Greening Cities
June 20, 2006 by francesca | permalink
Over the weekend I went to the Canadian Center for Architecture. They had three installations going on that I really wanted to see. One features a sensory exploration of the city "Sense of the City" and is as playful as it sounds. Another looked at the ecological architectural landscaping work of 87 year-old Cornelia Oberlander - yet another great eco-friendly mind trying to share her positive views with the world. And the last was the Green Benny Farm project which was done by a Montreal architecture group by the name of l'Oeuf, which is an acronym for L'Office de l'eclectisme urbain et fonctionnel, which translates into the office of eclectic and functional urbanism. They took a post-world war two veteran building and converted it into affordable housing for young families and single mothers. The mix was inspiring, and I strongly recommend a visit to anyone near the Montreal area.
Of particular interest was a publication by the Holcium Forum for Sustainable Construction in 2004. It posed the interesting question of whether we were ready for the advent of shrinking cities. Since there is so much talk about the increase of urbanization, it was a surprise to read the opposite trend, but it has been something I have witnessed driving along old country roads past former industrial towns along the Champlain Lakes of Vermont. These formre industrial centers are now ghost towns. As the book noted "city planners must be prepared to deal with the dynamic process that includes simultaneous growth and decline of populations...the decline of former industrial cities...(as an example) the growing number of declining cities like Liverpool and Manchester".
Noted demographer Joel Cohen is quoted so have said that "the demographic future has none of the inevitability that population projections convey because no one knows what people will choose to want".It is very true of our culture and quite unprecedented that in today's culture we have the ability to choose and therefore control certain demographic patterns like fertility, immigration and to some extent extended life expectancy. It is increasingly difficult for demographers to project concretely, and perhaps it always was an imperfect science, population growth.
I must confess a warm spot for Cornelia Oberlander who took a keen interest in creating parks for children where they would mingle with nature and not find themselves playing in an abstract concept of a playground. She felt that children had become increasingly distanced from the earth, and her 1967 Montreal World Expo Park for Children and Air was surely a tribute to that sentiment.
