CONFERENCES. Vitoria-Gasteiz 4-5-6 July
The SECOND URBAN LANDSCAPE FORUM is called in the framework of the Urban Ecology Class of the Centre for Environmental Studies of Vitoria-Gasteiz, an open space for reflection on the many aspects forming the city understood as an ecosystem.
The FORUM, which is biennial, will generate a debate between international experts, local agents and citizens on the role of landscape architecture and urban development in plannint cities and their territory. The CONFERENCES are to foster the exploration of strategies and mechanisms to enable evolution towards more sustainable communities, taking in the latest landscape, urban development and planning tendencies.
CITY-NATURE RELATIONSHIP
“CITIES + GREEN"
The Green Cities declaration of the United Nations in San Francisco (June 2005) started by reminding of the urban reality of our time in macro-figures. Almost half the planet’s population live in cities today and if the current trend goes on, in the coming years a million people will emigrate from the country to the city every week.
Along with this reality, another provable fact put forward on many occasions by UN-HABITAT is the precariousness of the settlements, which, mostly located in the urban peripheries, are developing in infra-human conditions.
In the quantitatively small reality of the first world cities, the terms are inverted and we are seeing wavies of immigrants settling in the heart of the city, often in uninhabited and degraded historical centres in favour of “dazzling” outskirts: Here we are amazed at the speculative spectacle in which the planning of solutions to the problems of city and country is rejected in benefit of unproductive and degraded landscapes. This thus forms a landscape to be desired often subjected to the “international landscape design style” which has very little to do with the pre-existing place, its ecology, its history, its identity. These are predetermined designs, imposed which are assumed and incorporated “a la mode” absolutely devoid of the places ecological and social processes.
It is probably in this matter of degradation and lack of sensible planning in the peripheries where most urban developers and ecologists agree. The increasing magnification of he edges of the city in just a few decades has gone from the metric scale (in our case the width of the city wall) to the immense “urban shadow” of today’s peripheries, infinite, ungraspable…
The integration of urban development and ecology, the return to city planning and design processes with a major environmental basis (especially in the city-country contacts) seems to be more necessary than ever. This will help us to establish the links between the more urban local view and the broader bioregional view more extensive an complex which provides connections and clear opportunities for a richer and more diverse urban life.
In this second edition, the Forum for Urban Landscape of Vitoria-Gasteiz in cooperation with the Network of Local Cocnerns + Biodiversity is proposing a debate on the philosophy which should govern the city-nature relationship in a framework of sustainability; it also aspires to showing planning and design techniques which improve the natural assets and local biodiversity coherently with urban and regional planning.
The conferences are rounded off with a selection of exemplary cases which can give qualified information on the real management of some cities or pioneering regions in the application of ecological planning and management techniques in urban spheres. |
José Fariña
