[Un]sustained cities: [pre]visions of the future.

10-SEPT-2020.

The [un]sustained city

We have reached a time in which the term sustainability is so recent yet widely spread. The concept arrives in a decaying environment and in a growing eager of people of all areas to fight for something in common: towards a sustainable community.

But, what comes to be a sustainable community when it already reached (not to go back) the status of unsustainable. It is a multifactorial problem in which not only us, architects, are fighting against. We shall ally with environmentalists, scientists, activists, and the general public towards one main goal: make the cities less unsustainable or, at least, stop the growth of unsustainability.

Referring to the book released for this year’s Mextrópoli congress 1, the world and its cities are ever changing, none of the solutions can envision future problems, nothing is quite certain. Changes shall be made to stop the situation from worsening. We are now building to host the machines that store all of our data, we are consuming resources we can not afford to have inside the densely populated cities.

COVID-19 acts as a catalyser for interdisciplinar work between architecture and other areas. At the end of the day, public spaces are not the same without people in them. Housing has got a privileged position in this new era, and we value even more open spaces where voiding social distancing shall be difficult.

We are not fixers nor destroyers

We can not fix mistakes from the past. At the end of the day, damage is already done. Overpopulation? The solution is not bringing down those overpopulated habitational developments. Much traffic? The solution is clearly not centralising power and industry in one zone.

Rem Koolhaas stated that We were making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea

Not everything is lost when we reevaluate our relationship with what surrounds us: the environment in general, but more specifically, the city. It is host of our lives and us, as inhabitants shall fight and move towards a new city.

The antidote to chaos is not order, is the perfect balance between order and chaos

Jordan Peterson said. We shall not impose tyranny in (re)ordering what we have, but we shall de-centralize power forces within the city, re-evaluate consumption and over-consumption of products. Evaluate what is truly necessity and what is desire. Not only as regular persons, but as the builders of the future.

Always reminding that we are not fixers nor destroyers.

Lo que hace falta es una revolución sin manos

What is missing, is a revolution without hands. This congress and its range of conferences show us the other side of architecture. The side fighting for a change not only in the skyline, nor in a plot. A change, a revolution in the way we think, the invisible change with merely large repercussions.

As we are forming students with yet a lot of way to transit, this opportunities show us that we can in fact change the way things are, and most importantly, that for changing we depend not only in the ramifications of our own area, but in other areas striving for the same change.

What if we simply declare that there is no crisis – redefine our relationship with the city not as its makers but as its mere subjects, as its supporters? 3

1. Ciudad (In)sostenible, Arquine. 2020.
2. Koolhaas, R. What Ever Happened to Urbanism
3. ibidem