Space is the place?

Two encouraging developments this week in the quest to establish a permanent human presence in space. The Times records that data from India’s lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 shows large quantities of water on the surface of the moon. This discovery increases the possibility that astronauts could be based on the Moon and use the water found there to drink, extract oxygen to breathe and use hydrogen as fuel. Meanwhile, Building Magazine reports that Norman Foster and Partners are part of a consortium hoping to investigate the possibility of adapting materials found in space for building purposes.

Foster has already designed the world’s first spaceport currently under construction in New Mexico - primarily as a base for Richard Branson’s commercial space flight venture Virgin Galactic. His latest bid is to the European Space Agency which wants to set up a programme for robotic and human exploration of the solar system, and to look into how future structures could be built on the Moon. It hopes that adapting materials found in space for building purposes could eventually help establish a more permanent presence on the Moon.

Jonathan Glancey welcomes Foster’s bid, and rounds up some space-age architecture from Archigram onwards. But, inadvertently, he confirms that so far the space age has had only a limited role in influencing the architectural and urban future. For example, whether or not you admire the soap-sud structure of Grimshaw’s Eden Project, it’s worth asking where it sits with the broader human objective of conquering space. As Glancey points out, the aim of the Eden Project is ‘protecting and nurturing plant life’. In the time since the Apollo flights to the Moon, stills of earth shot from space have often been interpreted as a sign of how vulnerable life is on earth. And, as we’ve become more anxious over life on planet earth, not only has the desire to explore space receded, but many of those who still do want to go into space are no longer motivated by a project of discovery. For example the idea of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) was to stream a continuous live colour image of the Earth from a million miles out in space. For environmentalists like Al Gore, the benefit of live footage of the whole Earth broadcast continuously over the internet would be to provide a powerful modern reminder of the fragility of our home planet. The Eden Project might look like a bubble city from another planet, but its motivations are similarly earthbound.

James Woudhuysen - who is speaking at Minimum… or Maximum Cities? on the future of energy - argues that we need to rekindle our appetite for space and go back to the moon - and beyond. “To want to go into space is human. It is a good in itself, an expression of humanity’s desire to conquer the unknown, discover more about our universe.”

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The Dilemmas of Growth - “minimizing the maximum regret”

World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change published last week by the World Bank looks at development in the context of a changing climate. It argues that future strategies for urban growth should take account of the idea of “mini­mizing the maximum regret”.

If we unscramble this somewhat opaque expression, we find an important indication as to how economic growth and urban development are now viewed. Maximising growth was once widely accepted as a primary aim for national economies and cities. Not only was prosperity welcome in its own terms, but it was accepted that growth helped urban communities exert more control over their circumstances. As the authors note (p8), “adverse climate trends…. do not discriminate by income, but better-off people and communities can more successfully manage the setbacks”.

Yet elsewhere the report goes on to largely reject this logic. For example, after two decades of impressive growth, China has created significant new infrastructure throughout the country. Yet the Bank questions the benefits of such growth by recalling that many migrant workers were left stranded in the unexpect­edly intense snow storms in January 2008. A similar logic is used to interpret Hurricane Katrina; decades of steady prosperity do not always produce good outcomes.

Today growth is often linked with an increase in cities vulnerability to climate change, and the focus is less on growth than on the “well-being” of current and future generations. For the Bank the development model needs to be reworked as one of creating “resilience”. Planning becomes an exercise in contin­gency rather than optimisation, less concerned with maximising development and more with minimising future risks. The “tolerable windows” approach advocated by the Bank uses “guard­rails” to set limits to development at levels thought acceptable according to expert judgement.

The term “minimizing the maximum regret” is adopted from post-war statistician Leonard Savage. But how useful is this approach for planning cities? While it sounds very scientific, there are arguably two important problems. Firstly, the frameworks which govern the work of planners (or urban statisticians?) necessarily reflect our fatalistic times. Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that today “it is not undue pessimism that is dangerous, but undue optimism”. The result is a tendency to speculate on worst case scenarios and lower the bar in terms of what is acceptable development. Secondly, urban planning becomes an exercise in deferring to statistics rather than an attempt to develop and then impose our ideas as to how the future should be. Rather than an exercise in statistics, the urban designer Edmund Bacon argued that ‘the city is an act of human will’. Is he right? We will return to this question over the coming weeks and months.

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