thoughts on cityscapes

I think that whatever we do in our cities we have to ensure that we maintain a direct relationship with the natural world. The reason is pragmatic, but has aesthetic benefits too. Fundamentally, we cannot escape the fact that we are part of the earth, not apart from it, and we live our lives in the cycle of birth and death, growth and decay. Facing up to this reality in our cities will civilise them. This is going to have to become a part of the restored narrative of our century, a realisation that we are of the earth. If we are moving ever more towards living well in the cityscape, then we have to overcome the denial of nature as to fail to do so is likely to have catastrophic consequences for our shared urban futures. For example, we can never become post agrarian, as we are biomass and need to eat. Consequently I think that we need to make sure that people have a number of essentials ready to hand, in the case of my work it is designing into urban spaces the opportunity to grow food, or food with others to establish small neighbourhoods of food resilience across entire cityscapes. In doing this people can establish a connection and a sense of place. Their relationship with place and with each other becomes meaningful when the macro becomes the micro. So our cities have to nurture people, not treat them like economic units, this changes the way we might look at them as spaces from simply being places for work and leisure, into places where the metaphor of growing becomes the nornm, growing community,m growing an eco-economy where all products are sustainably designed and where waste is food for something else or is redesigned into something else (cradle to cradle), wherea substantial amount of seasonal food is grown within the locale of the city, where schools are engaged in ecological literacy founded on permaculture and biomimic principles of nature as guide, mentor and measure. If we enable cities to become self reliant, their infrastructure will be facilitative for good life enhancing qualities, it will enable people to self reliant, as well as interdependent in the communities they move within in their city spaces. I have seen all this emerge from the perspective of community food growing, as the needs of a grower are water, soil, space (vertical or horizontal) and light essentials for life. Using these as starting points makes city design / service design and community development very simple as it embeds the idea of eco within the ego of our places.