ArchiLab's Urban Experiments

Vast Dickensian shantytowns and slums ring the great cities of South America, Asia and Africa. What answers has science got to this historic challenge? Maybe Vienna has a few. That is where the UN Population Division has offices, on the city’s outskirts by a pine forest, housed in a modernised palace. That is where, in 1996, their head demographer assured me that the world population will grow by 33 per cent, to nine billion, but then plateau and stabilise by about 2060. So, how to combine the old with the new, as symbolised by those rustic UN offices and by Vienna itself? New Scientist magazine summed up the answer this way in an editorial in June 2006: вЂGreens are prone to idealising the past. They instinctively look back to a pre-industrial pastoral idyll, or to the age of hunter-gatherers living in harmony with their environment. In this view, urbanisation and the rise of the mega-city are harbingers of doom. City dwellers, after all, make up only half of the world’s population but consume three quarters of the resources and generate three quarters of its pollution.’ The magazine notes all the urban experiments from China to Australia, and counsels: вЂThis is the challenge environmentalists should embrace ...»