Marin city and Urban Ecology
After the completion of project 1, and looking forward to the assignment of project 2, I found myself with some time to do readings over the weekend. Although not familiar with the area, I am intrigued by the idea that what we are working towards is for a real client and all our hard work will be submitted to a competition. This format of submitting work that is already complete to competition should be embraced by more educators around the globe as every project has a significant amount of work put into it and it’d be a waste to just sit on ones’ computer, never accessed again.
The name Marin City is quite deceiving to a Canadian like me. Instead of using the term county like the states, we use city to describe municipal administrative regions. So naturally, I thought of Marin City as a large regional area when really, it was a neighborhood in Marin County. In fact, from the readings, it states that one can “probably walk the length of it in 30 minutes or so”. The narrative of Marin City is not new, a myriad of neighborhoods around the globe also serve as enclaves of under-represented demographics among the burgeoning sprawl of cities. As their surroundings continue to change and costs of living continue to rise, it breaks the serene way of life that these people have set up over the years with problems that must be confronted head-first. Although I don’t know yet what the prompt of the project is going to be, I’m more than excited to dive into this complex neighborhood in hopes of offering impactful design solutions.
Kristina’s two articles on urban ecology were quite interesting. It is compelling to see landscape designs as good, better, and best. However, it seems that both of the examples offered in Berlin and Seattle fall either in “good” ecological design or somewhere in between “good” and “better”. Are there examples of “best” design in the contemporary world? If there is yet to be, what is stopping us from reaching there and what would it take? From my class on sustainability and society, we were introduced to the idea that it would take a catastrophic event in order for humans to mobilize and make the changes that are necessary to prevent/reverse global warming and I’m afraid the concept applies to a lot of current world events, including that of ecological restoration/design.
In fact, in the article outlining Downsview Park, the fact that OMA won the competition instead of the other 4 finalist whom were more ecologically conscious shed light on the lock-in we face today on public space and urban design. There is simply not enough social awareness and policies that will allow a more ecologically-focused design to come out ahead on one that seems more like an “urban space”.
