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San Rocco 10:

Ecology

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By 2050, the worlds population will be somewhere between nine and ten billion.
This means that India will have a population of around
1.6 billion; Nigeria, 390 million; Pakistan, 340 million; Indonesia, 290 million; Mexico, 140 million; and Egypt, 120
million. In 1950, India had a population of around 360
million; Nigeria, 30 million; Pakistan, 40 million; Indonesia, 80 million; Mexico, 30 million; and Egypt, 20 million.
And we will not only be more numerous: we will also be
richer, making greater demands, occupying more space
and producing more trash.
Parallel to this demographic growth, there has been
and will continue to be an equally undeniable growth
of regional, continental and global regulations. The institutions devoted to the definition of international norms
are countless (IMF, ISO, UNESCO, WCO, WEO, WIPO, WNO,
WTO whatever). As an example, the European Union is
constantly producing legislation regulating any and all
human activities: growing tomatoes, making sausages,
hunting pheasants, stuffing rag dolls, boiling mussels,
etc. This might have a comical aspect to it, but Europes
regulation-making factory is not the exception. On the
contrary, the EU seems to be a laboratory of regulations
that will soon be imitated by the rest of the world. In fact,
as clumsy as the EU might appear to those of us who live
within its boundaries, it is considered an enviable model by similar multi-state institutions, such as the East African Community, the Arab League, Mercosur and Asean.
Whatever romantic opinions neo-liberals may have, and
whatever rabid protests populists might voice, population and regulations are both increasing in a seemingly
inexorable fashion. If what we are witnessing is a population crisis coupled with the emergence of a large and complex bureaucracy, to use Wittfogels terms (1957), then
the question is: Can we escape a new oriental despotism?
Ecology is a word that makes sense only in connection
with the sheer quantity of the worlds population. Indeed, ecology means just about anything, considering
that in 2050 the world will be inhabited by around 10 billion
people. As such, ecology can be defined as the discipline
that aims at the survival of the human species in the long
term and pursues this goal by considering the world as a

totality. Forget panda bears ecology is realism starting

from the totality, or global planning imposed upon individual decision-making, and so it is also, unavoidably, a kind
of totalitarianism one to be understood without any
negative connotations, simply an undeniable condition
that could produce several different political results. It
is within the frame of this totalitarianism that we need
to discover a way to regulate the ecological irrationality
of the markets while nonetheless preserving a measure
of personal freedom. It is within the frame of this totalitarianism that the alternative to pure despotism or some
sort of polite and reasonable socialism emerges. In fact,
when it comes to environmental issues on a global scale,
only two alternatives remain: 1) non-ecology, or individualistic liberalism, otherwise known as the apocalypse;
or 2) ecology, or global planning, also known as totalitarianism, of which there are two possible types: 2.1) ecology done the brutal way, or so-called oriental despotism,
i.e., madness; or 2.2) ecology done the polite, reasonable
way, or so-called socialism.
Ecology (i.e., socialism) is in need of a theory, but no such
theory currently exists. Today, ecological thinking is in a
much more depressive and amateurish phase than socialist thinking was before Marx (so far, it amounts to a
bit of Jared Diamond and some WWF sentimentalism).
Although we have no precise ideas about what such a
theory should consist of, two things seem evident: 1)
the misery of contemporary ecological thinking is, of
course, a theoretical misery; and 2) new ecological thinking has to be developed from the point of view of the totality according to Lukacss formula. So, broadly speaking, ecology would first of all imply abandoning any
spoiled irritation about realism, any nihilistic criticism
of the universal, any unnecessary distrust of the common; it would also imply overcoming the uninterrupted
denigration campaign against the totality that has been
carried out by pretty much everyone over the last seventy years, from Arendt to Foucault, from Hayek to Altman,
from Eco to Eisenman, from Popper to Rushdie.
Ecology means planning. Despised as the dumbest thing
you could ever think of during the age of neo-liberalism, planning is the one and only solution if we want
to survive. We simply have to love it. And, of course,

while planning does not mean returning to some sort

of easy-going technocracy, it certainly does imply an explicit refusal of the micro-scale obsessions and deliberate weakness of all of the recent pseudo-critical, pseudo-participatory, pseudo-antagonistic rhetoric (all of
which ended up being nothing more than indirect neoliberal propaganda). Planning needs to consider global problems (such as modernism) and extended time
frames (such as classicism) while imagining humble,
local solutions applied by means of infinite variations,
adaptations, compromises, replicas and copies. Most
of the time, planning would operate ex post as remedy more than ex ante as prevention. It would imply a
controlled economy, but probably not a planned economy (forgive us, comrade Stalin). So, the planning we are
proposing would not really be planning; it would just
be kind of planning. In terms of territorial management,
too, planning would be anything but modernist, and it
would imply neither complete control nor a tabula rasa
approach. Planning would be listening, observing, learning and only then correcting, while always accepting the
logical priority of the existent over the new.
If we were to imagine a reasonable, non-apocalyptic
scenario for the future a global soup of super-national entities (something like the Holy Roman Empire) in
which super-mighty city-states and guilds (London, Istanbul, Moscow, Singapore, southern California, Switzerland . . . ) float about a more or less forgotten periphery then we could also imagine an ex-post planning,
one that combines the market economy with the interventions of super-national institutions every now and
then, limiting the arrogance of corporations and citystates and thereby imposing moments of large-scale rationality upon the random development of the markets.
In this optimistic scenario (something like a vaguely
enlightened, generically socialist, modestly corrupt,
fairly inefficient and unintentionally benevolent worldscale Pakistan), how would we go about planning? And
for whom? What would the territorial consequences of
the decline of the nation-state be? To put it in the terms
of Dantes Monarchia, how would we plan for the communes and how would we plan for the empire?
Within this scenario, a few reasonable ideas can be
proposed. First, territories need to be recognized not

according to existing administrative borders, but according to ecosystems and the organization of production. Individuating and naming territories from a global perspective is indeed the first and fundamental act
of planning. The narrative of these regions is already
encapsulated in their names, and if their definition is
correct, then their potential is immediately visible: the
Nile Valley could be planned; the Rhine Delta could be
planned; the Po Valley could be planned; Lake Victoria
could be treated as a city before it becomes one; Brazil
could make big plans for its highways just as Germany
did with the Reichsautobahn and the U.S. did with the
Eisenhower expressways.
While actively promoting more regulations, international organizations keep on selling a second-rate
American dream, promising underdeveloped countries
that if they do well and open up their markets, they, too,
will soon live the way people in New Jersey do: two cars
per family, a large home with a 300-square-metre green
lawn around it, maybe a swimming pool. And yet, as
much as this does not correspond to the dreams of the
Nile Valley farmer and as unjust as this might sound
that farmer cannot become modern the same way farmers in the Po Valley did. He would not buy a Lambretta,
then a black-and-white TV set and then a crappy FIAT.
We all survive only if the Nile Valley farmer buys a cell
phone, then a bike and then a personal computer. As
extreme as it may sound, the alternative is extinction.
Ecology is first an anthropological issue, and only secondly a technological one. Changes in social behaviour
have the greatest impact (for example, if the worlds
population became vegetarian, it would solve approximately 30% of our current environmental issues). Contemporary eco-friendly rhetoric is totally flawed: technology will not yield a solution. Solar panels will not save
us, and neither will electric cars: the real solution is to
be found in a series of changes in our social behaviour,
or even better in our desires (for technology would
then follow suit). Also, these changes are already known
to us for the most part; from a scientific and technological point of view, they are nothing new. Indeed ecology is no novelty. In architecture and urban planning, the
right ecological policies have been discussed since the

1970s, if not before, but they are still largely ignored because of the suicidal logic of the free market: suburban
settlements waste endless energy (as well as destroy
the social fabric) and should be abandoned; combinations of working and living spaces are desirable and the
dumb aftermath of modernist zoning and construction
standards should be eliminated from legislation; the
use of local materials, local technology and local labour
should be encouraged. The private ownership of cars
is simply nonsensical, for shared cars would immediately solve all of the issues that are currently not being solved by the clumsy and hypocritical electric car. A
taxation of individual airplane travel that increases with
the number of flights taken (a kind of anti-frequent-flyer programme) might make sense. In northern Europe,
interior temperatures could be kept significantly lower than the current average temperature of 22 C, and
we could easily return to sleeping in cold bedrooms
the way our grandparents did. Most of all, culturally
imposed Western standards pursued merely as status
symbols should be forced to re-adapt to their contexts.
There is really no good reason for freezing interior office temperatures in Singapore; there is no good reason
to wear a suit and tie in Thailand; there is no good reason for artificially produced lawns in the UAE; there is
no good reason for having Christmas trees in Mexico . . .
All of these policies are obviously valid from a technical
point of view, and yet nothing happens anyway because
they would require a radical redefinition of some of the
standards of living to which we have grown accustomed.
As much as ecology means exercising a certain degree
of restraint, this does not mean advocating prosperity
without growth. This perspective is simply anthropologically wrong (at least as much as classic liberal anthropology is). Aggression will not disappear, and neither will conflicts. But if the anthropological presuppositions of 19th-century socialism are not only wrong
for it seems clear that man is not good by nature
but also boring, the math of global population growth
is undeniable, and socialism offers the only reasonable
escape, provided that an appropriate anthropology is
developed. In the end we just need an ecology based
on a deep distrust of nature and a socialism freed from
any nave anthropological optimism. In the simple and

amazing words of Paolo Virno, the critique of the monopoly of political decision-making, and more in general of institutions whose rules function like a repetition
compulsion, must be based on the assertion that man
is bad by nature (E cos via allinfinito [Turin 2010], p.
154; translated by the authors).
For the average building constructed today, we presume an economic life span of twenty-five years, which
implies that from now on we will have to renovate buildings heavily every quarter century in order to maintain
them. But renovation costs are generally between 50
and 100 percent of the total investment necessary to
build a new structure! In the light of this, it is difficult
to believe in the salvific promise of cavity walls or HVAC
systems like the passive house. All of these things are
more likely to harm the environment than help it because of their maintenance costs and the trash they
produce in the long run.
This economic cycle creates a situation in which architects have very limited budgets and no longer perceive
buildings as an investment for future generations. Who
cares about the ageing of materials? Who cares about
future users and the transformations they might require? Who cares if a building looks nice? In the end,
it is all just about making a quick buck. Capitalism has
made mincemeat of architecture by reducing its longterm perspective to the twenty-five-year time frame of
returns on private financial investments. In the context
of these twenty-five years, firmitas, utilitas and venustas
all sound like a bad joke.
No matter the political scenario, ecology forces us to
think in the long term again. For all of the discussion
about recycling, the truly important task is to produce
things that could work over the long haul, and as far
as architecture is concerned, this is entirely possible
(there is enough evidence of this in the architecture
of the past). What is more, compared to the evidently
nonsensical time frame of contemporary capitalism,
architecture is something inherently ecological, not
because of some silly solar panels, but because of its
slower time frame. If we were forced to build things to
last 200 years, we would reflect upon what the future
might bring and we would have to design buildings to be

adaptable, solid and aesthetically convincing just like

the ancient Romans did.
If we look back, sustainability was always at the core of
architecture. The aesthetic result was never in opposition to functionality or durability. In fact, Vitruvius, Alberti and Palladio can all be read as a guide to sustainable architecture.
So what kind of architecture would satisfy a contemporary, realistic and ecological agenda? What should the
aesthetic of this realistic socialism be? Might the answer
be a dry, elegantly reductive and committedly universal
(and because of that thoroughly contextual) socialist realism?
Turris Babel
Turris Babel is Athanasius Kirchers attempt to imagine
the description in the Book of Genesis (1011) that recounts Nimrods attempt to build a tower reaching the
heavens. The story was of particular interest to Kircher as an account of the origin of languages (indeed, the
second half of the book is devoted to Kirchers theories
on linguistics). In the first section, much as he had done
in his Arca No four years earlier, Kircher proves that
Nimrods ambition was intrinsically flawed: in order to
reach the nearest heavenly body namely, the Moon
the tower would have to be 287,543 kilometres high and
comprise over three million tons of matter. The resulting uneven distribution of the Earths mass would compromise the balance of the planet and move it from its
position at the centre of the universe, resulting in a cataclysmic disruption in the order of nature. In the amazing drawings that accompany Kirchers geometrical
demonstration, the planet with the tower looks like a gigantic Pinocchio head staring at the unreachable moon.
Oriental Despotism
Karl August Wittfogels Oriental Despotism (1957) is a curious book. It is highly verbose, terribly insistent and irritatingly anti-socialist, and perhaps worst of all, it never really sounds very sharp. However, despite all this it
is difficult to deny that the author dealt with something
of contemporary relevance. The book also provides a
perspective on architecture. More than anything, when
read today, it is a funny book.

The best part is the index, where the dry magniloquence of the topics is not hampered by the authors didactic treatment. Consider, for instance, this sequence
of chapters:
D. Further Construction Activities Customary in Hydraulic Societies
Non-Agrarian Hydraulic Works
Aqueducts and Reservoirs Providing Drinking Water
Navigation Canals
Large Non-Hydraulic Constructions
Huge Defense Structures
Roads
Palaces, Capital Cities, and Tombs
Temples
E. The Masters of Hydraulic Societies Great Builders
The Aesthetic Aspect
a. Uneven Conspicuousness
b. The Monumental Style
c. The Institutional Meaning
Mondo Cane
It is possible that meat might soon disappear from the
everyday diet and become once again exceptional and
somehow associated with ritual, something like the hog
hunting portrayed in the film Mondo Cane (Cavara, Jacopetti, Prosperi, 1962), in which the inhabitants of an
island near New Guinea grow hogs for years before releasing them and then killing and eating them in an incredibly violent way. Maybe we will eat meat just to remember that we are carnivorous, just to accept that we
are bad by nature.
Might our future hold temples of meat? Slaughter feasts?
Sixtus Had a Plan
Sixtus V had a plan. It was not incredibly refined, for
he was not a man of subtleties. He may have picked a
relatively bad architect and he may have had limited
resources, but he still had a plan a simple one, a realistic one. He also had an idea: none of the citys resources should be wasted. Everything in the city was
to function or die. He probably even had the Septizonium destroyed because he could not see it working in
the city. It looks like he operated with a funny, stupid
brutality that lies somewhere halfway between Quentin

Tarantino and Hippocratic medicine: quae medicamenta

non sanant, ferrum sanat; quae ferrum non sanat, ignis
sanat . . .
The Barshch-Ginzburg Plan for Moscow
The plan for thereconstruction of Moscow as a "green
city" by Mikhail Barshch and Moisei Ginzburg was a radical proposal for the reorganization of Moscow, which
in 1929 was a metropolis of two million inhabitants
that could no longer absorb newcomers without seriously rethinking housing, industry, mobility and infrastructure. Linear housing developments combined
with infrastructure left the city, leaving old Moscow
as a park filled with architectural ruins.Together with
the Barshch, Vadimirov, Ochitovic and Sokolovs plan
for Magnitogorsk, Moscow as a Green City is the urbantranslation of the GOELRO plan that is, the plan
elaborated bytheState Commission for the Electrificationof Russia.
Ecology remakes the city, and so the old, unecological city becomes a ruin of the past. The Moscow project may have been crazy, but it was not at all utopian,
just an (exalted) assessment of the countrys main asset: space. In Russia, this could somehow make sense.
Robert MosessDams and StateParks
Robert Mosess vision of New York was not confined to the
city proper,but rather extended out to include the whole
metropolitan region. Since his sphere of authority included all parks and parkways, he was able to stretch his
influence to the veryend of Long Island and later to the
citys upstatefacilities. After systematically eroding the
power of the old park commissioners a bunch ofhighranking philanthropists Moses introduced the notion
of scale in park planningand, above all, shifted the parks
purpose from conservation to recreation.
Meanwhile, in New York Moses was facilitating connections and mobility (at least for some parts of the population) throughhis brand new system of parkways, providing access to tourist destinations in Upstate New
York. Once more, recreation was bound to infrastructure and on a monumental scale. In Niagara and Massena, two huge power dams bearing Mosess name testify
to the StateParks ambition.

TVA
"The Watts Bar Dam Visitor Center in Tennessee is the
right place to re-read and re-think Manfredo Tafuri's Progetto e Utopia."
Reyner Banham, "Tennessee Valley Authority: The Engeneering of Utopia", Casabella 542-43 (JanuaryFebruary
1988), p. 74.
An Appraisal of Minibuses
In the 1990s, a silent revolution took place. The introduction of cheap Chinese-made minibuses changed the
face of public transportation in half of the world. Indeed,
minibuses allowed private operators throughout the
Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America to provide
an affordable and relatively efficient transportation service to a population that had not yet had regular access
to public transit. Through innovative experiments run
by a multitude of logistical geniuses in different parts
of the world and by developing use-models that varied
according to each context the minibus spontaneously resolved the inefficiencies of larger state-operated
buses, expanding service to streets that were inaccessible to bigger vehicles. Minibuses are, indeed, typically smaller than buses and usually take passengers on a
fixed or semi-fixed route without timetables, departing
when all the seats have been filled. They can stop anywhere to pick up or drop off passengers. Minibuses are
almost never stopped for long, and so they do not waste
parking space. And since minibuses do not depart until
they are full, they do not waste fuel. Developed in nofrills contexts, minibuses offer one of the few glimmers
of hope if we want to think of an ecologically efficient
and realistic use of contemporary technology.
Socialism will arrive on a minibus, or it never will.
Standards
Protocols such as BREEAM, LEED, DGNB, Minergie, etc.,
might look stupid (and are primarly not-very-hidden attempts to privilege certain segments of the market),
but at the end of the day they are better than nothing,
for at least they introduce a kind of measurability into
the discussion. Architects mainly see these standards
as nuisances and do not realize their potential. CIAMs
architects were less spoiled and attempted to define

standards by which to imagine a new society. Although

they were pretty nave and almost never right, at least
they tried. Ultimately, they were pretty reasonable in
their identification of the problem: theirs was a proper
discussion and more importantly, a proper discussion
about a real problem. A world with five times the population of the 1950s has to engage in such discussion with
five times the urgency.
Calculations
What if we built walls instead of filling buildings with
foam? How much would it cost? Would it really be more
expensive than what we are currently doing? Could
somebody calculate this with a bit of precision? And
how long would it take for this option to start being
more convenient? Twenty years? Thirty? Fifty . . . ?
The Rue Corridor Is Soooooo Good
Cities should be made of blocks. Blocks are the most
efficient formula if you do not want to waste energy.
Blocks also reduce surface occupation and automatically produce programmatic complexity by bringing together different functions. What is more, blocks reduce
useless open space on the ground floor, thereby giving
the remaining public space a degree of urban density.
If you ever wondered why we stopped building cities
made of blocks, you probably thought it was Le Corbusiers fault (i.e., his crusade against the rue corridor), but
youd have been wrong. It was not Le Corbusier at all: it
was real estate.
In the end, the cities we live in are the product of the
fetishistic protection of private property. (Why would
we have to observe several metres distance from property borders when building if these borders were not
sacred to our society?) They are the product of the dimensions of contemporary real-estate companies: they
are too big to accept the citys plans, yet too small to
propose their own. Ultimately, a real-estate company
always wants to build a freestanding tower, no matter
the context. It justifies this by arguing that in doing so,
it is leaving a lot of public space at ground level. And
this is what is actually Le Corbusiers fault. Hes the one
who provided the argument they repeat over and over
in city council meetings.

Deregulation
An increase in regulations on a global level might result
in fewer regulations on the local one. It would make it
possible, for instance, to purge urban legislation of the
health-obsessed paranoia of the 19th century, for the
concerns that generated this no longer exist in the hygienic conditions of contemporary European and American cities. A rule forbidding the construction of isolated buildings would overcome a lot of the unnecessary
protection of private property. And indeed, in such a
crowded world, why should we enforce maintaining a
distance from property borders when building?
On the Dullness of Japanese Architecture
Can somebody explain why Japanese architecture is so
cool?
If you have ever been in Tokyo during a cold winter or a
hot summer, you cannot help but wonder why people in
the West like Japanese architecture. No insulation, no
screening from the sun, no thermal mass, no noise protection: welcome to the paper house.
In die entgegengesetzte Richtung
At the so-called Temple of Venus (or of Mercury, or of
Echo . . . ) in Baiae (now called Bacoli) on the bay of Naples, there is a fig tree. In the beginning, the tree grew
normally: its roots downward and its leaves skyward.
When the roots pushed down into the ground, though,
they encountered and penetrated the brickwork of a
Roman vault buried in the earth beneath the tree. When
archaeologists later excavated the Roman ruins, the
roots were left there, floating in the air beneath ground
level and then they transformed into branches and
leaves. So, from the top down, the fig tree has leaves,
roots and then leaves again.
(Note: This story is entirely invented. The upside-down
fig tree does exist, but we have no idea why it grew in
the wrong direction.)

Boris Ieremeevich
Vladimirski, Roses for
Stalin, oil on canvas, 1949