Top
oil index
- housing (1)
- maps (1)
- project outline (1)
- research groups (1)
- terminology (1)
- 0.1 Stage One
- Architects Without Borders Canada
- Carol Kleinfeldt: What kind of town do we need to support such industrial ventures?
- Colley Valentine: an International Energy Campus
- F.B.D.: Aiding Transience
- Fuller / Hatherley / McPherson: Equilibrium
- Low / Ong: Heading Towards Green Cities
- Manering / Courtney: Athabasca Sands
- O'Donoghue / Suen : a prototype for mining colonies off-planet
- Todd / Rabyniuk : architecture of change in a contested landscape
- Townsend / Semeredi / Ng: Solution without Pollution
- f(x)
- white: living lightly
1 Comment
Reader Comments (1)
Cars bad, yes. Social problems in Ft McMurray, true. These are the problems. Is the Sant Elia solution, albeit done colourfully, an answer? Colley/Valentine propose the city as a university of ecological practice and learning, as does this video. However, how does everyone get to work?
I'm beginning to wonder if the town is a problem at all. Isn't it the mining and refining process the problem? And far from oil reserves being depleted in the near future, the reserves will still be there, but the extraction process will be too expensive to use relative to the cost of oil. That is the point we are approaching. The use of the gas-driven combustion engine may soon be history, but only when it is forced to expire from lack of fuel, not from any sort of moral argument.
I keep mentioning soviet cities established in Siberia in the 1940s-70s: vast cities, permanent, significant, heated by central, natural-gas fired steam plants, pedestrian culture, university and research plus resource extraction industries. There was a chokehold on the disposable income of individual soviet citizens at the same time so many of the basic necessities were provided by the state. Precisely the opposite to how Siberian society operates today. We seem to exist with some sort of quasi-State consumer society of purported individual autonomy which for the life of me I cannot see putting in place any sort of revolutionary city, good for us or not.
How do we convince the greater public, that this is what they want? f(x) and Carol Kleinfelt believe that you keep stating and restating the statistics and the research until everyone gets it. How can we place these little but potent videos on tv, or get their web hits up in the hundreds of thousands? The general public tires very quickly of rants that lecture them on their wasteful lives, that is why we must always leave them with some sort of solution they can latch on to, and in which they can see themselves.