Expert Interview - Pierre Belanger

What does sustainable design mean to you?
When the West talks about sustainability, is the goal preservation of its current industrial economy? Its current cultural lifestyle? Its intellectual dominion? In these ways, sustainability is a commodity, a mask for neo-liberal economics that favours current models of growth, to their advantage, and so it's profitable to instil fear (fear of climate change, fear of sea level rise, fear of depleting of energy resources) because it drives demand. Canons of conservative urban development like Smart Growth, New Urbanism, or certifications of 'green' standards like LEED are masks for the failure of technology and conservative values to change the future, a point system to assuage environmental guilt. I think it's much more productive to be proactive, to shift our efforts towards systems, adapt to change and leverage our position to improve the world and make it better. This demands human energy and human ingenuity. Our biggest challenge for the future is not with the environmental performance of a single material, nor with the cleverness of a single building, nor with the architectural quality of a city, nor with the technocratic development of civil public works. Our biggest challenge is in the design and redesign of systems of urbanization and networks of organization. For the case of the CLEAR project, it could be a system of villages. The landscape of infrastructure, including the urban systems and biophysical dynamics, is a system of systems.

How does your work uniquely contribute to this effort?
We will never know the extent of our contribution, but creating new knowledge about the present world and working with likeminded pros to apply what we know now is an underlying operative strategy in our organization. We attract young, energetic people to collaborate with and large industrial organizations/public authorities come to us with complex challenges. That may be a sign.

When you imagine "sustainable future" what do you see? How do you feel?
In 2008, for the first time in human history, more than half of the globe's population - almost 3.5 billion people lived in cities. By 2060, two-thirds of humanity will join them. Urbanization, whether we like or not, is the most sustainable strategy that humanity has to offer so far. Slums and suburbs are its most pervasive and enduring pattern; ironically, slums and suburbs survive without design. It's an inconvenient truth: instead of resisting them or opposing them, I would start by learning more from them. Jesse Ausubel argues this in his carefully argued and lucid 'Liberation of the Environment' (1996).

What is your first impression of the CLEAR project?
I am naturally sceptical and suspicious of everything. The CLEAR project is a great motivator but realistically, it needs geography. What you design is as important as where you design it. The future can no longer be idealized, like the 50s or 60s. The 21st century should not, cannot operate without real world conditions. We have to be hyperreal about this reality and exploit it. The village scale on its own is not enough, nor is the city scale, nor is the regional scale. Planners, designers, and engineers have to learn how to slide across scales to make urban conditions perform better.

Do any past case studies (successes or failures) come to mind that we might learn from?
Despite their rising popularity, the mainstream (erroneous) ideals of the New Urbanists and Smart Growth advocates show us what not to do or avoid at all costs (see Celebration, FA or Seaside, FA). They rely on skewed views of history and nostalgic return to the past. They disdain Modernity because they don't understand it, and therefore, fear it. On the other hand, I'm a big fan of Jaime Lerner's work in Curitiba, as well as Youngstown's Jay Williams, Chicago's Richard Daley, Mississauga's Hazel McCallion and Liberia's Johnson Sirleaf who crystallize the potential of leadership, persistence and proaction. As progressives, they work at the city and regional scale, they work on synergies and systems. In North America, learning from urban deltas or urbanized coasts is the most useful exercise since that is where the future lies. Revisiting suburbs from the 50s and 60s (Radburn, Levittown, Llewellyn, Don Mills) and shrinking cities (Buffalo, Detroit, Newark) in tandem with South American megacities would be an extremely useful project. Then, I would start connecting the dots to understand what we have been overlooking: urban-regional networks, for example.

Does scale matter? Are there distinctions when designing sustainable solutions for a village vs. a city, for example?
As a reaction to the overreach of globalization and the failure of community level planning, the regional scale is the most prescient one today. This is well documented, factual and one of the most critical scales that will transform cities in the future, big or small.
More specifically, watershed regions will rewrite boundaries and, in some cases, overwrite the future of nations. A good example of this is the trans border region of the Great Lakes between Canada and the US, or of the Rio Grande between the US and Mexico. Rather than reinforcing political boundaries or cultural differences, watershed organizations are regrouping to ensure the longevity and durability of the single most important common resource on the planet: water.

If you were leading the design of a sustainable village, what would you prioritize, and why? Who would you want working with you?
My first question would be: Where? The region determines everything, especially the pre-existing infrastructure of biophysical systems. Start at the regional scale, and work down, then back up the scales. Cities and communities have to look beyond themselves and see that their mutual future depends on how living systems work across the regions - how they are organized and how they can work better. The operative word is 'systems'.
On another level, if we were asked to work singlehandedly on one single dimension/aspect of a village/city/region, food production and agriculture would be on top of the list. These are the fundamental infrastructures that hold cultures together and sustain (or cease) the longevity of regions. These are spatial, they provide sustenance and form an ecology that generates exchanges, markets, and economies. And if food creates a market, then a market creates a village! Remarkably, agriculture has been removed and separated from cities as a result of zoning and planning practices in the 20th century in the industrial metropolis. I would argue that through food production and agriculture, a series of consequential changes would spin-off urbanistically, and without major investment or sluggish bureaucracy. They just need space, soil and water, and the human energy for cultivation. Cities are presently locked up in their zoning regulations and planning practices...it is a legal challenge as it is an organizational one. But I have confidence leadership and sheer will can change that in this century.

Is it possible to replicate the design of one village across different contexts? If so, which design elements would remain consistent no matter what? What would need to change on a case-by-case basis?
The medium is the method. Complexity is the concept. Means, instead of the ends, should be duplicated. I would avoid design emulation (evident in the crisis of architecture), as every region is different. It is the infrastructural requirements of urban populations that should be replicable: water management, waste cycling, food cultivation, energy generation and mobility. Urban systems in the West work almost all in the same way: a large bureaucratic apparatus centrally controls the operations (the infrastructure) of its population within its boundaries. These bureaucratic entities and conventional systems have reached a tipping point, and the redrawing of their boundaries, regionally, is imperative. The decentralization of these systems is a way forward. However banal, this is already happening. I would start by looking at this dimension of current urban conditions where work can be done. The question could be re-phrased: should design learn from different contexts to better understand how cultures evolve? We could learn more about sea level rise, and 2000-year old flood management measures by going to Thailand and travelling the Chao Phraya Delta as much as we could learn from the civil engineering of flood protection in the Netherlands.

Does culture play a part in the design of a sustainable village?
Culture is synonymous with regional innovation. Culture is design. In fact, culture is what designs, and continually redesigns.

And finally, business models. Are there any you know of that could inform a more robust outcome for this initiative?
Unless the outcome is a product (for which mass production or mass customization is the solution), the following countries offer some of the best national and regional policies for urban-economic regeneration in the world: Iceland, Malaysia and Brazil. Contraposing business models that dominated the 20th century such as Fordist forms of industrialization, Taylorist forms of management and Euclidean forms of planning, I would favour looking at emerging fields of knowledge that are reorganizing business systems, industrial production and urban regions. Landscape ecology is now, and will continue to be in the century to come, the most influential field of research and design to guide urbanization. It sponsors super planning at super scales. Without any form of forecasting, urbanization will continue to design us.

Pierre Bélanger
Bélanger is Associate Professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. His academic research and public work focus on the convergence of landscape and infrastructure. Combining knowledge from the earth and engineering sciences, he collaborates with public agencies, regional authorities, and private landowners towards the reclamation, redesign and reconstruction of large urban-industrial landscapes with dual objectives of ecological performance and economic durability. His design work has received several prizes for competitions including Columbus Re-Wired, the Chicago Prize and the Prix de Rome. Bélanger is publicly appointed as a member of the TRCA Etobicoke-Mimico Watershed Coalition Task Force, one of the most industrialized regions in the Great Lakes, and as a director on the Ontario Food Terminal Board, the largest wholesale food distribution facility in Canada.