Towards a bio-urbanist policy for the Basque region
Excerpted from a long article by John Thackara, which cites many examples of alternative Basque urbanists working in this direction, against the starchitectural options still chosen by mainstream politicians and planners:
“Buildings conceived as icons, spectacles or tourism destinations have fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns. Bilbao’s Guggenheim is now one among hundreds of me-too cultural buildings around the world. As their number has grown, their capacity to attract attention, or differentiate their host city, has declined. Spoiled consumer-travelers are liable to lunch in the café, buy the t-shirt, and move on. That’s not a great return on all the time, work and money needed to bring these totemic edifices about.
The second objection to the Euskal Hiria strategy, and Guggenheim 2 as its emblem, is that they would stand for the high entropy economic model that caused the global crisis in the first place — and that is now dying.
If the iconic cultural building as a catalyst of development has run its course, and the Real Estate Industrial Complex is gone forever, is there an alternative?
A conference in Bilbao last week, organized by Fernando Golvano and Xabier Laka, challenged speakers to propose new models of development based on more artful and sustainable uses of the region’s social, landscape and natural assets.
My contribution was to say that a bioregion — more than a high-entropy “knowledge hub” preoccupied with abstraction — could be the ideal basis on which to re-imagine the future development of the Basque Country. At the scale of the city-region, a bioregional approach re-imagines the man-made world as being one element among a complex of interacting, co-dependent ecologies: energy, water, food, production and information.
The beauty of this approach is that it engages with the next economy, not the dying one we have now. Its core value is stewardship, not perpetual growth. It focuses on service and social innovation, not on the outputs of extractive industries. Being unique to its place, it fosters infinite diversity.
The idea of a bioregion also changes the ways we think about the cities we have now. It triggers people to seek practical ways to re-connect with the soils, trees, animals, landscapes, energy systems, water and energy sources on which all life depends. It re-imagines the urban landscape itself as an ecology with the potential to support us.
A bioregion is literally and etymologically a “life-place” — a unique area, in the words of American writer Robert Thayer, that is “definable by natural (rather than political) boundaries with a geographic, climatic, hydrological, and ecological character capable of supporting unique human and nonhuman living communities.”
A growing worldwide movement is looking at the idea of development through this fresh lens. Sensible to the value of natural and social ecologies, groups and communities are searching for ways to preserve, steward and restore assets that already exist — so-called net present assets — rather than thinking first about extracting raw materials to make new iconic buildings from scratch. “
