Biomimicry & Sustainable Cities

This week was about biomimicry and sustainable cities — two subjects I really enjoyed learning more about. I already knew a bit about biomimicry from grade 11 Visual Communications. The fact that so little of the rest of the class did was surprising yet not unexpected. We need to teach these genres more often — too many issues are being solved inelegantly. My favourite example: the Shinkansen in Japan. The train would create a loud boom when exiting tunnels due to compressing air too much. The fix was copying a diving bird's beak, which creates no splash when entering a pond. This reduced the noise of the train exiting the tunnel by 80%.

Biomimicry should be applied everywhere. Covid-19 had a vaccine created for it due to scientists figuring out they should copy viruses for how to fight a disease. Industrial facilities are experiencing vastly increased productivity by organising themselves more like a mycelium network instead of the traditional assembly line — they can avoid failure now. I think people aren't applying biomimicry as widely as they should, mostly because it just isn't taught enough in schools.

Sustainable cities — I'm curious but more skeptical. Though changing the design of a city can be good — removing car-reliant infrastructure, for example — I think a few core issues in city design won't be solved. Like what I mentioned in Week 3: attacking the symptom instead of the issue. Maybe it doesn't matter what shape a city is, if that city is built around the extraction of labour or goods, the purpose of the system will always intrude on the living standards of the people. An example: Detroit. After the shutdown of the car factory, the city collapsed economically, yet now the new Detroit is much more of a cultural hub, rising in liveability. The exploitative pipeline has been removed, and now more controlled by the movement of the people within it, it's become a new, more sustainable setting.

To be 'sustainable' needs to be talked about more. If you make a truly sustainable city or machine, you get BLAME! or the paperclip machine — objects that perpetually recreate and expand themselves, growing ever more. I think sustainability, if looked at from a biomimicry standpoint, should evolve instead of just survive. A city in limbo is not considering how art, people, and technology change over time. I reject the idea of survival through ambivalence and instead propose coharmony with the ideas of the future and social evolution in mind.

I also wonder if a truly sustainable city can exist under capitalism, as exploitation inherently means there is an excess or underrepresentation of a material or idea within a system. One of the best examples of a sustainable city was during the Spanish Revolution, when cities were taken over by the anarchist revolutionaries and turned into a self-sustaining system. The revolution ultimately failed — but at that time, a completely different way of running a social system was put forward. In a class talking about different ways of thinking about vision, sound, and culture, I think also talking about societal systems from a different perspective should be done.

A good example of this form of thinking about widespread society would be Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed — it overviews the same societal battles we've talked about in a sci-fi context. I highly recommend it. I am not an anarchist, though I still think it would be an interesting contrast to the ideas proposed in class about what society can even look like at all.

Sadly, I was unwell, so I didn't pick up on as much as I could usually this week. I wish I was there!