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an infrastructural operation. The alternative toolbox equips the town with the necessary infrastructure in the broad sense of the word: tools and elements that operate within the urban and natural landscape. They work together guiding the system of urbanization, all with a shared goal in which the urban space holds the landscape as its main component. The proposed elements tackle the urbanization process in an integrated way. A set of interventions is deployed simultaneously working on the layout of public space, road infrastructure, private development, urban design guidelines, building regulations, architecture for public programs, and landscaping. A piecemeal and guided approach permits greater flexibility but also offers space for close collaboration with inhabitants and other user groups. This feedback mechanism allows the results of the interventions to be continuously evaluated and redirected in order to adjust the design of future operating infrastructures. Infrastructural lands as an opportunity for natural and urban space The large-scale infrastructures supporting economical systems and controlling hydraulic flows occupy vast lands within the contemporary city. The infrastructural omnipresence has directed the design profession and academic research to explore the logic of contemporary infrastructures. Recent scale jumps and the development of physical infrastructure for data flows are just a few of the phenomena architects and urbanists are dealing with. While taxonomies of infrastructural landscapes are made and new typologies are designed, this argument on operative urbanism seeks not only to question our notion of infrastructure not only regarding its internal system of flow but also to respond to direct physical encounters of its surroundings. The integrated approach to infrastructure can combine the hardware resulting from a technological viewpoint with what could be regarded as software: The ability of the element to respond and act upon input from surrounding systems based on its internal design is related to the operational behavior of programmed algorithms, hence software. Operative urbanism in which infrastructure is designed as operative in a population therefore manages to reclaim infrastructural lands as valuable urban and natural landscapes.

South bank VIDEO ANALYSIS Jackie Chi Ho Cheng


bUILdINg AS NATURE Dennis Dollens Self Nature A commonly held misconception is that humans are creation’s panicle, blessed with dominion and pillaging rights to the earth (with no corresponding responsibility); I’m thinking of an alternative scenario. The plan is straightforward: Mirror public-library privileges, whose temporary loans are contingent on care of the book and mandatory return. Only, in this scenario, the library’s stacks are nature’s resources. Here, literacy means ecoliteracy, guiding bioremediation toward the environment while nurturing ideas for its care and understanding. Recycling nature’s library of elements, forces, and life is my essay’s substrate, a growing medium for the cultivar-idea that nature produces consciousness, thoughts, and ideas, and in turn, they produce design. This formulation seems clear: Design is part of nature. And I think now is the time to reweave architecture, planning, and design into nature’s plaited matrix of life. Toward this goal, I found in John Rajchman’s introduction to Pure Immanence, by Giles Deleuze, a constructive observation outlining what Deleuze learned from Hume1. And I think Rajchman’s view applies beyond his philosophical subject, becoming forceful for us when discussing design’s environmental and genetic role in an era of industrialized nature. More than merely mix –and match ideas from Rajchman, Deleuze, and others, including Dawkins, Leibniz, and Whitehead, I’m tying to extend their concepts. By cross-pollinating their thoughts I hope to support a design polemic in which ideas are understood as natural forces, like gravity and electromagnetism. If I’m hijacking ideas from these authors out of their original literary or philosophical context, it’s because they each carry necessary thought-molecules for discussing two difficult, related concepts. First, that architecture, urban planning, and design are genetic extensions of human thought; second, that ideas are genetically originated electromagnetic forces.

Implicit in Venter’s synthetic biology experiments, as well as those taking place in other labs, is the transformation of existing paradigms of life and styles of living; yet shifting perspectives are notoriously difficult. Extrapolating from cell theory into design theory is equally dicey, but suggests potential architectures imbued with lifelike biology hosting communities of bioremeadiating bacteria or plants within wall membranes or structural networks. Pushing this line of thought—if we broaden our concepts of mineral elements and molecular forces as constituents of life and consider applying bacteria and synthetic life as architectural materials or ingredients, we can employ science and technology to rehabilitate cities and buildings within the context of design. Taking cities and buildings seriously as latent bioremeadiators, even in their present states, we could begin to categorize them as protonatural. Seen as structures with growth potential, possessing vast vertical surfaces and valuable wall membranes—the physical interface of interior and exterior environments—we might “farm” them as pollution sensors and air filters. Additionally, if prosaically, we could cultivate existing buildings’ environmental assets, fostering interior water recovery and nurturing microclimates and growing conditions, as well as creatively designing for obvious untapped solar, wind, and water harvesting, thus bringing biodesign into close proximity with day-to-day living. Design becomes a part of neighborhoods, no longer relegated to mere studio activities divorced from constructed life. If we set goals for transforming buildings and cities into living systems, casting a positive atmosphere for bioremediation is critical for reversing perceptions that architecture and urbanisms are large dead objects. Retrofitting synthetic biology and eco technologies into existing structures can deliver rapid reversals from environmental liabilities to environmental assets. Helping buildings join local and regional information systems with remote sensing will bring them into global information networks, with potential benefits ranging from energy consumption, urban temperature control, water conservation, and even wildlife habitat

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Consider: If we can conceive new forms, botanic relationships, and genetic procedures for hybridizing cities and buildings, we will be able to extend the more difficult idea of cities and buildings as life forms into our understanding. For example, recent breakthroughs by teams working with genome-sequencing scientist J. Craig Venter have, as the New York Times reported, “successfully transplanted the genome of one species of bacteria into another,” demonstrating that synthetic life may be

created to answer environmental problems. The creation of a synthetic bacterium is intended to “make cells that might take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and produce methane,” potentially reducing dependency on fossil fuels.2 Furthermore, related discoveries may aid water recovery in drought-stressed areas and eventually feed toxic waste to single-celled microorganisms with the potential for on-site, in-building sewage and toxic-substance reformation.


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