February 2022 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold, the promotional image for the 2023 EcoCity World Summit, to be held in London next year. The simpleminded idiocy in play befits a foundering civilization incapable of realistically imagining its future. As usual with shallow eco-urbanism, sociopolitical conditions are assumed to be exactly the same years ahead as they are now. Daily life is portrayed as a perpetual coffee break in an orderly milieu.

Get this: urban life will be anything but orderly in the future. London will not be a city of cafe layabouts diddling on their phones. It will be desperately attempting to cope — and perhaps failing to — with social disorder, economic collapse, ethnic conflict, and political paralysis.

The sole idea depicted above is the “greening-up” of the street and its buildings. Plant life is imagined to be the sovereign remedy for all the ills of imploding modernity. It represents nature in its most inert and unthreatening form. It just sits there softening the hard-scape. In fact, nature is rather cruel, including human nature. How much of London’s thirty-two boroughs, thousands of streets, and 671 square miles will get this treatment? Or will it be limited to a few special streets like the one in the picture, for the remaining toffs who have somehow escaped the wrath of the plebes?

How do you propose to marshal the army of gardeners needed for the maintenance of all these plantings? Will it employ half the population of London — the ones replaced by robots and artificial intelligence in all the other jobs? Do you see how silly this is? And how pathetically limited our collective imagination is?

What it comes down to is an inability to face the eco-truth: namely, that our great cities have exceeded a scale that comports with the realities of the future — resource and capital scarcity — and that they cannot be made sustainable in anything like their current form. These mega-cities have to contract substantially and severely and the process will be pretty hideous, including massive losses in real estate value, battles over who gets to inhabit what’s left, and awesome decay in the abandoned districts. Virtually all of the oversized infrastructure will be un-maintainable — skyscrapers, megastructures, the Underground transit system, gas, water, and sewage service. Decorating the streets and buildings with “parsley” will not come close to solving any of this. By the way, who owns the sole car in the picture? And why is it not standing forlornly on its rims with the windows shattered and the interior torched?