1998 Chicago Institute for Architecture & Urbanism (CIAU)
Building Recombinant Ecologies

Entropic Cities

“Entropy can serve to structure a practice committed to defining and engaging the disorganization of the residuum. If the lack of conceptual differentiation has made certain urban potentials disappear, then an understanding of entropic processes may allow them to be thought again. . . . In its extreme degree of disorganization, exurban space may not seem to match its inner-city counterpart. Yet what they both provide is a ground upon which to cultivate an alternative to absolute closure.”

—Albert Pope, Ladders

While the American city has certainly experienced a radical restructuring over the last fifty years, transformations of this magnitude are not unique nor unexpected in urban planning, particularly in the history of the modern city since the Enlightenment. Successive cycles of construction-destruction—what Marshall Berman calls the bourgeois propensity for “innovative self-destruction”—are the very essence underlying cultural modernism’s cult of progress and unabated renewal, and industrial capitalism’s ever-growing productive capacities. [1] As capitalism consolidated its techniques of production, beginning in the eighteenth century, the city evolved into a tool to maximize production assets, concentrate labor, serve as a processing center in the efficient extraction of regional natural resources, rationalize distribution, and communication networks, and establish new markets through land speculation schemes. Periodic reorganization in capital’s technique of production—usually crisis-generated—paralleled transformations in the urban field to support these political-economic structural shifts. The history of the American city is one of an instrumental rationality in both its mainstream manifestations and utopian countercultures. [2]

The decentralization of cities and the urbanization of suburbs is arguably another moment of self-destructive innovation released by capital’s search for new modes of productivity. The history of the American city shows us that an urban equilibrium of any endurance appears to be the exception rather than the rule. What is new is late capitalism’s loss of substantial need for the city and its known subset of social organizations. Superseding the city, the emergence of elastic metropolitan development is a new topological field characterized by an extreme unevenness in organizational qualities. On the one hand, the nuclear city has become reconfigured in a field of self-sufficient enclaves—those erstwhile satellite business districts, fortressed commercial centers, residential subdivisions, corporate parks, freeway arteries, and stranded agricultural zones—that internalize a high degree of organization. On the other hand, a residual tissue of seemingly homogeneous, amorphous spatial development lacking urban coherence characterizes the exurban landscape. Sprawl in the expanded metropolitan field appears incapable of producing the differentiation that characterizes urban complexity. Nor is new development integrated with “nature” as advocated by the modernist legacy of garden city planning. Neither city nor country, contemporary development’s movement toward greater social and material disorganization seems to be its defining characteristic. It is the land itself that is at stake now, rather than the traditional city. [3]

Building Recombinant Ecologies is a design approach that aims to produce new possibilities of space from disorganization. New planning possibilities, not yet organized by exurban sprawl or the traditional city, are conceivable from this dialectic between the instrumental rationality of the enclave and the disorganization of the residuum. Planning and architectural design culture, however, have yet to construct effective imaginary practices able to withstand the entropy of metropolitan development. This conceptual paralysis is due in part to design culture’s inclination to reduce all matters of the city to the primacy of built form. Architect and urbanist Albert Pope writes:

“As proposed many times, from Garden Cities of Tomorrow to The New City, to Learning from Las Vegas, to S, M, L, XL, it is not built form which characterizes the contemporary city, but the immense spaces over which built form has little or no control. These spaces, which overwhelm the architectural gesture, ultimately dominate the contemporary urban environment. . . . Without adequate conceptual access to these amorphous, unquantifiable spaces, the contemporary city remains inaccessible not only to those who live in it, but often to those who specify its design.” [4]

Recombinant Ecologies is a spatial design practice that weaves existing natural and human resources into complex, intelligible assemblages over various scales. If ecologies are “complex assemblages of resources, species, and climates, operating in multiple feedback loops,” then it follows that these assemblages could evolve the capacity to be self-generating entities along a self-encoded set of guidelines. [5] Their coherence is locally derived, avoiding the grand gestalts of urban and architectural form, what Pope calls “absolute closure.”

In the effort to redirect planning toward the goal of a sustainable metropolis, it is imperative that institutional culture—particularly nonmarket sectors—outlines a vision for socially responsible yet feasible development. Design culture for its part must engage uncharted possibilities in relationships between different sources of knowledge rather than simply give form to a set of available conditions. In this paper I outline the interdisciplinary design strategies—Building Recombinant Ecologies—developed in our planning projects for Eustis, Florida. We are a university-based research and design group that works across different disciplines and public/private institutions. Project-making in architecture, Vittorio Gregotti remarks, “could never be a matter of techniques and instruments, but would simultaneously construct a technique of the present and of the horizon of its reorganization.” [6] To these ends, in the first part of the paper I explore the “horizon” of institutional arrangements among design, capital, and public administration as a way of thinking about how the architectural project might find new forms of effectiveness in arenas where it presently excludes itself. In the second half, I examine specific design projects for Eustis, focusing on the relationships between ecology, transportation, and tectonic culture in urban planning, as local instruments of socially responsible organization. I am particularly concerned with the capacity of architectural design instruments to project sustainable, equitable development in entropic yet novel conditions such as those exhibited in sprawl.

Building Recombinant Ecologies

If . . . all sociopolitical projects are ecological projects and vice versa, then some conception of “nature” and of “environment” is omnipresent in everything we say and do. . . . All critical examinations of the relation to nature are simultaneously critical examinations of society.

—David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference

The paramount challenge in physical planning today is the development of progressive design practices that offer broad disciplinary frameworks to address the consumptive patterns of development restructuring regional environments. It is not merely a matter of finding the right spatial form, but of engaging the social and urbanization processes such that the architecture project may be engaged in a dialogue with the historical geographies of a context. In his book Reworking Success: New Communities at the Millennium, theorist Robert Theobald outlines a tripartite agenda for fundamental social change in which ecological reforms are embedded in equitable social practices. [7] Theobald poses new criteria for success based on (1) ecological integrity (integration of the urbanization question into the ecological question), (2) effective participatory decision making and, (3) and social cohesion rooted in altered concepts of justice. Collectively these criteria pose a challenge to the maxims of late modernity-maximization of economic growth, compulsive consumption, and international competition. Questions of environmental reform are inherently questions of justice bound up in the allocation and management of natural and human resources. Theobald’s criteria offer a comprehensive starting point for design thinking.

The critical potential in the contemporary debate over the environment must remain resistant to the instrumental rationality of dominant forces that have a vested interest in shaping the debate through their own discourses of “ecological modernization,” “sustainability,” “green consumerism,” and “ecotourism,” just to name a few. Consider David Harvey’s statement on the tricky dialectics of social and environmental change:

“Part of the problem here is that environmental-ecological arguments, precisely because of their diversity and generality, are open to a vast array of uses to which environmentalists and ecologists would almost certainly object. Their rhetoric gets mobilized for a host of special purposes, ranging from advertisements for Audi cars, toothpastes and supposedly ‘natural’ flavors (for foods) and ‘natural’ looks (mainly for women) to more specific targets of social control and investment in ‘sustainable development’ or ‘natural conservation.’ But the other side of the coin is that ecologists and to some degree even environmentalists of a more managerial persuasion, tend to leave so many loopholes in their arguments, litter their texts with so many symptomatic silences, ambiguities, and ambivalences that it becomes almost impossible to pin down their sociopolitical programs with any precision even though their aim may be nothing less than a violent revolution to overthrow our whole polluting, plundering, and materialistic industrial society and, in its place, to create a new economic and social order which will allow human beings to live in harmony with the planet.” [8]

Will the outcome of a sustainable consciousness in design move beyond a compositional employment of nature that merely softens objectionable ideologies organizing the city? The legacy of early environmental reform in urban planning, for example (particularly along the Olmsted-Howard Geddes-Mumford axis) tended toward “greening” schemes that sought a metabolic equilibrium between country and city, yet stopped short of comprehensive environmental-social transformation. Or will sustainability be the frontier for an integrated stewardship in regional planning, for civic infrastructures that replenish rather than extract natural resources, for the restoration of democratic forms of social agency in our communities, and for equitable access to public sector services and social justice?

New Epistemology of Design

If, as Harvey states, the problem “. . . is to enlist in the struggle to advance a more socially just and politically emancipatory mix of spatiotemporal production processes rather than acquiesce to those imposed by finance capital, the World Bank, and the generally class-bound inequalities internalized within any system of uncontrolled capital accumulation”; then design culture must reshape its imaginary practices if it is to serve as a staging ground for environmental-social reform. [9] Building Recombinant Ecologies is an adaptive renewal design strategy specifically engaged in the contradictions characteristic of the contemporary extended metropolitan landscape. It is a pragmatic planning approach that focuses redevelopment in existing cities and peripheries. It does not require a great imaginative leap to think of the city as an ecology, which experiences evolutionary and entropic dynamics, and undergoes unpredictable mutations similar to those associated with natural systems. Recombinant Ecologies opportunistically weave metropolitan fragments together, encoding information from local social, political, and ecological conditions in new formations of enriched, diversified, and sustainable-oriented assemblages. They avoid the classic forms of utopian schemes and work in between the cracks, while understanding that dominant processes of resource accumulation and development will not be changed easily. Though still the result of a measured and deliberate design process, Recombinant Ecologies are appropriately retooled strategies resistant to fixed compositional theories or classic gestalts. Their new forms of coherence are contingent and knowledge-based, rather than master planned. Newly formed planning ecologies derive their design and managerial profile, in part, from the multiple intelligences and vernacular technologies embedded in local sites. Coherence emerges from combination rather than from form.

The greenway is recombination’s paradigm. Greenways are linear public realms that arise within interstitial conditions as an attempt to reconnect wildlife ecologies and metropolitan neighborhoods fragmented by the leapfrog patterns of postindustrial development. [10] As social and ecological assemblages that absorb the local conditions through which they pass, greenways are defined by their ability to connect. Greenways manifest an emerging genre of public space aligned with the need for repair and curative redevelopment in our environments. Recombinatory practices favor a redistributive politics that challenges the unevenness in access to civic amenities, housing, and public sector services brought on by predatory developmental practices. Within conventional market development, radicalized possibilities that open paths to an alternative modernity exist, as Harvey suggests:

“Fortunately, the latter powers (finance capital), however hegemonic they may be, can never entirely control urbanization (let alone the discursive and imaginary space with which thinking about the city is always associated). Intensifying contradictions within a rapidly accelerating and often uncontrolled urbanization process create all sorts of interstitial spaces in which all sorts of liberatory and emancipatory possibilities can flourish. How and where these social movements within the urban process might be mobilized into a more general anticapitalist politics is then the crucial question.” [11]

Adaptive design work that participates in reforming urbanizing processes cannot live off the positions of current thinking. The a priori authority of composition in shaping design decisions is overshadowed by the unpredictable possibilities in multidisciplinary laden recombinations. Research acquires an ever-greater status in the design process; indeed, architecture is as much a profession disciplined by knowledge and information as it is a craft built from the capacity to express. The significance of design results will be measured more by their performance-based competencies than by their signifying systems. Akin to the tasks of an environmentalist, the work of the architect is diversified beyond assigning a formal value to program, to incorporating the procedural logics of management, mediation, and cultivation.

Bits, Patches, and Corridors: Building a Recombinant Ecology

Rather than oppose the city as a resource governed by the civics of human relations to nature as a space free of human interests, our designs projected for Eustis, Florida propose instead an urban ecology that redeploys organizational principles from both urban studies and ecological sciences. Looking for shared territory uncouples the mutual exclusivity between the two and, in particular, challenges an urbanism that has ignored the environmental movements. If we are serious about linking sustainability to equitable resource management, then urban structures and the built environment can no longer remain outside the theoretical and practical considerations of the ecological sciences. Urban ecology suggests a model of geographic coherence beyond that found in the autonomous logics of the city or of nature. Planning for Eustis integrates the natural technology of the local watershed with new urban development. For instance, we examined the urban planning possibilities offered by the bits and patches of marshy ecologies, given their excellent capacities for stormwater management, flood control, visual and biotic diversity, and the regulation of nutrient exchange necessary for water purity treatment and maintenance. Wetlands are reconfigured as a civic and recreational corridor of hydric parks that connect isolated and socially disfranchised neighborhoods surrounding the edge of downtown. Riparian corridors, reclaimed from privatized, industrial land uses that commonly occupy urban waterfronts, have their biotic functions as erosion and metabolic regulators and wildlife habitats restored. Accounting for biotic processes in programming urban redevelopment is an advancement on Ian McHarg’s singular use of pattern in designating ecologically sound land use. [12] These bits, patches, and corridors offer an expanded repertoire of socially vested public space (particularly given the political will to create and enforce environmental legislation that preserves and regulates these spaces) complementary to the piazza, plaza, or square. Throughout the metropolitan landscape these ecological patches readily provide civic amenities, pollution abatement, biological complexity, and local identity not matched by garden variety “greening” schemes whose environmental visions are primarily aesthetic.

On the other hand, we explored an “ecology of urbanization” that integrates urbanizing processes into environmental-ecological discourse. [13] Why would the human body and its habitat stand apart from the natural? It is an effort to overcome the antiurbanism pervasive in ecological movements. We propose a new urban infrastructure that adds a nonecological dimension of work to the tasks already performed by the natural hydrological systems. Water, which covers more than 15 percent of Lake County, serves as the principal medium for a proposed regional intermodal transportation system that directly connects the county’s cities vis-a-vis its extensive lake system. New water jitneys and docking systems located on downtown waterfronts are integrated with land transportation networks. This drifting urbanism softens the impact of new infrastructure on the environment as its modes of construction mitigate disruptions to plant and wildlife communities. The flexibility offered by water permits a modulated design that responds to temporal and spatial shifts in population more readily than capital-intensive transportation investments. The system produced is inexpensive, convenient, and accommodating to all classes of potential users. The ecology of urbanization demands that future design practices of any significance account for the following questions: “To what extent are the design and rhythms of natural and social systems compatible, and under what criteria can we make their purposes coincide? More fundamentally, what do natural and social systems have in common?” [14] I will explore these questions later in a more detailed examination of the Eustis projects.

The Nonequilibrium Landscape

Adaptive renewal processes in urbanization parallel those in ecology. Like the city, a steady-state landscape equilibrium of any endurance appears to be the exception rather than the rule. Nature systematically undertakes creative self-destruction as a strategy of renewal as well. Tensions between systems and conflicts in development are the normative historic trajectory by which ecological and human systems evolve, succeed, and ultimately reproduce themselves. Consider what environmentalists Holling and Sanderson write about ecologies as an analogy to the city:

“[They] do not have a single equilibrium. Rather multiple equilibria define functionally different states, and movement between these states is a natural part of maintaining structure and diversity. On the one hand, destabilizing forces are important in maintaining diversity, resilience, and opportunity. On the other hand, stabilizing forces are important in maintaining productivity and biogeochemical cycles.” [15]

Our proposal for an urban ecology was informed by “disturbance theory,” an environmental analysis used by some scientists to describe the long-term behavior of ecological communities in time and space. [16] Disturbance theory privileges the nonequilibrium, evolutionary landscape of the patch as a paradigm, with its varying degrees of stability and constantly shifting relations to bordering landscapes. Classic assumptions of normalcy, with the static purity of the ecosystem as its paradigm are replaced by this more dynamic science of analysis. Successional stages of evolutionary growth, in all of their cooperative and competitive combinations, more accurately depict ecological arrangements than the taxonomies of form.

A healthy riparian corridor, for example, is constituted by a working integrity that may not necessarily persist due to natural or human interventions. Yet its ecological profile certainly suggests a local strategy for responsible development that would prove inappropriate for another site, like an upland ridge community. Patches inevitably come and go, alternatively exhibiting a range of character from highly complex and durable organizations to fragile monocultural communities on the verge of nonexistence. Disturbances, even of a catastrophic type like floods, fires, hurricanes, and human interventions, are sometimes the most potent forces of environmental renewal at work. Nature, then, does not have to be subjected to a systematic preservation, strict reconstruction, or an unadaptable gestalt to embody the “natural.” Instead, nature is a flexible and unpredictably resilient system, which in its own work can undertake certain urbanizing tasks and rightfully sustain long-range human interests. Such parallel theories in urbanism and ecology liberate both from their mutual exclusivity and offer a provisional way to synchronize their development dynamics.

Recasting Institutional Arrangements

In addition to recombinations in the physical environment just described, environmental-social transformations require recombination in institutional arrangements between design culture and its various constituencies—that is, recombination in the horizon of its organization. The ostensible social divestment in the culture of the city is mirrored in professional design culture’s incapacity to provide feasible alternative possibilities. Has the totality of market forces completely overwhelmed institutional culture in the professions and public administration? Relations among design, capital, and public administration have changed along with capital’s historic stages of reorganization, from strong collaborative partnering between the three during the formation of the twentieth-century industrial city (with its climax in the Depression-era New Deal) to weakened affinities between market and nonmarket sectors in late capitalism. The evolution of design culture into professional organizations was tied to the rise of capital’s need for regulatory mechanisms that disciplined urban growth and provided the ceremonial spaces that celebrated accumulation in the emerging city. [17] Though design will always play an instrumental role in rationalizing the techniques of production, capital’s withdrawal from the public realm has diminished the need for design in shaping the environment. Likewise, capital’s mobility to locate production assets anywhere (preferably now on the most deregulated sites), alongside the development of global distributive and communicative networks (with innovations like on-time delivery), and the employment of downsized, disposable labor pools in open shops has weakened government’s ability to demand a corporate stewardship rooted in people, place, and resources. The present challenge would then consider how professional design culture might reclaim a social responsibility in environmental design, despite the disinterest of the market. And what kind of participatory politics could make this possible? Since capitalistic processes are usually based on competition, how might recombination dynamics position cooperation to be an important ethic in the creation of value?

The architectural profession’s slippage into vocational modes of work suggests the need to renegotiate its status with the public. Like other professions, architecture has experienced a diminution in its traditional responsibilities and its capacity to exercise qualitative control over the production of its work. If professions are cultures of work defined by the extent to which they hold a trust in the public interest beyond the immediate needs of an individual client, then we should wonder (as some have) if the profession as an institution is obsolete. [18] Elliott Krause argues that the professions’ shift toward capitalist control away from a guild power has led to the erosion of four indices that define professional identity: control over association and training for the profession; control over the workplace; control over the market; and control over the group’s relations to the state. [19] But the professions are highly innovative organizations with a keen sense of survival; originating out of successful nineteenth and twentieth-century reform movements, they are quite adept at creative restructuring. Let us not forget that the professions are extensions of the market. Among the various cultures of work, the professions exert a powerful influence on social structures and, as such are, well-positioned to establish partnerships for affecting environmental-social change. They only need to maximize the potential of their unique community-building capital.

The fundamental assumption underlying ecological thought—that everything is connected to everything else—provides us with a metanarrative equally as compelling as the totality of the markets. True ecological reform will entail recombined administrative, political, and professional practices. Two possibilities for recombination come to mind. First, beyond the education of future practitioners, the architecture profession (unlike the medical community) does not have strong market-producing structures in nonmarket service delivery institutions like universities, think tanks, or public administrations. Beyond a few scattered ad-hoc efforts (i.e., community outreach programs) there are no sustained institutional networks within the architecture profession committed to practice-based research, environmental and urban scholarship, public service extension, and creative policy construction that could leverage design culture’s ability to participate in environmental-social reform of any civic consequence. The Congress of New Urbanism may be an exception. Structural reforms are not typically the products of individual practice, which in architecture is primarily patronage-based. Nor can structural reform emerge wholesale from the planner’s practice; based as it is in public administration and subject to promarket municipal politics, it suffers from an equally narrow range of effectiveness. A vital profession constitutes more than just the sum of its individual practices. Meanwhile, design practitioners, for the most part, occupy specialized roles in the building industry’s division of labor. The most costly liability has been the nonexistent collaboration between the creativity of knowledge-producing institutions, whose subsidized research and experimentation could revolutionize product delivery in private practice, and market-oriented practices whose applied results would be enriched by progressive, practice-based scholarship. Universities, in particular, are networked across a wide spectrum of needs, interests, and constituencies that could prove resourceful to professional design practice. Cross-institutional arrangements could create new socially responsible markets and diversify the meaningful applications of design.

Second, design culture has failed to harness the creativity latent in public sector administration. In Eustis, our decision to invite two state environmental regulatory agencies (the St. Johns Water Management District and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection) to work as co-clients along with citizens’ advisory groups from the outset of planning was an attempt to employ the regulatory apparatus for its creative potential and technical resourcefulness. This transcended the typical procedural relationship between designer and code enforcement authority, favoring instead a negotiated relationship in which regulatory intelligence is incorporated into the initial community visioning process. Public agencies’ capacities to generate knowledge and effective programs of application, as they codify environmental scholarship and legislation, are too often overlooked as an invaluable source of advice by design professionals.

Design culture has consistently purified participatory politics by privileging the citizen charrette as the mechanism for an engaged practice. This fails to consider that various forms of the public are visibly and invisibly manifested throughout the political and institutional landscape. Indeed, special purpose authorities—like the St. Johns Water Management District and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection—are established out of the public’s will to secure appropriate management of its valued natural resources. Regional political organization is an acknowledgement that the ecological boundaries of natural systems transcend local political boundaries, and that to be productive, ecological management cannot be subjected to local prejudices in municipal scales of management. Though almost nonexistent in American land law tradition, regional scales of governance are emerging as effective responses to the fragmented political landscape of metropolitan development. [20]

In the case of Eustis, design was an effective mediator between those who saw land as commodity and those who saw it as community. It was an effective arbiter between contested public realms: between the local public that sometimes favored economic development to the detriment of ecological integrity, and the regional environmental agencies that were occasionally driven by their single interests—neglecting that everything is connected to everything else. In connecting conceptions of property and justice with design, sociologist Dana Cuff observes that such “contentious developments offered the possibility to create a public realm that would otherwise have no proponents.” [21] More than language or speech, the unique visioning process of design can mobilize imaginative resolutions even when consensus seemed impossible. Design demonstrates “through representation of the land’s physical development—into houses, parks, environmental preserves, commercial enterprises—that the costs and benefits of one group’s speculative venture becomes meaningful to another group.” [22] Even architects collectively underestimate the full transformative capacities of design. Cuff goes on to remark that if design culture is to assume a leadership role in environmental-social stewardship, then:

“It implies a level of education about the city and the environment that architecture schools have yet to achieve. It implies a level of political participation that does not presently characterize our profession. And it implies that architects must understand and advocate exactly those regional issues which typically have no constituents.” [23]

Design culture’s synthetic capacities could play an invaluable role in positioning recombination among institutional ecologies for environmental-social reform. The success of reformist visions will be codetermined by the level of creativity exercised throughout the institutional framework in which design culture works. It is to the practical application of Recombinant Ecologies’ framework that I turn in the examination of our work for Eustis, Florida.

The Ecological City

“What bearing does the contingency of reality have on the reality of nature? The principal task today is not to single out nature by some exclusive definition, but to include and appreciate it among the real and eloquent things and practices that are threatened by the hypertrophic overlay of hyperreality.”

—Albert Borgmann, “The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature” in Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction

Our projects for Eustis, Florida consist of a combination of research and design efforts with the city over a six-year period. Though each project was commissioned for different purposes, they are linked by the objective of promoting sustainable economic redevelopment based on ecological values. Although Eustis is a small town of 14,000 (its population is projected to double every decade), its location at Orlando’s periphery has pulled it within the orbit of its metropolitan sprawl. Eustis is located in Lake County, a citrus-producing region distinguished by its rolling hills in an otherwise flat state. Lake County is a rather wet county with 15 percent of its surface area covered by more than 1,400 lakes and numerous additional wetlands. Eustis is the second largest city on the Harris Chain of Lakes, a six-lake network comprising the county’s largest lakes. This network has become a regional magnet for dispersed metropolitan development to an expanding retirement community who uses the lakes for recreational boating. Two questions were implicit throughout our design investigations. The first, how might the ecological context encourage regional technologies of metropolitan development? The second, how might infrastructure provide alternative public realms to the mythic town square?

Hydric Parks

New development of property in Florida must begin with the understanding that the state’s landscape, unlike that of most states, is a creation of water rather than the kind of geological tectonics that build landforms. Florida’s peninsula is a thin, porous skin patiently built from marine sediment deposited by oceanic tides over a long period of time. Beneath the skin lies an extensive cavernous network of aquifers, which provides Florida’s drinking water and sustains the delicate patchwork of ecosystems organizing the state’s geography. The skin’s porosity—that is, the sandy soil’s quickness in permitting the introduction of surface water runoff into the state’s aquifer—is a critical factor in water management, especially during the wet season when large amounts of rain fall daily in a short period of time. As a result of extensive agricultural, commercial, and residential development brought on by an extremely rapid growth in population over the last two decades, stormwater runoff—now quite polluted—reaches the aquifers and numerous wetlands that populate the Florida landscape before it is treated. The “urban stormwater runoff from the first one half-inch of rain usually has a pollutant content greater than that of raw sewage.” [24] All of the current lake sediment, and up to 90 percent of the metal deposits now within Florida’s lakes, are attributed to polluted stormwater runoff. [25] The production of wastes resulting from our patterns of dispersed development have far exceeded the absorptive capacity of the landscape.

Newly enacted legislation has mandated the retention and treatment of stormwater runoff before it is permitted to enter the state’s underground and natural surface water networks. Thus, new metropolitan infrastructure must accommodate water flow and storage in its organization. Typically, these projects are designed by waste management engineers as utility zones apart from the city. Our water management projects are integrated into the city as catalysts for urban redevelopment, creating unforeseen collateral resource combinations and benefits.

On the downtown lakefront in Eustis we propose a public park that provides four treatment basins for the city’s stormwater runoff before it enters the lake. The scheme proposes the construction of new retention and treatment ponds nestled within the existing lake, but sealed from it. Rather than construct costly and unsightly mechanical treatment facilities on the city’s most impressive real estate—the lakefront—stormwater runoff is organically treated through a miniature ecosystem. Upon collection in retention ponds, pollutants are extracted from runoff through biogeochemical interaction with waste-retardant plant life cultivated in the new basins, and aerated by fountains before it is discharged from flow gates into Lake Eustis. The park maintains a sustainable occupation of this fragile and resource-rich water edge, yet accommodates new development interests without the attendant privatization and destruction of the littoral ecology that unregulated development typically provokes.

On the other end of town, we propose a stormwater management plan for the community of East Eustis. East Eustis is an economically depressed ethnic community that lacks a sense of physical coherence from within and also fails to establish connections with its immediate neighbors. Not surprisingly, East Eustis is the lowest topographic point in a town with a rather abrupt 100-foot change in elevation. The wetlands that naturally form there have been an impediment to any comprehensive planning initiative. East Eustis’s inability to secure public sector planning services has resulted in laissez-faire occupations of the landscape, hardening its marginal status.

We propose a linear park that integrates existing wetlands with scattered institutional, commercial, and residential development. In its obligation to protect existing wetlands, to manage and treat the flow of surface water, to provide flood control—as well as a protected aquifer recharge—this new stormwater park employs an ecological framework in the creation of public space as it prepares the ground for the reception of redevelopment. This resource management infrastructure and its pedestrian extensions propose binding directions for redevelopment that acknowledge the scale, ecology, and casual building traditions of East Eustis without submitting the community to imposed aesthetic building codes. These recombinations will hopefully foster a sense of belonging and connection that historically has escaped this community.

We attempted to celebrate the kind of poetry that emerges from the transgressions of proper form, which characterizes East Eustis, rather than repress or decorate those transgressions through the imposition of densities and nostalgic building grammars that would prove alien to the texture of this small community. Nor did we look to the artifice of design codes, which in their attempt to “upgrade” typically enforce imposed aesthetic standards that reflect more a professional abstraction than any real organizational tendency underlying the place. Any success realized by the redevelopment efforts would not be reliant on the self-consciousness of form, but instead on the spatial logic introduced by an environmental-social infrastructure that would ably accept diverse grades of building and reinforce existing patterns of occupation.

The Urban-Riparian Interface

During the past twenty years, new suburban commercial strip development has drained downtown Eustis of its commercial vitality. Rather than appeal to this car-based regional economy, Eustis has chosen to redirect its redevelopment efforts toward attracting boaters into Eustis as one strategy for revitalizing its downtown economy. Through a rehabilitation of the neglected riparian ecology and the abandoned waterfront industrial infrastructure, the design seeks to reverse this decline by reclaiming the city’s lake edge as a new front door—in effect recladding the edge of downtown and representing the edge of the city to its lakefront. The lake is engaged for its unique cultural and ecological amenities in addition to its service as a capital resource.

If architectural design is concerned with the actual properties of construction, then urban design could be likened to the arrangement of construction—the groundwork from which architecture springs. As a threshold between land and water, urbanism, and ecology, the redevelopment design weaves together four bands of construction, each distinct in their design methodologies and production processes. Systems of engineering biology, symbolism, and adaptive reuse recombine in the redevelopment of the city’s edge. The first layer is a pedestrian infrastructure, situated in the lake, that includes promenades for walking and fishing, spectator platforms for boat and water shows, and docking facilities for boats and marine planes. The pedestrian infrastructure connects with the existing railroad and city streets to form an intermodal transportation facility. Its tectonic organization is directly influenced by the biotic processes governing the lake’s edge.

The second layer is the riparian ecology of the lake edge consisting of wetlands, native plant and wildlife communities, and the metabolic profile structuring the system’s vitality. Our proposed management scheme restores the native plant and soil communities, and removes opportunistic, low-grade invasive plant species that typically attend natural habitat destruction caused by metropolitan development. A healthy riparian edge is imperative to the environmental well-being of the lake. I will examine this later in more detail.

The third layer consists of two proposed landscape-anchoring spaces that extend two municipal parks. They serve as connections between the city and the pedestrian infrastructure. In their function as civic foyers to the proposed intermodal facility, they signify and enhance the relationship between the water and urban space.

The final layer addresses an adaptive reuse strategy for the vacant warehouse structures that border the railroad along the waterfront. Their party wall construction allows for easy removal of existing facades and the insertion of new skins and programs. The proposed programmatic reorganization returns housing to downtown and enriches the pedestrian environment.

Natural resource protection and enhancement, as well as pollution abatement, are essential objectives of the redevelopment design. The existing riparian corridor of Lake Eustis is a characteristic wetland of complex ecotones, with marshes and cypress communities serving as habitats for a variety of aquatic and wildlife populations. Consequently, the initial impulse of the community to intensify building development directly on the land-water threshold was resisted. Instead, the new pedestrian infrastructure is floated in the lake, while the degraded riparian ecology is rehabilitated and protected as a greenway that reconnects the city with its waterfront.

A healthy riparian corridor accomplishes several critical urban tasks in its contribution to the larger ecological work of the region. [26] The marshes and wetlands lining the corridor act as sediment sinks and filters that treat polluted urban groundwater runoff, remove pathogens, and subsequently enhance the water quality of the lakes. This avoids the construction of costly mechanical treatment facilities. Consider as well the life-affirming value of wetlands, as a recent study indicates: “. . . each acre produces between $2,300 and $9,800 in food annually. . . . Acre for acre, they are more productive than agricultural lands.” [27]

Erosion control, wave attenuation, and overall stabilization of the lake edge is another important function of the riparian vegetation community. The Eustis banks of Lake Eustis are subject to two opposing forces; extensive wave activity created by the lake’s microclimate and urban groundwater runoff contribute equally to erosion of the lake edge. Plant communities native to riparian ecologies stabilize the soil, preventing erosion and nutrient overloading (eutrophication) of the lake. Already an advanced problem in the lakes of Central Florida, eutrophication occurs as an increase in mineral and organic nutrients reduces the oxygen content in water, producing an environment that favors plant over animal life. Entire fish communities, once important to the local economies, have become extinct due to eutrophication brought on by the discharge of untreated wastes from agricultural and urban development.

Habitat conservation and the maintenance of native species biodiversity are imperative for an ecology of complexity. An ecology of complexity is effectively positioned to endure human and natural disturbances, particularly those introduced by urban development. Native trees located at the water’s edge are preserved to maintain shade, which stabilizes water temperature, increasing the capacity of water to carry oxygen necessary for certain nutrient transfers between land and aquatic life. The native upland tree community is preserved in its current status as a local rookery and critical energy source, as birds play an important role in seed circulation and germination, and hence the ultimate productivity of the edge. The degraded soil composition of the upland zone is renovated. Urban fill is removed and replaced with a topsoil native to the Lake Eustis edge, enhancing nutrient exchange necessary for a maximum edge biodiversity. Wild taro, an invasive poisonous weedy species, is removed because of its tendency toward a monoculture in which native vegetation species are eliminated—particularly those upland plants that attract local wildlife.

Drifting Urbanism: The Ecology of Urbanization

Drifting Urbanism is another recombinant design approach that integrates urbanizing processes into environmental-ecological discourse. It explores the use of water as an ecological medium for the construction of a new municipal transportation infrastructure. The four layers of the urban-riparian redevelopment design combine with the railroad to establish an intermodal transportation facility that coordinates local and regional travel between land and water, by boat, light rail (to Orlando), automobile, bicycle, and on foot. This diversification of transit expands affordable options beyond car-based culture and its exclusive patterns of attraction across a region.

Its design is engineered to mitigate the impact of new construction on the ecology to a more sustainable degree than permanent land-based transit systems. Florida’s large population of seasonal residents poses a particularly thorny management problem given their uneven usage of the local infrastructure. The proposed low-impact, flexible, floating transportation infrastructure is better equipped than a heavy, permanent land-based system to respond to fluctuating demographic concentrations and the stress that seasonal patronage places on local resources and habitats. As a “kit-of-parts” it can easily be dismounted and recombined in different configurations at other locations.

The kit-of-parts vocabulary of the transit infrastructure extends the morphology of the city, yet provides a flexibility that accommodates changing social and environmental ecologies. Fabrication and assembly processes are particularly responsive to the surrounding riparian ecology. Three 300-foot promenades, comprising the basic armature of the pedestrian infrastructure, are each constructed of six 48-foot-long trusses that bring their weight to the ground at their endpoints. This system reduces the use of piling by 50 to 75 percent from that of a conventional post-and-beam pier system. The reduced number of pilings minimizes surface displacement and disruption of the lake’s benthic community (plants and animals native to the lake bottom) caused by pile installation. To avoid inflicting major disruptions to the shoreline, the trusses are fabricated in a local shop, floated to the site, and installed onto pilings. Dredging of the lake bottom for hull clearance is avoided by floating docks that extend the marina into deeper waters. All horizontal surfaces—from the infrastructure’s perforated metal decking to the pavilions’ translucent mylar roofs maintain the passage of sunlight to the benthic and riparian plant communities below. Local social and ecological conditions are inscribed within the infrastructural as they civilize its instrumental logic.

Conclusion: Collaborating with Nonplaceness

In mapping the distinctions between place and nonplace, sociologist Marc Augé contrasts the anthropologically laden space of the former, with all of its history, identity, and relations, to the late capitalistic space of the latter, which lacks any “organic society.” [28] Transport routes, leisure parks, shopping malls, airports, communication networks—like the unmediated infrastructural logics confronted above—organize in an isotropic rationality governed by maximized efficiencies in resource allocation. Though “nonplaces are the real measure of our time,” Recombinant Ecologies aims to reinscribe the social lifeworld of place within the “excessive space” of the nonplace. [29] This is certainly possible, as Augé himself argues that nonplace:

“never exists in pure form: places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed in it; the ‘millennial ruses’ of ‘the invention of the everyday’ and ‘the arts of doing’, so aptly analyzed by Michel de Certeau, can clear a path there and deploy their strategies. Place and nonplace are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten.” [30]

Building Recombinant Ecologies seeks solutions in the “everyday” yet problematic programs that structure our landscapes across all socioeconomic classes. It seeks a more layered complexity than those offered by new urbanism, public art projects, gentrification, media, and entertainment districts, and other market-oriented schemes of the new “symbolic economy” that employ cultural discourse to advance an urbanization that is neither sustainable nor equitable. [31] Although they reopen needed discussions on urbanization, the reinscription of social-environmental lifeworlds in urbanization processes is far more difficult work than those brands of urbanism permit. Building Recombinant Ecologies is an attempt to outline a language of design and a horizon of political arrangements that will imaginatively engage—rather than avoid—the disorganization of metropolitan development. Through the alchemy of recombination among urban, social, and environmental ecologies, true reform is viable from a leverage impossible in each ecology on its own.

Notes

[1] Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 98.

[2] M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), Chapters 2–6.

[3] Albert Pope, Ladders (Houston and New York: Rice University School of Architecture and Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 203.

[4] Pope, Ladders, 3.

[5] Stan Allen, “Artificial Ecologies: The Work of MVRDV,” El Croquis 86 (1997): 32.

[6] Vittorio Gregotti, Inside Architecture, trans. Peter Wong and Francesca Zaccheo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 21. Italics mine.

[7] Robert Theobald, Reworking Success: New Communities at the Millennium (Stony Creek, CT: New Society Publishers, 1997), 3.

[8] David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996), 176–7.

[9] Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, 420.

[10] Daniel S. Smith and Paul Cawood Hellmund, eds. Ecology of Greenways: The Design and Function of Linear Conservation Areas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

[11] Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, 420.

[12] Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969).

[13] Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, 426.

[14] C.S. Holling and Steven Sanderson, “Dynamics of (Dis)harmony in Ecological and Social Systems,” in Rights to Nature Ecological, Economic, Cultural, and Political Principles of Institutions for the Environment, ed. Susan Hanna, Carl Folke, and Karl-Göran Mäler (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996), 58.

[15] Holling and Sanderson, “Dynamics of (Dis)harmony in Ecological and Social Systems,” 58–9.

[16] Steward T. A. Pickett and Peter S. White, “Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics: An Introduction,” in The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics, ed. Steward T. A. Pickett and Peter S. White (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985), 3–13.

[17] Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, Chapters 4–6.

[18] Elliott A. Krause, The Death of the Guilds: Professions, States, and the Advance of Capitalism, 1930 to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

[19] Krause, The Death of the Guilds, 16.

[20] David Rusk, Cities Without Suburbs (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993).

[21] Dana Cuff, “Into the Fray: The Local Politics of Architecture,” ed. D. Friedman, Practices 5/6 (1997): 158.

[22] Cuff, “Into the Fray,” 161.

[23] Cuff, “Into the Fray,” 62. Italics mine.

[24] Peggy Cavanaugh and Margaret Spontak, Protecting Paradise 300 Ways to Protect Florida’s Environment (Fairfield, FL: Phoenix Publishing, 1992), 86.

[25] Cavanaugh and Spontak, Protecting Paradise 300 Ways to Protect Florida’s Environment, 97.

[26] Rutherford Platt, Rowan A. Rowntree, and Pamela C. Muick, eds, The Ecological City: Preserving and Restoring Urban Biodiversity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

[27] Cavanaugh and Spontak, Protecting Paradise 300 Ways to Protect Florida’s Environment, 16.

[28] Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 1995), 52–3.

[29] Augé, Non-Places, 79.

[30] Augé, Non-Places, 78–9.

[31] Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1995).

Bibliography

Allen, Stan. “Artificial Ecologies: The Work of MVRDV.” El Croquis 86 (1997): 26–33.

Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. New York: Verso, 1995.

Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.

Borgmann, Albert. “The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature.” In Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, edited by Michael E. Soulé and Gary Lease, 31–45. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995.

Boyer, M. Christine. Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.

Cavanaugh, Peggy and Margaret Spontak. Protecting Paradise 300 Ways to Protect Florida’s Environment. Fairfield, FL: Phoenix Publishing, 1992.

Cuff, Dana. “Into the Fray: The Local Politics of Architecture.” Edited by D. Friedman. Practices 5/6 (1997): 158–62.

Gregotti, Vittorio. Inside Architecture. Translated by Peter Wong and Francesca Zaccheo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

Harvey, David. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996.

Holling, C.S. and Steven Sanderson. “Dynamics of (Dis)harmony in Ecological and Social Systems.” In Rights to Nature Ecological, Economic, Cultural, and Political Principles of Institutions for the Environment, edited by Susan Hanna, Carl Folke, and Karl-Göran Mäler, 57–85. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996.

Krause, Elliott A. The Death of the Guilds: Professions, States, and the Advance of Capitalism, 1930 to the Present. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.

McHarg, Ian. Design with Nature. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969.

Pickett, Steward T. A. and White, Peter S. “Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics: An Introduction.” In The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics, edited by Steward T. A. Pickett and Peter S. White, 3–13. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985.

Platt, Rutherford, Rowan A. Rowntree, and Pamela C. Muick, eds. The Ecological City: Preserving and Restoring Urban Biodiversity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Pope, Albert. Ladders. Houston and New York: Rice University School of Architecture and Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.

Rusk, David. Cities Without Suburbs. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993.

Smith, Daniel S. and Paul Cawood Hellmund, eds. Ecology of Greenways: The Design and Function of Linear Conservation Areas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Theobald, Robert. Reworking Success: New Communities at the Millennium. Stony Creek, CT: New Society Publishers, 1997.

Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1995.