Cities, data, landscape
By: Invalid Syntax
Tags: Urban Planning, Climate Change, Landscape Architecture, Smart Cities, Architecture

Evolution. From the closed city to the global city.

The accelerated process of human migration and urban territorialization that began as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution meant one of the most circumstantial changes in the way of inhabiting the planet. For the first time in history, urban centers began to experience population growth that would continue to increase over the centuries. As a result, the natural world would begin to be increasingly subject to the requirements of urbanity. The culmination of this process, called the closing of the frontier, illustrates the end of the planetary exploration stage, where the predominance of the artificial world over the natural is a consequence of the triumph of the market in its task of registering, quantifying and commercializing all corners of the earth.

The culmination of this process, called the closing of the frontier, illustrates the end of the planetary exploration stage, where the predominance of the artificial world over the natural is a consequence of the triumph of the market in its task of registering, quantifying and commercializing all corners of the earth.

In this context, Neil Brenner, coordinator of the Urban Theory Laboratory at Harvard University, coined the concept of Urbanized Planet or Planetary Urbanization to name the process of reconfiguration of the territory in favor of human activities, where even the spaces furthest from the traditional city (from transoceanic routes and transcontinental highways to alpine and coastal tourist enclaves, natural parks and previously inaccessible areas such as deserts, oceans and mountains) become, due to their economic interdependence, integral parts of the world urban fabric. In this context the city evolved from a spatially delimited settlement unit towards the contemporary city, understood as a polycentric entity with diffuse or open edges that constitutes itself as a node within an interconnected global network. The transformation of the city is directly linked to the influence of the reduction of space-time barriers, as a result of advances in transport and telecommunications, in the expansion of the urban area of ​​influence –called Hinterland-. Before the Industrial Revolution, the hinterland of the city was limited directly to the needs and productive capacity of the settlement, thus restricting it to a ring of a few kilometers around it. Currently, the hinterland of the global city has expanded exponentially to reach the scale of the entire world, due to the ease of receiving and shipping products and raw materials around the planet.

Fig 2. Buenos Aires Hinterworld: Cities with the highest numbers of exchanges of goods and services with Buenos Aires.

Global city

As a consequence, the contemporary city and the processes involved in its operation and supply began to be recognized as the main responsible for climate change and other socio-environmental transformations such as loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, deforestation, acidification of the oceans and pollution, among others. Urban evolution and the transformation of nature are today more than ever linked in a dangerous process that, if not modified, could jeopardize the continuity of civilization as we know it. However, these concerns do not seem to have influenced the tools and strategies used for the contemporary planning of many cities, which continue to cling to anthropocentric organization concepts derived from modernity and based on a conception of the city as a static element, inert to changes over time. The persistence of clichés such as the organization of the city in exclusive categories (work, housing, transport, commerce) as a planning strategy, the proliferation of political propaganda about the relevance of investment destined to the repair of roads and urban beautification and the integrally engineering solutions, among others, are issues as problematic as the impossibility of urban planners in determining the socio-ecological implications (microclimates, energy consumption, inequality of opportunities) of the old and new urbanizations due to the abysmal separation between them and the new technologies, capable of tracking and visualizing urban trends (big-data, geographic information systems). At a global scale, new project and management strategies that propose a more symmetrical and compensatory relationship between the artificial and the natural are being put into practice in response to the inability of traditional urban planning to offer solutions to the main problems faced by today’s cities in relation to pollution, economic fluctuations, social inequality and climate change.

Urban evolution and the transformation of nature are today more than ever linked in a dangerous process that, if not modified, could jeopardize the continuity of civilization as we know it.