Urban Futures




Ana María Durán Calisto participa en Urban Futures: Opportunities and Challenges for Transforming the Urban Landscape
Octubre 6-10, 2010

con la conferencia

FROM EXTRACTION TO EXCHANGE:
BIO-TECTONICS AND THE TECTONICS OF WASTE

Abstract

Industrial cities have been built under the silent assumption that there are endless resources outside of them that can be extracted and imported as needed. The last two decades have seen the frontiers of resource exploration reach the very limits of unexplored geography. Every square inch of this planet seems to have been inventoried and appraised for extraction purposes, aided by our unprecedented satellite surveying and mapping capabilities. Cities continue to grow under the premise of “new is best” while traditionally remote ecosystems like the Amazon Rain Forest continue to be depleted, unable to re-new themselves. Hybrid cars and architectural topographies have been presented as “green” solutions by the global market… but, have their extraction costs been computed?


In a brief presentation, I would like to emphasize the relationships between disposal, construction and extraction/depletion, as it becomes apparent that these three stages are transformations of the same available matter: future cities need to be conceptualized as natural resource, raw material, geology and mine, if we are truly to address their environmental impact.

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