The Urbanism Of Metabolism

"This edited book explores and promotes reflection on how the lessons of Metabolism experience can inform current debate on city making and future practice in architectural design and urban planning. Sixty years on from when the Metabolist manifesto was published, the authors' original contributions highlight the persistent links between present and past that can help to re-imagine new urban futures as well as the design of innovative intra-urban relationships and spaces. The essays are written by experienced scholars and renowned academics from Japan, Australia, Europe, S. Korea and the US and expose Metabolism's special merits in promoting new urban models and evaluate the current legacy of its architectural projects and urban design lessons. They offer a critical, intellectual, and up-to-date account of the Metabolism projects and ideas in the context of current evolution of architectural and urbanism discourse in a global context"--

Understanding Urban Metabolism addresses the gap between the bio-physical sciences and urban planning and illustrates the advantages of accounting for urban metabolism issues in urban design decisions. Urban metabolism considers a city as a system, and distinguishes between energy and material flows as its components. Based on research from the BRIDGE project, this book deals with how the urban surface exchanges and transforms energy, water, carbon and pollutants in cities. This book also introduces a new method for evaluating how planning alternatives can modify the physical flows of urban metabolism components and how environmental and socioeconomic components interact. The inclusion of sustainability principles into urban planning provides an opportunity to place the new knowledge provided by bio-physical sciences at the centre of the planning process, but there is a strong need to bridge knowledge and practice, as well as for a better dissemination of research results and exchange of best practice. This book meets that need and provides the reader with the necessary tools to integrate an understanding of urban metabolism into urban planning practice.

This edited book explores and promotes reflection on how the lessons of Metabolism experience can inform current debate on city making and future practice in architectural design and urban planning. More than sixty years after the Metabolist manifesto was published, the author’s original contributions highlight the persistent links between present and past that can help to re-imagine new urban futures as well as the design of innovative intra-urban relationships and spaces. The essays are written by experienced scholars and renowned academics from Japan, Australia, Europe, South Korea and the United States and expose Metabolism’s special merits in promoting new urban models and evaluate the current legacy of its architectural projects and urban design lessons. They offer a critical, intellectual, and up-to-date account of the Metabolism projects and ideas with regard to the current evolution of architectural and urbanism discourse in a global context. The collection of cross-disciplinary contributions in this volume will be of great interest to architects, architectural and urban historians, as well as academics, scholars and students in built environment disciplines and Japanese cultural studies.

"The iCUP (Institute for Contemporary Urban Project) is the institute, directed by ... Acebillo and coordinated by ... Enrico Sassi, within which this book has been produced and it is part of the Accademia di architettura, USI (Universita della Svizzera Italiana), Mendrisio"--Page 6.

Even in a country where outstanding achievements have become almost a commonplace, the Japanese architect, Kisho Kurokawa, appears as both a remarkable and a remarkably successful man. With buildings in the United States and Eastern and Western Europe as well as in Japan, he has established an international reputation as a leading figure amongst the younger generation of architects. At the age of forty he already had thirty-five major buildings and seventeen books to his credit; four new towns are being built to his designs; he heads a company of over a hundred employees, he runs a think-tank and an urban design bureau and for variety he has his own television programme with a regular audience of some 30 million. Behind these statistics lies a prodigious vitality expressed in original and stimulating buildings. -- from book jacket.

Understanding Urban Metabolism addresses the gap between the bio-physical sciences and urban planning and illustrates the advantages of accounting for urban metabolism issues in urban design decisions. Urban metabolism considers a city as a system, and distinguishes between energy and material flows as its components. Based on research from the BRIDGE project, this book deals with how the urban surface exchanges and transforms energy, water, carbon and pollutants in cities. This book also introduces a new method for evaluating how planning alternatives can modify the physical flows of urban metabolism components and how environmental and socioeconomic components interact. The inclusion of sustainability principles into urban planning provides an opportunity to place the new knowledge provided by bio-physical sciences at the centre of the planning process, but there is a strong need to bridge knowledge and practice, as well as for a better dissemination of research results and exchange of best practice. This book meets that need and provides the reader with the necessary tools to integrate an understanding of urban metabolism into urban planning practice.

Metabolism, the Japanese architectural avant-garde movement of the 1960s, profoundly influenced contemporary architecture and urbanism. This book focuses on the Metabolists’ utopian concept of the city and investigates the design and political implications of their visionary planning in the postwar society. At the root of the group’s urban utopias was a particular biotechical notion of the city as an organic process. It stood in opposition to the Modernist view of city design and led to such radical design concepts as marine civilization and artificial terrains, which embodied the metabolists’ ideals of social change. Tracing the evolution of Metabolism from its inception at the 1960 World Design Conference to its spectacular swansong at the Osaka World Exposition in 1970, this book situates Metabolism in the context of Japan’s mass urban reconstruction, economic miracle, and socio-political reorientation. This new study will interest architectural and urban historians, architects and all those interested in avant-garde design and Japanese architecture.

First presented as a manifesto in the 1960s in Japan, "Metabolism" is a theory of architecture contending that "buildings and cities should be designed and developed in the same continuous way that the material substance of a natural organism is produced." From the time of Japan's postwar redevelopment to its period of rapid economic growth, the theory gave birth to grand visions of future cities, encouraged the realization of much experimental architecture, and also provided the foundation on which many of Japan's contemporary world-renowned architects and designers could build their careers. It is the most widely known modern architecture theory to have emerged from Japan. This exhibition is the first ever to pose the question of what significance Metabolism holds today. It draws on various documents and models to explore the thoughts and work of Tange Kenzo, which set the scene for the emergence of Metabolism, and the activities of the Metabolist architects and others during the 1960s up until Osaka's Expo '70, which in many ways was a showcase for the theory. It also represents an important opportunity to think about the necessity of archiving and preserving distinguished historical documents and records related to the movement.

With the aim of projecting alternative and sustainable forms of urbanism, the book asks: What are the key principles of an ecological urbanism? How might they be organized? And what role might design and planning play in the process? While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical, issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed. The premise of the book is that an ecological approach is urgently needed both as a remedial device for the contemporary city and an organizing principle for new cities. Ecological urbanism approaches the city without any one set of instruments and with a worldview that is fluid in scale and disciplinary approach. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecology with an urbanism that is not in contradiction with its environment. The book brings together design practitioners and theorists, economists, engineers, artists, policy makers, environmental scientists, and public health specialists, with the goal of reaching a more robust understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future. Contributors include: Homi Bhabha, Stefano Boeri, Chuck Hoberman, Rem Koolhaas, Sanford Kwinter, Bruno Latour, Nina-Marie Lister, Moshen Mostafavi, Matthias Schuler, Sissel Tolaas, Charles Waldheim

Addressing the complex interrelationships between city making and the resources needed for its production, Predatory Urbanism explores the link between urbanization and resources in the global South. It particularly focuses on urban megaprojects, highlighting these planned developments and re-developments carried out by the state or state-linked agencies.