Tonight the critic and architecture curator Lucy Bullivant gave us a lecture questioning the role of the concept of “master plan” in the current urban developments. During the lecture, Lucy explained us that we need to achieve cross-scalar, social-ecological resilience through adaptive systems in order to achieve a relational urbanism that matches the way we conceive of nature now, shifted from the tree of life to the web of life, with nested systems, food webs, ecosystems, relation browsers, cloud computing and distributed energy systems…
Adaptive planning as an interdependent approach enabling mixed programmes rather than compartmentalisation of functions is vital, with urbanism, seen as inseparable from living systems, making landscape its basic building block, as an active tissue of a socially nourishing identity. The metabolism of each city, urban conurbation and their relationships, influenced by today’s problems of organized and disorganized complexity, call for an urbanist sensibility that is homeopathic, not solely allopathic; that is networked, distributed, localized and situational.
