Regenerative Cities ; Agropolis – Petropolis – Ecopolis
A particular quote that rang true for me by Herbery Girardet:
“Cities take resources from nature. The new challenge is for cities to find ways to continuously help regenerate natural systems from which they draw resources.”
“Towns and cities need sustenance for their people and this requires elaborate ecological and economic systems. In his book ‘The Isolated State’ the prominent 19th century economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen described the way in which human settlements, in the absence of major transport systems, are systemically tied into the landscape surrounding them through various logically arranged modes of cultivation.4 In fact, they have an active, symbiotic relationship with it: they also assure its continuing productivity and fertility by returning appropriate amounts of organic waste to it.” Herbert Girardet on the Agropolis"
“The industrial revolution caused a virtual explosion of urban growth that continues to this day. Steam engine technology enabled the unprecedented concentration of industrial activities in urban centres. Cities increasingly cut the umbilical cord between themselves and their local hinterland and became global economic and transport hubs. This process has undermined local economies, as new modes of transportation have made it ever easier to supply food, raw materials and manufactured products from ever greater distances. Cities are no longer centres of civilisation but of mobilisation, with access to global resources as never before.
The modern city could be described as ‘Petropolis’: all its key functions – production, consumption and transport are powered by massive injections of petroleum and other fossil fuels. But there is ever growing evidence that the resulting dependencies are ecologically, economically and geopolitically untenable, particularly because the fossil fuel supplies on which modern cities depend are, most definitely, finite.” Herbert Girardet
“The new task facing of urban planners, civil engineers and managers, in close cooperation with the generalpublic, is to create spatial structures that satisfy the needs of city people whilst also assuring their ecological and economic resilience. We need to provide secure habitats that allow us to move about our cities efficiently, and we want them to provide pleasant spaces for work, recreation and human interaction. We want urban environments that are free from pollution and waste accumulation. But we also need to get to grips with the impacts of cities beyond their boundaries” Herbert Girardet