture the water requirement would increase to an equivalent of constructing a new dam uh the electricity consumption would increase to the that of um building a new thermal power plant uh and like i discussed before all of these have um an effect both within the with within the development but also have far reaching consequences outside the limits of the development and and with well that there is provision for more parking spaces about 50 000 new car car parking spaces um and while the um while the idea was to actually increase open space provisions um it and it would create new open spaces but because of the increase in the population density the per person availability of open space would actually reduce uh to 1.07 square meter as opposed to 1.27 uh existing currently so we we see that there is a lot more negative implication as as compared to positive so the main implications would be that intensification cannot reduce the metabolic flows even with the incorporation of new technolo even with the incorporation of renewable technologies uh in cities of developing countries which are characterized by very low ecological footprint currently and very high population densities it reduces the potential of the city to meet its resource requirements through the incorporation of renewable technologies and increases the demand on the hinterland and increase infrastructural provision can improve the quality of life but improving but providing the required infrastructure itself has negative impacts on the environment and the urban quality of life and the need uh to and therefore we need to stop considering in intensification or increasing fsi as in the case of indian cities as a means to solve urban problems uh finally uh i would like to conclude by just commenting on on on the whole idea of the book which is uh basically that the number of mega cities is estimated to rise in the uh from from in the in the future and in terms of scale in terms of scale and rate of growth um the cases that we discuss um will eventually also con comfort their limits to the resources needed for urban metabolism to operate effectively so in this book um we discussed how vertical and dense mega projects offer very little resilience i mean from all the case studies um we see that because the motivation behind scale and verticality is particularly due to the image and the desire to become world class especially in the case of mumbai the tower blocks are perceived as modern and high standard of living so and and then the cities are really trying to showcase themselves as world-class smart and livable and green and eco and all these different uh labels that is actually promoting compaction um but the cumulative effect of this rapid urbanization uh is is is resulting in not only environmental uh problems but also a lot of uh social segregation and change in the uh social mix of uh of the development of the redeveloped areas so smart technologies can allow for effective use of resources but ultimately limit the ability availability of the resources so as as cities grow and demand grow and demand more ever in ever greater quantities of resources from the hinterland so increased demand of resources is like a direct result of increasing population but it is also a result of the policies regarding the urban form um and a top-down master plan city or a master planned uh mega redevelopment um uh and indulge in this kind of uh uh vision of of um which which actually takes away the economic diversification the economic diversification away from the fossil fuels but in reality they are actually uh they actually predate resources to try and stay afloat in an increasingly competitive um um okay they they actually predate on the resources from from this hinterland and mega projects and mega redevelopments that basically grant experiments to uh directly or indirectly um um mold the nation's feelings and um so so as to attract uh more more visitors more of uh attract more commercial investments affluent workers and it's and when we we we discuss how uh the how i mean while that is true they actually uh reduce them i mean they uh they can neither reduce the metabolic flows or uh even with the incorporation of renewable technologies um um they they cannot yeah exactly they cannot um they cannot reduce the metabolic flows and instead they reduce the potential of the city to meet its resource requirements through the incorporation of renewable technologies so um and that's all from me thank you thank you thank you so much thank you for actually sharing your view on predatory urbanism by presenting the case study of the urban renewal of mumbai so now i would like to invite our third speaker alessandro melissa to give you to share with us his his thoughts so alessandro milis is the curator of the italian national pavilion eddie venice biennale and he is also professor of architecture and innovation in the school of architecture at the university of portsmouth where he teaches in the fields of climate sensitive design sustainable strategies for communications environmental policies radical theories and criticism resilience and sustainable conservation before joining the university of portsmouth he was the head of the technology area and director of the postgraduate engagement at the school of architecture and playing alessandro melis has been appointed a guest professor in austria in germany and has been a honorary fellow at the edinburgh school of architecture and also a keynote speaker at the china academy of art at the moma new york and the venice biennale has published extensively books and articles in europe new zealand and the usa and his projects have also been widely published in international magazines alessandro the floor is yours thank you very much for this kind of presentation and simona and of course thank you also the author of the book agatino and uh it's a pleasure for me to be here uh thank you for having me and i will i'm out here in a double position in the sense that i'm also uh let's say the host of the event in the in the position of the curator of the pavilion which made me particularly grateful to you all also to the to our guests and panelists because i would like to say that this this book is has been i don't know if i ever told latino but it's been kind of influential especially in a certain phase of the design of the italian pavilion very helpful uh many reflection came from the discussion that tina and i had about this book so i would say that uh i was particularly happy to to have you here in the italian pavilion virtually i'm very far now by the way i'm very close to my window here i see the united nations building i'm in new york now and i think this is also kind of inspiring because a lot of what i would like to say is related to the 17 goals of the united nations so uh what i i was trying to take the the double uh pleasure condition the double pleasure situation he this one and i want also to uh to highlight for those who don't know that this book has been highly influential also for my work i would like to underline especially two aspects of the book that for me have been particularly significant and i've been common ground for the discussion between me and the cultural group uh regarding the concept of the italian pavilion these two aspects were the level of politics that is uh needed to be discussed every time that we talk about sustainable sustainability in architecture and resilience [Music] the fact that also discussion about the possibility to build architecture or cities for climate change is must consider the the potential war against the the forces the conservative sources of the capitalism that are particularly smart and prepare and make a sort of resistance to the change and the second aspect which is very much related to the first is the speed of mass communication which is which maybe starts as an instrument let's say the the i mean the taxonomy of for example the discussion on resilience that starts from the uh in the within the research environment but very quickly can be cannibalized and digested by the national sources of the society and can be used to do the let's say the opposite of what we expect the job should be so i think that this was a discussion this is a reflection that is also part of the phase of the book and these i would say that this was particularly uh evident also in the presentation that an indiana made where we have seen very clearly that the potential ideas that the beginning that were [Music] at the foundation of the project uh where most of them were more let's say uh buzzing words that were more let's say instruments to prepare the basis of uh of the more okay the speculative project uh and uh if not green washing so i would like to share very quickly uh a presentation about this if i can find it okay this aspect let me check if i can um and as you can see from the from the uh log of the italian pavilion probably is already immediate present the the the need of understanding the responsibility and the role of activism that we need to take in consideration every time with that we face issues related to the city as we said at the beginning we know that everything was already there but has been somehow accelerated by the uh by the crisis or let's say differently the crisis the climate crisis has emphasized the criticality of our society marginalization has become higher and let's say all the differences have become more and more evident today when we talk about taxonomy it's always important to consider that something is happening that obliged us to rethink our surrounding reality uh in a more holistic way this is the first time that humanity has to face the dimension of the uh crisis uh like this like the one that we are facing now but also there is a problem in understanding this crisis this is why it's for it's easier for let's say the predatory forces of the economy to control the change because this is the first time that which the history of humanity the the the crisis is coming from the sky the blue skies as well as being seen as something particularly [Music] positive while everything was coming the the dystopian signs of our society were coming from darkness and so on so this this create as a difficulty in the management in the way we handle the the the terminology and the let's say the main elements of the discussion uh under a certain level of rationality as you can see here the in a very simple way the the idea of the italian pavilion is to try to understand how it is possible to sign a new new agreement with the environment uh starting from uh let's say the the the historic compact city not from uh new foundation newtown foundation this this is not only related to what we have seen before so the mega project at the cost that goes beyond the fact that they are apparently sustainable this also comes from transdisciplinary research which is again another aspects which is highly relevant in the publication in predatory urbanism as a research publication this is not even anything not even something new we can all remember a discussion about these sorry i forgot to do this a general discussion about the fact that we are living in a reality now for the reason i was mentioning before that is not static anymore it's dynamic is fluctuant and it's not progressive this is also very important these considerations don't come from the field of architecture or let's say they we are assuming them but they derive from consideration coming from the new taxonomy evolutionary biology new generation of biologists taught us that the world is not like we interpret this in architecture 2 000 years of history of civilization architecture are not necessary uh the best situation that allow us to deal with these crisis uh here you see an example of one of the projects presented in the talent pavilion which is a worker tower by arturo vittori and the reason why we presented this project is just a representation of this butterfly effect we have to consider today that if we put a brick in our soil in italy for instance there is an immediate effect in terms of uh co2 emissions that is can be even measured perfectly in terms of percentage of decentrification of these 10 meters a day of desertification in the in the uh global south areas so this this is an an evident a clear sign of the fact that now we have to consider the dynamicity the flu dynamic of the environment not only for ethical or moral reasons but because this is a precise responsibility we have uh what i'm trying to say is that it's evident the mega project that we have seen before even if they have for instance 100 percent of energy generated but photovoltaic panels this is not this is going to be very far to be sufficient to um generate a positive effect on the planet because what is not calculated beside the the the life cycle uh assessment is the fact that the inc at nunc idea of architecture is something that doesn't exist anymore a mega project can have an immediate impact negative impact even if it's truly interpreted in a technological way as sustainable and this impact as i was as i was saying before is an impact that goes beyond the resources or let's say that resources have an immediate impact in the social pressure so what we are changing is the definition of the physical condition of the troposphere with consequences that are uncontrollable at the moment and they are controllable in terms of resources as we see here and when we consider the fact that in in within 30 years we will arrive in a condition in which half of the world population will be below the level of nutrition today we are the calculation uh is uh 20 so one billion out of seven we have to consider that uh there is something that goes beyond ethical beyond morality we know for history and we have a one case which is in the 50 536 after the probably closest climate crisis we had due to vulcans in in iceland they changed completely the society at least in europe with millions of deaths what we call the gothic wars so what i'm trying to say is that what we have to expect when 50 of the population is under the level of nutrition is a permanent wart permanent ward worldwide war so there is only one way probably to go beyond to overcome this what we can call impossible equation the fact that we are going in a way that degrees of population and reduction of resources are uh basically um uncontrollable and also the fact that this condition is mainly due to the construction uh to the way we build cities and how we build cities the solution the solution i'm despite what i'm saying till now i'm a fundamental i'm an optimistic person so the the idea is that of course we have to consider transdisciplinarity as something that can teach us many things like the fact for example that high density compactness is very equivalent to what in exception is the use of the functional computation of existing structure and the fact that resilience mainly depend by the disorder so i i like to highlight that this book is in a way in a way trying to break a stigma the stigma of the order uh i'm not the first one talking about this we know that uh this is a discussion that even christopher alexander or richard sennett since the 70s is doing so let's say that every time that we build architecture consider the order the organization the planning deterministic planning as as a tool as a strategy without considering the possibility of combining not not as an authentic but combining these with informal practices what we are doing is basically reducing the possibility of the community to express themselves and make their community more resilient and more questive and what we didn't know when christopher alexander was writing this and when richard cena was starting his discussion on this topic is that this is also uh creating more co2 emissions so there is something that is not working something that we have to change in the in the taxonomy and this is this is what the book is trying to do if we consider informal cities are the generation of the city uh while we know today that the formal city is the main cause of uh co2 emission and main cause of crisis while the informal cities is the place that will suffer uh the uh the the consequence or consequences of these aspects so it's clear that in this contradiction there is the evidence of the fact that the the taxonomy the current taxonomy of architecture is not working needs to be changed and this is not something that is uh underestimated by the united nations when they uh specified that uh integration is as important as the goals so we are all aware that we have to embrace this complexity it's not the time anymore to say okay we have to uh to face the poverty we have to challenge the poverty without considering the problem of climate this is not possible anymore so we are in a situation in which also the extreme extremization of climate is telling on one thing that is very clear it's not possible to have a sustainable society without having a just society and it's not because uh it's an ethical position it's not because it's a moral position because as thermo pioneer the most influential uh biologist of evolution italian biology of evolution [Music] following the lessons of steven j gould is telling is telling us that nature is not moral so it doesn't care if we are just or not this is not the point the point is that we know that this is uh diversity variability and redundancy of organism are the only way to make this organism resistant resilient to change capable to uh to be adaptable to changes so uh considering the heuristic value of biology what we know today is that the main possibility the the the the only way to make our societies more resilient to crisis is to make them more diverse so in a way in a very simple way uh it's just like repeating what bernardovsky in a way intuitively already said we are not talking about architecture in the history of architecture we are not talking about architecture we are not talking about planning we are mostly talking about a very limited selection of culture coming from the western world and what we know today this is why a discussion of diversity is important to all levels is that this selection is done by white male 1 uh with an age between 50 and 70 years old like myself by the way so i am a dinosaur so that's clear el antino is very close to be a dinosaur as well so so it's gla it's clear it's clear that i i i totally agree i could not be more happy more happy when anthony sorry when latino called me to write the the preface of this book because he was talking about predatory and in the same period i was writing a book which was about zombie city because in a way i thought that what we are doing is not only a predatory um keeping a life a predatory economy but we are keeping life in zombie economy in the sense that the predatory economy that agatino is considering is economy that we are trying to keep alive as if it's more convenient but what we are doing is is investing billions in keeping alive a dead body and we have quantitative data that they are telling us that this is the situation so i would like to simply to conclude with the images of bernardovsky that are showing us that there is also a stigma in the idea of informality that need to be discussed because every time we are talking about informality as if this is somehow a representation of what in this case not positive like we say from a perspective the united nations are describing as a lack of infrastructure and so on so basically islams no if we if we if we re if we check 20 of population is living in slums but not more than 20 percent of population is living in plant city so according to the martin school of the university of oxford there is a 60 of uh life that take place in the urban settlements that don't belong to plan or slums so what is this this is a this is uh this is a dark architecture that matter of architecture that need to be considered and this is what what stays at the marginality of the predatory economy and it is exactly there that we i'm sure we can find the opportunities for overcoming the crisis thank you thank you thank you thank you so much alessandro so let's move on to the next presenter natalie koch natalie is an associate professor in the department of geography in the environment at syracuse university's maxwell school of citizenship and public affairs she's a political geographer and she's working on geopolitics and nationalism urbanism and this state power in the resource-rich states of the arabian peninsula in addition to over 60 journal articles and chapters she's author of the geopolitics of the spectacle space synadoc and the new capitals of asia published by cornwall university press in 2018 she's the editor of the book a critical geographies of sport space power and sport and global perspective published by routledge in 2017 and co-editor of the handbook on the changing geographies of the state and in spaces of geopolitics published a new edited collection specializing authoritarianism will be released with syracuse university press early the next year in 2020 please join me in welcoming natalie thank you simona for that introduction and and to tino and adita for inviting me to participate uh today so i will just read some some comments and and also i'll speak a little bit freely but hopefully i will keep the the comments short because i know we are also short on time um so with that uh yeah i'll i'll just sort of speak under the rubric of what i'm thinking in terms of scale authoritarianism and urban sustainability uh which are are important themes in my own research but also important themes in uh in the book so the concept of sustainability is as everybody and this that that's listening uh is well aware is incredibly nebulous it can mean many different things for different people um but however vague the term might be it has a very global reach today it pervades formal and informal politics it unfolds in parliaments corporate boardrooms local farmers markets and of course architecture studios and classrooms yet sustainability has also been slower to permeate some contexts than others and many parts of the global south including the three case studies in predatory urbanism qatar malaysia and india are often seen to be holdouts or sort of late comers to adopting uh policies to promote sustainability in their cities and and just more generally but as the book shows that situation has changed pretty dramatically in recent years and state planners all across the world are investing pretty heavily in these various sustainability programs and all range of efforts uh in the more cynical term which i actually share uh the cynicism that it comes out in the book as well about greenwashing um that these a lot of these projects these efforts are green washing particular development agendas but this is happening within a global context where quote-unquote being green is seen as a sort of a marker of progressive thinking and sort of a way to show that you're being modern so the nationalistically minded planners in the private and public sector i would i would note are frequently harnessing that image and ideals of sustainability to index their ins their aspirations to global leadership and to advance their development agendas as being ultra modern so in considering these issues through the lens of predatory uh urbanism tino and adita draw our attention to the broader glo the broader social and spatial reach of mega projects that aim to sell this vision of being green and modern so i want to just touch on a handful of issues that the book raises but i should first acknowledge that i'm a scholar primarily of the arabian peninsula so i come to this conversation with a particular regional bias and particularly enjoyed the the parts of the book focusing on the gulf countries but that said i'm also a scholar of spectacle as as you heard my book on the geopolitics of spectacle is about spectacular capital city projects in central asia the gulf and southeast asia so i'm intimately familiar with a lot of the dynamics that they describe but also the power of a trans-regional inter-asian analytical approach and i'll come back to that point lastly i should also say as a geographer i'm also a scholar of authoritarianism and the the other forthcoming book that you heard about about spatializing authoritarianism is is also a lens that i was sort of reading uh predatory urbanism through so with those caveats um i'll just highlight three of the themes that i think are worth further discussion um probably not here today or to give the the link that we have but also just in the interdisciplinary community of urban scholarship and practice um the first the theme that i think really comes out in the book is this um that the act of defining a city is also about locating its hinterlands and scaling its hinterlands um so what the what the book sort of draws our attention to is to shift away from this idea that there's like the city and then there's some sort of somehow there's an externality but rather this i focus on uh the predatory nature of urbanism is to look at how those things that we often are taught to categorize as externalities how those things are brought in um and consumed and and bringing that inside so this is something that i've been really interested in as well in my book on spectacle thinking about spectacle and it's others and that those others have lots of different forms and so with this idea of predatory urbanism what we see is that sheer diversity of how those sort of hinterlands can be defined and i think what the book does so well is it calls our attention to the the fact that we can we can take that concept of a hinterland and we can be much more creative in how we think about that um and that by doing that by looking beyond the borders of a city in in different ways is actually really productive so we're not just thinking about um you know the municipal border and the beyond but also state borders of countries well beyond that and the gulf cities are a great example of this their hinterland reaches far into many different parts of asia and africa to get labor but also to get resources etc so you can look beyond state borders resource borders thinking about things like sand uh water energy all sorts of things are they imaginative to borders we didn't really talk about that or the previous speakers didn't really speak too much about that but how ideas circulate in a particular way uh and and how this is another way of imagining a kind of hinterland or the extension of a of a city so um the second theme that i i found particularly rich and and with further discussion and consideration is is just the power of this trans-regional research uh which which i mentioned i i myself have done as well um and and i think what what the book shows and and what i've always enjoyed about this international trans regional work is that you can you can use it to kind of unpack some of the assumptions that you have about basic concepts so some of those basic concepts like authoritarianism or sustainability so how do you locate these phenomena how do you define them cross-regional research really forces us not to rely on oversimplified versions of how those things are understood how they are interpreted locally how they're practiced locally um and and just in general how you then solve an issue like authoritarianism or unsustainable practices right so i think the trans-regional research kind of it destabilizes a lot of those essences that that can often kind of creep into these conversations about something like authoritarianism or sustainability so um i think uh then we'll kind of just move quickly to the topic of authoritarianism and the environment which is the third sort of major theme that that i really um focused on in my own reading of the book because i i really do think that there needs to be a lot more attention to how authoritarian practices creep into the broader like communities related to sustainab
2021-07-10