'Ecological Urbanism' - the term does not exactly trip off the tongue. On the contrary, it is an active disincentive, promising the worthy and the dull: buildings lost in generic greenery and garnished with wind turbines. At its worst, Ecological Urbanism trails these in its wake. At its best, it challenges the way we conceive of urban and non-urban, and the way we privilege the city as cultural construct over the city as metabolism - literal metabolism, taking in energy and resources and evacuating wastes. What is most dispiriting in the general refusal to engage with these processes is the inability to perceive the indivisibility of the environmental and the social, and both with the economic. Urban flooding, for example, isn't just a headline-grabbing aspect of climate volatility, it ruins lives and urban fabric and costs money to put right.
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