Organicity

Sustainability requires changes, but major ones. As stated by Stephen Dovers, “sustainability is a profound challenge, which requires change to basic structures of society (Dovers 2001, p.3). Cities are part of that structure, and as many researchers suggest, this urban forms are the future, due to the trend of population to concentrate in this areas. On account of this, the way that cities are conceived, designed, constructed and developed should be modified, and it would be no surprise to have non conventional ways of urban living in the future.

According to Chris Brown, David Dobereiner and Paul Jones, this dilemma could be addressed with the Organicity, a prototype they created which could be defined as a “localised, autonomous, sustainable, urban community infrastructure. Densely occupied, with residential, urban agriculture, retail, industry, commerce, education and health facilities stacked above each other, accommodating approximately 5,000 people per unit” (Brown et al. 2017). Nowadays, most people might consider this an interesting theme of a futuristic movie, while for others, it could represent a real solution for megacities. But will this smaller, self-sufficient communities be the panacea or the remedy could be worse than the disease?

On my point of view, this could be an interesting approach to address high density in cities, at least in a sustainable way, rather than the vertical ghettos to which i referred in other post. However, these settlements, envisioned as compact productive environments how will they deal with flexibility and tolerance for errors? The high dependency between their elements could convert this new type of city in high risk places. If one of the elements of the Organicity fails, then the productive cycle wouldn’t be executed. Furthermore, what would happen when facing natural disasters as earthquakes, floods and tornadoes? Other point that should be considered is construction and its costs associated. In plain areas, this terraced housed model could be more suitable to be constructed, but in irregular terrains maybe advanced technology should be needed, what would make increase costs considerably. Moreover, the construction result in its configuration could differ from the coliseum concept that the creators recommend, which is the main feature of the model.

I believe that this novel alternative should be implemented in a small scale to prove if the prototype is likely to become a real initiative. Taking into account its complexity and high cost, only a wealthy country could afford this experiment.