The Future Of Cities

Doors Of Perception has posted a Cluster Magazine interview with designers John Thackara and Sunil Abraham. The discussion is chock full of potent brain-food on the future of cites, design, sustainable and informal economies and more. They explain in great detail what changes need to be implemented to improve living conditions for the growing number of city dwellers.

John Thackara on creating democratic cities through design:

All cities are part of a larger ecology of resource extraction, energy use, environmental impact, waste flows, and social networks. The rules that govern how this larger ecology works - or not - are political rules shaped by an era in which we could burn cheap fossil fuel while ignoring the ecological consequences. That era is now over, and its eco-cidal politics (and economic development) have become obstacles to our survival. The only meaningful task of design, now, is to help people transform the ways they obtain food, energy, materials, and water - in cities, or outside them. This kind of design is of course “political” in that it opposes the demands of industrial society for limitless resources in a world whose carrying capacity is finite. But ecodesign - and hence, eco politics - is about new ways of inhabiting places; it is not about new ways of organizing representative government.

Doors Of Perception Weblog: “Can Dynamic Cities Be Democratic?”