[artinfo] MONU NEWSLETTER: MONU #11 RELEASED

[MONU - magazine on urbanism]

27-08-09 // NEW ISSUE - <http://www.monu-magazine.com>CLEAN URBANISM

Do we simply have to stop having sex to produce 
Clean Urbanism - i.e. an urbanism that is 
dedicated to minimizing both the required inputs 
of energy, water, and food for a city as well as 
its waste output of heat, air pollution as CO2, 
methan, and water pollution, Samo Pedersen asks 
in his piece “Sci-fi greenery..or just 
Responsibility?”. In fact Randall Teal sees the 
growing world population frequently ignored in 
discussions on sustainability, as he points out 
in his article “Coming Clean: Owning Up to the 
Real Demands of a Sustainable Existence”. Fewer 
people spend less energy, and as the gas and oil 
supply will come to an end sooner or later, 
saving energy may be a cheaper and smarter 
solution for cities than depending on renewable 
energies, as Gerd Hauser, one of the leading 
researcers on the implementation of the EU 
Directive on Energy Performance of Buildings, 
explains in an interview with us, entitled “Domes 
over Manhatten”. Although sustainability has 
recently become a cache misère for our lack of 
intent, a trendy make-up hiding our incompetence, 
with Clean Urbanism being its apotheosis as 
Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia (WAI) 
maintain in their contribution “Rendering the 
Clean”, energy self-sufficient cities are 
technically possible as Gerd Hauser states and 
explains using a five-point manifesto. Greg 
Keeffe and Simon Swietochowski support that view 
by introducing their “Bio-Port” project, a vision 
of a “Free Energy City” set in Liverpool, where 
the old dockyards have been transformed into 
bio-productive algae farms. Furthermore, the 
Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) 
illustrates in its project “Zeekracht – The North 
Sea Masterplan” how wind farms could be clustered 
along an Energy Super-Ring in the North Sea, 
distributing national surpluses and supplying 
regional energy needs efficiently and profitably. 
On the other hand, Clean Urbanism cannot only be 
understood from a purely technocratic 
perspective, but also needs a social one as 
Claudio Astudillo Barra articulates in his 
article “Regenerative Ecologies – A Prototypical 
Approach to the Territory”, introducing Felix 
Guattari’s ideas of ecosophy. On such social 
aspects Rogier van den Berg focuses in his piece 
on “The Cooperative City”, where a community is 
created that triggers individual initiative and 
the cooperation of its users to generate 
collective values. The Cooperative City requires 
a flexible plan with an open end that is only 
guided by one set of rules, described by Bryan 
Norwood and the Jackson Community Center as 
“Mania: An Emergent Sustainability of Density and 
Intensity”, created by the disorganized, 
hyperactivity of an actualized system with no 
specified, singular goal, a bottom-up phenomenon 
that emerges from the individual events of 
architecture within the city, combined with the 
ideology of urbanism conceived as anti-capitalism 
and anti-homogenization. It is mania, and mania 
is clean.

Contents MONU#11:

Sci-fi Greenery ...or just Responsibility? By Samo Pedersen
Clean Cities - Dirty People By Matteo Muggianu
Dirty Consumerism By Nikonus Pappas
Coming Clean By Randall Teal
Domes over Manhattan - Interview with Gerd Hauser By Bernd Upmeyer
Rendering the Clean By Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia (WAI)
The Mobile Library Unit By John Southern
Where the Grass Is Greener By Tomorrow’sThoughtsToday
Clean around the Edges By Lee Altman
Bio - Port By Greg Keeffe and Simon Swietochowski
Zeekracht - The North Sea Masterplan By OMA
Scarcity: Bipolar Urbanism in the Sonoran Desert By Felipe Correa
Regenerative Ecologies By Claudio Astudillo Barra
Clean Energy is Dirty Business By Aleksander Tokarz
Dystopic Verdure By Jacob Ross Boswell
How to Win Poetic Praise and Influence Architects By Amanda Webb
The Cooperative City By Rogier van den Berg
Mania By Bryan Norwood and the Jackson Community Design Center

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